There is a sentence I hear from principals more than almost any other when the subject of being found online comes up, and it arrives with complete confidence and a fair amount of justified pride, which is that our law firm reviews are excellent so we are doing fine online.
Half of that is true and the half that isn’t is quietly expensive, so it’s worth taking the whole sentence apart properly rather than leaving it sitting there sounding sensible.
What law firm reviews actually do
Law firm reviews work at the moment of decision, which is to say after somebody has already found you and is weighing you up against two other firms they also found, and at that moment a wall of five star reviews with real names attached will close the thing for you more reliably than anything else on your website. That is a real asset and it took you years of good work to build it, so nothing here is an argument against reviews.
Reviews do carry real weight in one particular place, which is the local map pack, where Google’s own local ranking guidance lists prominence among the factors that decide who appears. If somebody types family lawyer plus your suburb, strong reviews help you show up in those map results, and that is worth protecting and worth continuing to earn.
What law firm reviews cannot do
Now think carefully about how your future clients actually begin, because this is where the sentence falls apart. Very few of them start by searching for a family lawyer in a suburb, since that is a late stage search made by somebody who has already decided to hire and is now building a shortlist.
The journey starts much earlier than that and it starts with the problem rather than the professional, which means they are typing things like what happens to the house if we separate, or can I stop them taking the kids, or how does superannuation get split.
Your reviews cannot rank for a single one of those searches, and it doesn’t matter whether you have five of them or five hundred, because Google answers a question with pages that answer that question, and if your firm has never published anything about how superannuation gets split then your firm does not exist in that result at all. There is simply nothing for Google to show.
Meanwhile somewhere in your city there is a firm with distinctly ordinary reviews and forty published answers, and they are appearing in those searches every single night, which has nothing to do with Google thinking they are better lawyers and everything to do with Google having something of theirs to put in front of the person asking.
The two search test
You can test your own law firm reviews against this in about two minutes and I would suggest doing it, because the contrast is the entire lesson. Search your firm’s name first and enjoy it, because everything will look excellent and your reviews will be sitting there doing exactly what they are meant to do for anybody who already knows who you are. Then search the three questions your clients most commonly bring you in a first consultation, worded in plain language the way a worried person would actually type them, and see where you appear.
For most firms the honest answer is nowhere, and what that means is that every person typing those questions tonight, in your suburb, is meeting your competitors and never meeting you. Your reputation, which is the thing you have spent a career building, is currently visible only to people who already have your name.
Why the two layers need each other
This is the thing I keep coming back to whenever I build content for law firms, because the two layers feed each other beautifully once both of them exist.
Published answers do the discovery work and put your firm in front of somebody at the moment they most need help, and then your reviews do what they have always done, so that when the person clicks through and checks you out they find a wall of five stars confirming that they have chosen well. The happy client that comes out the other end leaves another review, which closes the next one.
A firm with brilliant law firm reviews and nothing published has built a beautiful front door on a street that nobody walks down, and the fix is not to stop caring about reviews but to build the street that brings people past the door in the first place.
Your law firm reviews are the proof that you deserve to be found. They just cannot do the finding.
If you want to see exactly where your firm appears, and where it doesn’t, for the searches your clients are actually typing, that is the core of the Law Firm Visibility Audit.
$1000 + GST, conducted personally, and credited against a monthly plan if you move to one within sixty days.
Details at ngcreative.au/law-firm-visibility-audit, or start with the free webinar at ngcreative.au/webinar.
