Why AVVO No Longer Works for Legal Services Marketing for Law Firms
AVVO was once the top-ranking legal profession directory on Google, offering peer endorsements on lawyer profiles for prospective clients to review. In recent years, though, AVVO has been unable to keep up with changes to Google’s ranking statistics.
Now, your law firm’s AVVO profiles are lucky to land on the first page, and they certainly won’t reach the top of the results page. As a legal marketing strategist, I hate AVVO in 2022.
Changes by AVVO in Recent Years
Many state bar organizations, including those in Indiana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia, have published ethics opinion statements against AVVO.
After Internet Brands (WebMD, Lawyers.com) purchased AVVO in 2018, the membership and marketing for the AVVO platform changed to benefit the platform rather than law firms.
AVVO membership fees rose, while ranking for AVVO profiles fell. The math is simple: fewer visits to your AVVO lawyer profile page mean fewer prospective clients from AVVO.
Does AVVO Still Provide Good Value in Legal Services Marketing?
While we previously recommended that our clients pay for marketing on AVVO, we now advise spending those same dollars elsewhere. A real digital marketing strategy would serve you better.
In addition to paid advertising, your law firm’s comprehensive digital marketing strategy should include search engine optimization (SEO), Google My Business, social media campaigns, and more.
Where you could benefit from claiming your lawyer profile would be in controlling your image on the AVVO platform. However, you don’t need to claim your AVVO profile if no one ever sees it. Remember that landing on the second page of Google results makes you virtually non-existent.
Marketing for the Legal Profession
Effective legal marketing requires a well-built network between your website, social media pages, direct digital marketing engagements, and paid digital advertising. These efforts will boost your law brand’s local domain authority (DA) for your practice areas.
You need an attractive and functional website. That website should have a strong sitemap with interlinked pages and external links to authoritative sources that have a high DA ranking to boost your site’s DA.
Your social media pages need to link back to your website as often as possible.
Search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on your website content. By writing fresh content for your site relevant to your practice areas, your site will rank higher in the search results.
As you combine several strategies to direct traffic to your site from social media, Google My Business, Google Maps, and other sources will help bring your brand in front of more prospective clients.
Contact Us at La Grande Marketing for Comprehensive Legal Marketing Solutions
I’m Shawn Leamon, Chief Strategist at LaGrande Marketing. We help law firms like yours get new clients using digital marketing strategies that work. To find out what we could do for you, call us at 972-236-5750 or contact us online.