Lead sources are great ways to connect to people who are looking for the type of legal service you have to offer, but you have to work to make that connection. Chasing a lead is a difficult in any profession. Reporters chase leads for information, detectives chase leads to solve crimes, salesmen chase leads to close a deal. Even in the legal profession, you have to follow up on leads to connect with would be clients. It is about making a connection with the person on the other end of the contact information.

To illustrate the value of leads, we conducted a case-study of one of our bankruptcy clients.  In the last 6 months of 2008, the law firm we surveyed received 506 leads from LeadRival’s  web marketing efforts on its behalf.

Following are the results of the case study:

In the end, over 23% of the leads filed bankruptcy with the law firm. Another 7.7% filed bankruptcy through another firm, bringing the total number of leads who filed bankruptcy to over 31%. While these numbers may be high, they reflect what can be achieved when the right system is in place.

Using lead sources to grow your business is a simple, effective, cost efficient way to connect to consumers who are looking for your services.

Here are six tips that the VP offers for working a lead into a client:

1. Contact Lead Immediately – “Upon receiving a lead our firm contacts them immediately.  We have techniques in place that allow us to contact the lead with 60 seconds of receiving it.”
   
2. Exhaust all means of Contact – “We make sure and use all methods of reaching the client.  We contact them first by phone, and follow it up with an email and letter if need be.”
   
3. Set same day next day appointments – “We never set appointments out more than one day.  This keeps our show rate up and the topic fresh on the mind of the potential client.”
   
4. Offer free, no obligation appointments – “We never conduct a consultation over the phone.  Always set the client a time to visit the office.  The more information you give them over the phone the less likely they are going to actually show for their appointment.”
   
5. Confirm Appointments – “We always confirm all our appointments.  We even call them 30 minutes before their appointment time to confirm directions.”
   
6. Follow Up – “If a client doesn’t retain our office we send them letters and make phone calls to them to check on the status.”

Just having a Web site may not be enough for it to generate interest in or clients for your law firm. Generating the type of traffic that will be beneficial to your firm takes strategic planning. 

The first step is to know your target. If you are a bankruptcy law firm, you probably don’t want clients who are facing a criminal charge. If your firm handles only criminal cases, you probably don’t want to deal with a Social Security disability case. 

It helps to do a little research into the search terms that people are using on Google, Yahoo and MSN to find attorneys in your area of practice. Once you know what they are, make sure that they are prominent in the content on your site. 

The content on the site should not only match the type of law you practice, it should include information about the geographic area that your practice is in. Include the city, county and state in the keyword focused pages. An attorney in Atlanta, Georgia wouldn’t necessarily want a client in Houston, Texas. 

Here are a few sites that you can use to analyze the keywords on your site for their effectiveness.

• Word Tracker This site will help you analyze keyword searches and the sites competing for the traffic on those terms.
• Good Key Words A free way to find basic information about search terms and traffic generated from them.
• Keyword Discovery Provides a free and paid version that analyzes keywords across all the search engines.

It helps to know your audience in any marketing effort. Gearing your content to keywords that generate the most searches will help you to get the most out of your Web site. Having the tools and the time to discover your target and the type of searches being made out there can help you connect with more clients. 

If you decide that you haven’t got the time or the manpower to dedicate to this, ask your LeadRival account executive about our Search Engine Optimization and low cost internet marketing solutions for your Web site.