SEO for Lawyers in NYC
Besides being one of the most populated cities in the US, New York City (NYC) enjoys an overabundance of legal professionals. With over 187,000 lawyers in the city, one can’t help but think: “Surely, everyone who needs a lawyer can get one.”
But this is not true at all. There is a gap between the city’s law firms and clients looking for advice or legal representation. Getting an appointment for a consultation is gruelling for people despite NYC having multiple law offices (domestic and non-NYC-based firms).
End to End Solutions for
Grey Smoke Media is North America’s only full-service legal marketing firm, offering:
Media Buying
radio, tv, Out of Home
Digital Marketing
with a heavy focus on SEO
Content Production
Reputation Management
Management Consulting
We elevate law firms to the highest echelon through a multi-pronged, unified approach.
Our Results
Grey Smoke
Media grew an
injury firm
from less than
30 employees
to over
350 employees
Tripled a divorce
firm’s traffic in just
11 months
3 xgrowth
Our agency has
handled international
communications
for over
$3 billion in class action lawsuits.
Our agency has
negotiated legal ad
buys
with over
100different publishers across North America.
Grey Smoke Media has
negotiated brand
partnerships between law
firms and major sporting franchises such as
Our founders
have provided
commentary
to over
100
television and radio
stations, podcasts, and
newspapers globally.
They have given speeches
on digital marketing to over
3,000
attendees.
Consequently, clients go to the Internet to find a lawyer. They visit legal directories like Justia and Avvo. They read many lawyer profiles. Ideally, they would see your law firm’s website, too. But they don’t. You need to let a powerful tool bridge the gap so potential clients can find your NY firm.
So, what should you do? It starts with a legal marketing strategy: use the right keywords, produce high-quality content, and perform search engine optimization (SEO). Grey Smoke Media can help your law firm get on the right track. First, we audit these variables:
- Your firm’s current content marketing
- Competitors who practice in NYC
- Competitors with competing practice areas
- Your law firm’s website
- Other digital marketing efforts
This auditing is vital because your firm’s current strategies can provide insights into your firm’s local SEO performance. Firms without prior marketing tactics can make the most out of the competitor analysis. The bottom line is the more information we can glean, the easier it will be for us to make data-driven decisions.
But why SEO? Why not social media or other techniques? Law firm marketing can be challenging because there are definite restrictions on the information that firms can share, per the American Bar Association Rule 7.2 on Communications Concerning a Lawyer’s Services.
However, SEO does not undermine these rules. To be precise, law firm SEO provides a new angle for reaching out and attracting new clients in your New York firm. This angle focuses on their online searching behavior – how they perform Google searches for a specific legal service.
This makes SEO the best approach for law firms: the SEO strategy matches this searching behavior by ensuring that your potential clients find your website online, whether they intend to find legal services or lawyers based in New York City.
Want to help your clients find your firm first? Meet with us to learn more about law firm SEO.
Our SEO services
Bigger Market Makes Competing Unbearably Tough
The legal market size of New York is estimated at $54.6 billion. According to the world’s most prominent industry information publisher, most of the city’s law firms are in New York, Queens, and Kings Counties.
The firms provide legal services primarily to the financial, consumer products, and retail sectors. Furthermore, according to Georgetown University’s market profile, New York is the most significant legal market (by headcount). NY lawyers serve numerous high-profile clients and offer a broad range of services as large or boutique firms.
However, if you devote time to compete with so many firms, you may have less time to help your clients prepare for personal injury cases. You may not be able to draft contracts that would allow your client to close a significant deal.
You shouldn’t have to compromise your time. Grey Smoke Media can do the heavy lifting. Our in-house legal marketing team can roll out diverse tactics to top your local NYC clients’ search engine results pages (SERPs).
Whether potential clients use Bing, Google, or other search engines, you can trust our marketing agency to help your website gain visibility. Our SEO services cover keyword research and ranking factors but can also include website design or building the best business profile. We do it without cutting corners.
Grey Smoke Media recognizes that the best use of your time is in providing premier legal services. However, the agency understands that educating clients is part and parcel of the profession. Because producing great content is essential to every SEO campaign, education and strategy can coalesce.
For instance, quality content may include your legal perspective on car accidents. There could be a blog that offers tips that complainants or respondents can use when collecting evidence. There could be guest posts for high-traffic websites (such as Forbes) to educate people about courtroom etiquette.
Grey Smoke Media can handle everything, but you can be as involved as you prefer. Let’s get started on your legal marketing strategy.
Grey Smoke Media
in the Press
Jordan Whelan, a spokesperson for Diamond Lawyers and president of public relations agency Grey Smoke Media, told the Star Thursday night that “after consulting with counsel, we will be appealing the decision.”
Having worked with many brands in Canada, however, Jordan Whelan, president of Toronto-based Grey Smoke Media, doubts that his clients would embrace a programmatic exchange for podcast ads.
“Media buyers and marketing companies don’t want to stray from what’s working,” he said. As a media buyer for major Canadian brands, Whelan said that many are skeptical compared to similar media, such as radio.
