Salaries of lawyers—directly for equity partners and indirectly for everyone else—depend upon the success of their firms. In addition to the skill and dedication with which lawyers practice their professions, that success requires a comprehensive marketing and advertising strategy. The lifeblood of any firm is new business, and while word of mouth can help, it’s just not enough to grow firms. In this day and age, a high percentage of those marketing and advertising efforts need to take place online, where prospective clients are increasingly searching for lawyers. Here are the basics to help your firm get started.

Your firm’s website. Trying to draw a connection between a firm’s website and its lawyers’ salaries may seem like a stretch, but the reality is that the website is the cornerstone of a successful online marketing strategy. A great deal of your firm’s efforts will be devoted to getting prospective clients to your website, and in order to successfully convert them into clients, your website will have to be as close to perfect as possible. That means that it’s regularly updated and stylistically current. As every lawyer knows, impressions matter, and your website is a reflection of your firm. You want it to clearly demonstrate your professionalism. In addition, the content of your website should be easy to navigate and focused on giving visitors what they’re looking for: a reason to hire you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In order for your website to convert prospective clients, you need to first get them there. This is where SEO—tying your website with targeted terms so that when a prospective client uses those terms in an online search, your website is one of the first to be displayed—comes in. Most of the growing percentage of prospective clients who use the Internet to find lawyers use Google or another search engine, meaning that optimizing your website should be a top priority. There are two primary ways to do so: and in so doing, help your firm raise its salaries: 

1   On-page optimization involves making your content and website architecture all use those search terms you’ve selected. That means that the bulk of your client-directed content should be edited, as well as the unseen text in your website: everything from the meta tags to the title descriptions to the labels of your pictures.

2   Off-page optimization refers to using websites not formally associated with your own to help boost your search engine ratings. By convincing other sites to link to your own, you can exactly that: most search engines place a premium on the number of external sites that link to your own, particularly if those sites are popular and related in some way to your search terms.

Lawyer directories. As useful as SEO is, many clients prefer to look for lawyers the old-fashioned way: albeit in a different medium. That means using online legal directories in much the same way that previous generations used the Yellow Pages. These directories pool together listings of law firms and create searchable content so that prospective clients can sort by practice area and geographic location. Finding a quality directory—especially one that offers a unique service to its users, such as the ability to upload video content—is a great way of increasing your client base, and by extension the salaries in your firm.

Through judicious use of online marketing and advertising, your firm will attract more clients and increase both its billable hours and its lawyer salaries.