Video can be an extremely powerful tool to help promote your practice on the Internet. It’s no secret that many Internet users love watching videos. A recent comScore study showed that in January, nearly 123 million people in the U.S. (70 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience) viewed 7.2 billion videos online. Those numbers wil continue to grow for years to come. What does that mean for law firm’s who market their practice on the Internet? Well, video can be a great tool to help generate new clients. Here are five reasons why your law firm should take advantage of video to generate more business for your law firm:

1. Video can help convince a visitor to contact your law firm -When visitors come to a law firm’s website, one of the most commonly viewed pages is the “about us” or “about the attorney” page. Consumers want to know more about you before they contact you. Pictures are helpful (people want to know what you look like), but a video on your website is a much more powerful way to help convince that visitor that your law firm is the right law firm to call in their time of need. In addition, having video on specific topics can make you look like an expert in that area and providing that kind of information can help improve your website conversion rates.

2. Google is now incorporating video into their search results – Here’s a search on Google for “San Diego trial attorney“. If you look at the results, you’ll see at the top of the page is a thumbnail of the video and you can even watch the video right there in the search results without even leaving that page. Google is always changing and looking for ways to improve their search results and this is definitely a great improvement on their part.

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We’ve had good success optimizing videos to show up for search terms like “San Diego auto accident lawyer“. That link shows a video we recently did targeting that search term. See this search on Google to see that video in the search results.

3. YouTube! – YouTube is a great way to promote your law firm. While there are plenty of video sites on the web, YouTube dominates with over 70% of U.S. visits to video sites. YouTube videos are often found in Google search results today (as in the example above). If you have videos, you definitely need to upload your videos to YouTube. Many people today are actually starting to use YouTube as a search engine so that’s another great way to increase exposure for your law firm. Over 5 billion searches were conducted on YouTube in August 2007 according to a comScore study.

4.Videos on your website can give you the advantage over your competitors! – When most consumers are online looking for an attorney, they don’t just look at one site. Most look at multiple websites and then will make their selection on who to contact after reviewing the law firm’s site. Video is a GREAT way to differentiate yourself from your competition in a way that words on a page simply can’t do. It can help inform visitors about specific legal topics and can be a great way to comminicate important aspects of your firm that you would want a visitor to know about your firm.

5.Video marketing works! – As this graph from emarkerter shows, video advertising works. I can also speak to the fact that video has improved conversion rates of website visitors for our clients who have added video.

My advice is jump on video marketing for your law firm now before it becomes common place and then everyone is doing it. Video really is a great way to help your law firm generate more clients via the web. Here’s a sample of our work and maybe can give you an idea of what can work to help convince visitors to contact your law firm.