What you should know first
The legal field poses unique challenges when it comes to getting clients to write online reviews. The sensitive and personal nature of a law firm’s work makes it more difficult to encourage clients to speak out about their experience. It helps to look at generating reviews for your firm as both a numbers game and a long-term proposition – but one that is more than worth it.
The value of a single review is enormous. Consider the following:
- The conversion lift even a single review can provide your firm: a recent Bazaarvoice study showed that one positive online review can boost prospect conversion by 10 percent. Every subsequent review boosts that rate even more
- The financial value of a new client to your firm
- The difficulty your competitors will also have acquiring reviews
With a long-term review acquisition strategy, it’s important to both have patience and make sure you are putting in a sound and consistent effort to gather reviews from your clients.
1) Find your major review site listings across the web.
Once you’ve created your account and logged into your dashboard, automatically search and load in links for your business’ existing listings across the most important major review sites by clicking the Connect a Location button in Dashboard > Funnel > Links > Review Profile.
Although industry-specific sites play a huge role in law, your major review site listings (on sites like Google and Facebook) do have a large impact on your business’ visibility and reputation on the internet, with a strong impact on your visibility and presentation in search engines. Even if you choose to hide these major review site links on your landing page, it’s valuable to keep them in your list for monitoring.
2) Find your industry-specific review site listings across the web.
Industry-specific review sites are particularly important in the legal field and should not be overlooked. Consider creating or seeking out existing listings on the following review sites (we integrate with all of the sites mentioned):
- Avvo (the primary player in lawyer reviews)
- Lawyers.com
- Martindale.com
As always, if there’s a review site you’d like to see integrated into our platform, feel free to get in touch.
3) Determine which review sites are most important to your goals
Take a moment to inventory and assess your listings across these major and minor sites to determine which links you’d like to display and highlight for your visitors. Highlight your top priority site by dragging its link into the blue box in Dashboard > Funnel > Links > Your Review Site Links
3) Ask clients directly for feedback
As a law firm, you have the advantage of establishing strong, sustained, face-to-face relationships with your clients. This is why directly asking your happy clients to leave you a review is still one of the most powerful and effective ways to acquire them. And by directing them to your landing page, you ensure that their review goes exactly where you want it to go.
Still, your clients are susceptible to all of the same deterrents to leaving a review as customers across all industries, including simply forgetting to do so. That’s why it’s useful to send them off with a tangible reminder to visit your landing page. Consider adding your landing page URL to your printed materials or client paperwork.
If you keep an email list you might also consider using our drip campaigns or your email software to send a review invitation to your clients via email. You’ll also find an embeddable email signature snippet in the Widgets section that you can use to drive interaction with your landing page right in your correspondence. And our embeddable landing page widgets are great for your website (find these in Dashboard > Widgets).
4) Optional: monitor your reviews across sites and keep tabs on what people are saying about you
It’s important to take a proactive approach to managing your online reputation. Our optional Review Monitoring add-on allows you to keep an eye on what’s being said about your business across the internet. You’ll receive email alerts whenever you receive a new review on any third-party site listing you’ve loaded into your account, so that you can take quick action if needed.
5) Adjust your campaign as needed
Review acquisition is a long-term commitment, and one worth doing above-board and authentically. You may find that the most important review sites for your business change over time. We encourage you to make adjustments as you go. You can re-order, hide, show, edit, and delete your review site links at any time (all of these actions can be performed in Dashboard > Funnel > Links > Your Review Site Links.