I spoke to Jordan Whelan, Toronto Media Buyer at Grey Smoke Media and client of mine, who builds customized media campaigns. According to him, “ I’ve tested campaigns on Twitter that received more clicks but resulted in low conversions. Facebook capitalized on user psychology in a way that reached your target customer, despite the higher CPC.”
Featured in The Toronto Star
“‘We’ll get a client a media hit in a major news outlet and then also parlay that into getting them on page one of Google,’ he says, collaborating with search-engine-optimization experts in tandem.”
Read the full feature here >
Political clients (say John Tory for Mayor campaign) and leading law firms, including Personal Injury
Powerhouse and Diamond & Diamond Lawyers, trust Grey Smoke Media.
All SEO Services Are Not Created Equal
Not every SEO company has what it takes to succeed in legal marketing. Your law firm has needs that are different from other professional services. New Yorkers’ demand for legal services is also different from the other US states.
According to the Georgetown University profile, NY’s primary practice areas include capital markets, commercial finance, investment funds, white-collar bankruptcy, real estate, and transactional (private equity and mergers). Venture capital and cybersecurity are emerging legal clients.
Small or niche practices tackle healthcare, employment, energy, entertainment, and estates. Some legal markets are small but gradually growing, while others are significant and relevant (i.e., almost saturated). On that account, it is up to a law firm’s internal marketing team or agency to bring out the firm’s competitive advantage.
But marketing teams need to acknowledge the needs of their firm’s target audience or segments to avoid stretching the marketing budget unnecessarily. SEO services that provide a low return on investment (ROI) are the bane of premier SEO’s existence. Some SEO companies use too many tags that cause competition within the law firm’s website. Others publish content fitting for search engines but not for readers or clients.
The sad reality is many law firms fall prey to such mediocre results. Grey Smoke Media offers a better route for your marketing woes. Get in touch with our SEO team to discuss schema markup, metrics, pricing – everything you need to know to get the desired results!
Content optimized for algorithms but not clients
Some lawyer SEO agencies promise outcomes that are too good to be true. To deliver, they take SEO practices to the extreme and compromise certain aspects, including readability. They no longer pay attention to text structure because they’re occupied with cramming search terms regardless of context or topic.
This practice relies on Google’s algorithms, but it could backfire. After all, Google is making multiple improvements to its algorithms. These adjustments allow the search engine to pick the keywords’ frequency and context.
Quality content requires writing with sentence length and context in mind. It involves writing legal SEO copy that connects with the firm’s audience and their needs. In other words, content optimized for algorithms should be readable for clients, too. The topic should be precise, whether providing information on personal injury attorneys or consultation.
Grey Smoke Media uses its unique insider team to help law firms create content that drives maximum ROI. They consist of former producers, editors, and reporters. Yet the agency doesn’t restrict itself to traditional marketing approaches. Instead, it combines conventional techniques with emerging campaigns, such as lawyer SEO.
Grey Smoke Media can help you curate and publish content that reflects the brand of your NY law practice. Our ten years of experience allow us to navigate diverse areas, such as creating content based on geo-specific terms, launching outreach to earn backlinks, and improving keyword research. This way, your firm shows up in clients’ local searches. The SEO strategy will align your efforts with your clients’ information and services needs.
We serve the entire United States including places such as:
“Legal marketing powerhouse”
Overused tags that negatively impact readers and your SEO
About 28 percent of law firms hire an agency to perform SEO for their firms. The ABA 2022 Websites and Marketing report also found that 50 percent of firms select an external agency to do their website design, 25 percent for social media campaigns, and a meager 5 percent for Google AdWords, pay-per-click (PPC), and directory listings.
But not every firm is likely to gain much from their SEO strategy, specifically those that misuse tags. For a time, search engine outcomes worked well for this approach, despite readers having difficulty navigating the site’s content.
But Google and other search engines caught up and released update after update. Google, in particular, was bent on pulling SEO strategists back in the reader’s favor. Its Webmaster Guidelines recognize the practice as a harmful one, stating that “keyword stuffing” attempts to manipulate the website’s rankings. It advises professionals to veer away from this practice because it diminishes the consumer’s user experience.
As mentioned earlier, Grey Smoke Media doesn’t cut corners. The agency helps law firms select the most appropriate search terms and title tags. We leverage today’s premier technologies to make sense of Google Analytics and find the tags that perform well and fit the reader-focused content.
On top of best practices, the agency offers auditing to check for potential technical SEO issues. These are problems that could cause search engines not to find your website right away or to find your site but rank it low. The auditing checks for broken links, duplicate content, incomplete sitemap, and missing Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
The Marketing Agency of Canada’s Largest Personal Injury Firm
Book a Meeting
Commit With Only the Best SEO Practices
Compared to organic social media, SEO can drive more traffic to a website by 1,000 percent. Further, most marketing professionals say that SEO is an excellent source of their leads. Naturally, the top three firms that appear in the Google search results can get as much as 54 percent of all clicks.
These figures provide a narrative of favorable results that comes with great SEO strategies. Grey Smoke Media can help your firm get started. After auditing, you’ll be able to make the most out of your website. Most law firms are unaware of how their websites help capture a client’s interest, per the ABA 2022 Websites and Marketing report findings.
