One Of The Best Ways For Solicitors To Grow Their Law Firm Is To Make Full Use Of Google My Business (GMB). In this GMB Legal Services Guide I Will Show You How To Use It To It’s Full Potential.
What Is Google My Business / Google Business Profile
Whenever you search Google for local business services, you will usually find three business presented to you on a map as part of the search results, as you can see for my business below:
Whilst I provide my legal marketing consultancy services across the UK and Worldwide, meaning local search results are not that important, if you provide your legal services in any significant way to your local market, you really must build a good Google Business Profile, and then most importantly, consistently collect reviews to ensure that you appear at the top of the google map listings.
Building Your Google My Business Profile
There is no real trick to this process, but having seen dozens of solicitors’ Google Business profiles, I know that most people get this wrong.
Ultimately, the key is to ensure that you complete every aspect of your Google My Business profile.
Many law firms complete the bare minimum, then stop.
All this means is that you are unlikely to generate any visitors to your website from your google map listing from people who are looking for your legal services. Ultimately, it means a significant wasted opportunity.
You need to complete each of the main profile settings, including:
- Business Name. Whilst this may seem obvious, including the word solicitors or lawyers when possible in your name can make a significant difference to your success in the listings.
- Business Category. Legal Services, Law Firm or Lawyer are your options, and you should select each of them. But which should be your primary service category (and this is vital). It depends, is the answer. Doesn’t it always. But there is a simple way to decide which I will share with you later on this page.
- Description. This should set out who you are, who you help and why your prospects should choose you. The longer, the better, but don’t just copy and paste from your home page. It should be reworked content so that it is unique (Google does not like duplicate content at all).
- Opening date.
- Contact details, including your best telephone number for new enquiries (hopefully diverted to a call centre to improve your conversions) and your full website URL
- Business location. Your address.
- Service area. This should list all areas that you service, whether just local, national or international.
- Hours. There is a way to ensure that the minimum you put here is 8am to 8pm, which will improve your GMB Profile performance as all of your competition will be displaying 9am to 5 or 5.30pm. Anyone searching for your services within an hour of your closing time will see a notification “Closing Soon”, so will go elsewhere, hence the need to have longer opening hours. Download my guide below to discover how you can do this.
- Services. You have to list every type of service you undertake, so that anyone searching for you can find you when searching for your services. Most law firms will list around 10 services. I recommend around 100!
Google Reviews
Once you have a complete Google My Business listing, it is essential that you collect AT LEAST 25 four and five star reviews?
Why?
When someone leaves you a one star review, which they will, and usually it is not someone who has actually used your services but did not like the way you answered the telephone, anything less than 25 reviews dramatically brings down your overall score.
Each business profile is scored out of 5.
If you are only showing 3.3/5 as your score, how many people, if any, do you think will click through from your Google Business Profile to your website?
Review Collection System
To discover my simple yet effective review collection system, along with how to ensure your opening hours are displayed as longer than your competitors, click the button below: