Law Technology Today From the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center
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Since the introduction of Google Posts for Google My Business accounts, agencies and businesses of all kinds have been able to positively impact their search rankings with minimal effort. This is great news for legal firms: promoting your agency is crucial for attracting potential clients, and most law firm’s clients come from their local area.
With just a few low-effort tasks, you can utilize the Google Posts feature from your Google My Business dashboard. Your firm can create updates, staff bios, testimonials, or share special offers that will appear directly in the search results. This can help you to positively influence your ranking in local searches. Here’s how you can optimize your use of this technology to benefit your firm.
Creating A Google Post
Log into your My Business account from your mobile device or computer and navigate to the “Posts” section. Here you will be presented with options to add images, text, events, or buttons to your post. Select the appropriate options for the content you have in mind and enter or upload any relevant information.
Once you’ve finished crafting your post, click “Preview” to see how it will be presented to the viewer. If it’s as you intended, hit “Publish” on the top right of the screen. If not, simply return to the post and make the necessary adjustments. Keep in mind that any inserted images will only display the middle third of the picture in the published post.
After a post has been created, it will appear on Google Search and Maps for seven days. If you’ve created an event post, it will stay up until the event date has passed.
Using Google Posts To Your Advantage
Using posts shows Google that you are an active member of your local community. You will be rewarded for creating timely and informative posts by being featured more prominently in the local results of Google’s SERP.
The key is to share regular, quality, and timely information about your law firm. If you specialize in car accident injuries, then make sure to highlight this fact and related auto accident content in the post. A few ways to utilize this feature are to create spotlight bios of staff members, posts about awards won, or talking about other achievements your firm has made. In doing so, you are able to reach local users with your content before they navigate to your web page.
Each of the posts has insights available which let you know how many views and engagements have been made. Just as with other content for your firm, it is advisable to track these metrics to help you understand what works best. This should be repeated to increase your exposure.
The Best Posts For Promoting Your Law Firm
Your My Business account with Google takes your firm’s pre-existing information to create its listing. Address details will put you on the map—literally—with your firm’s name and location marked with a pin.
Google Posts take the idea of your firm’s listing a little further, allowing you to share news, updates, special offers, and events right from the search results page. Posts should be used to keep your Google profile active. Doing so shows you’re an in-demand business, as well as a trustworthy source of information relevant to your specific area of law.
Obvious examples of law firm Google Posts are staff bios, speaking engagements, conferences, news of community service and charity work, and information or short articles about your services and areas of expertise. One of the best posts to use for your firm, though, is highlighting your happy clients and letting them become advocates for your services.
Integrating User-Generated Content
Small Thanks with Google makes it simple to use these customer reviews as promotional posts for your business. Search for your firm listing in the section provided. Choose “Personalize Your Toolkit” to customize the review and begin turning it into a Google Post.
In this section, you will be able to choose colors, fonts and upload images. Download the finished product and pull the files from the zipped folder, then login into your My Business dashboard. Navigate to the post creation section and upload the new file; ensure it is cropped to the right size to fit your Google post. Lastly, add any relevant text to the testimonial post, be it a quick thanks for their comments or a return thanks for their business.
Make sure that the testimonial post is not published as an event and choose an appropriate CTA for your button. “Learn More” and “Sign Up” are both good options, but whichever you choose, verify that the associated link takes the user to a relevant part of your website. Whether it’s a contact form, bio page, or page with further details about the services your firm provides, you won’t achieve what you set out to do if your information doesn’t match up.
Regular use of Google Posts with a mixture of testimonials, news, and information about your firm will help to increase your local search ranking. By taking note of the insights for each post and incorporating simple Google Posts with a more comprehensive SEO and marketing strategy, you will be able to drive more business to your law firm.