This lack of awareness is at odds with data showing that 56 percent of law firms have more than one lawyer involved in producing legal website content. It indicates the need for marketing metrics that should have matched the firm’s efforts. Grey Smoke Media can fix this issue because all SEO plans have realistic targets.
1. Keyword research
Doing keyword research for the firm’s legal services in a big market like New York demands high-level diligence and focus on the firm’s mission. From this research, SEO experts would list all relevant keywords and study the prospective clients’ search intent, which is the goal of entering a query into search engines.
These goals can be informational, requiring clients to answer their legal questions. It can also be that searchers are interested in availing themselves of a legal service. Others may want to learn more about the service before making a decision.
Your clients want to go to your website. However, because they may not know it yet, they enter keywords or phrases such as: “law firm in New York: clients looking for lawyers onsite,” “car accident: clients are looking for lawyers who handle cases on car accidents,” or “personal injury attorney: prospective clients may be looking for a specific kind of lawyer.”
Through keyword research, our team can provide your law firm with an overview that defines your firm’s target audience and how they look for legal services. SEO experts can zoom in on the client’s questions and keywords or phrases used to find your firm’s website.
Keywords and search intent inform the type of content you can publish on your website’s landing page or individual web pages. Grey Smoke Media recognizes that this is a lot of work. To bring your marketing strategy to speed, its SEO experts leverage the use of tools for technical SEO (indexing), on-page SEO (content optimization), and off-page SEO (website focus).
2. Quality content
Grey Smoke Media can help law firms curate text, image, and video content that can easily be optimized by search engines and shared by clients. The majority of law firm websites feature their lawyer’s profiles, but law firm profiles are just as important.
One of the most important profiles for law firms is Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business). This free tool enables organizations to manage their online presence in the search engine. It also features analytics so law firms can see how many people found your profile. It can be helpful when determining how potential clients found your firm.
From the client’s perspective, this tool allows them to find your law firm through Google Search or Google Maps. It also enables clients to verify your business information, such as phone number, office address, and practice area or type of lawyer (e.g., personal injury lawyer).
Besides profiles, law firm websites also feature accomplishments and legal articles (in-house): 57 percent and 62 percent, respectively, based on the ABA 2022 Websites and Marketing report mentioned earlier. Your website can do the same, but your content marketing may include case studies (with correct citations), frequently asked questions (FAQs), and know-how articles that show the lawyer’s professional opinion on a case or legal scenario.
“Marketing tactics of the
elite class”
3. Optimizing content
Grey Smoke Media follows best practices in optimizing content and provides law firm clients with performance reports. We put you in the loop so you can better understand what’s driving your SEO success and if there are strategies that require tweaking to scale up its positive effects.
Further, our SEO experts can provide information on which NYC counties or jurisdictions offer better ROI. We can review the SEO and other marketing metrics to fine-tune the SEO campaign.
Using local SEO and proper tags, Grey Smoke Media can ensure that your firm appears on the first page of the search results. SEO experts know which high-traffic websites can be used to syndicate your site’s legal content, which can help your site earn quality backlinks.
These backlinks can further support your website’s authority in a legal practice area. Over time, you can diversify content and publish infographics, resources, and even ebooks. These links can also come from high-authority directories.
Break Out From the Stereotypical With Grey Smoke Media
New York law firms have an image to uphold, but your firm can still stand out. Grey Smoke Media has brought out the competitive advantage of several award-winning law firms. Unlike other marketing agencies, this team found the optimal use for SEO and its potent blend alongside different digital marketing strategies.
Besides the best SEO practices and tools, in-house SEO experts cover comprehensive competitor research to ensure that your law firm’s brand remains discernible. It focuses on the correct variables and pushes content to nothing short of perfection, as legal clients can be some of the most astute consumers.
Our Testimonials
“Grey Smoke Media is exceptional and in a league of its own. Jordan has played a pivotal role in our explosive growth over the past decade. His raw creativity is inspiring.”
Jeremy Diamond
Senior Partner,Diamond and Diamond Lawyers
“Grey Smoke Media took me from 50 keywords on page one to over 250, more than doubling my traffic, in just 8 months. They are more than an agency. They are a business partner that I can depend on at 10pm on a Sunday. Their work is beyond reproach.
Barry Nussbaum
Owner of Nussbaum Family Law
“Fantastic work”
Thomas Grajek
Criminal Defense Attorney
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Exclusive Backlinks
We have secured links for our clients on some of the largest media outlets in the world. This marriage of traditional PR outreach and SEO has resulted in an indisputable and inimitable advantage for our clients.
FAQs on SEO for Lawyers in NYC
A SWOT analysis means looking into any organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It helps law firms understand the internal and external factors that can impact their performance and long-term growth.
According to a 2022 legal report, high-demand practice areas include commercial law, litigation, real estate law, intellectual property, and family law.
Google ads work for law firms but require an expert to set up and manage the ad campaign.
Our Clients
Have Been Featured In
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