When someone chooses to engage a lawyer or law firm, they’re often doing so under intense or difficult circumstances — and the more information they have about you, the better they feel making a decision. That’s why you need a strong online reputation to convey to potential new clients that you’re legitimate, trustworthy, and able to help them. However, you may be asking yourself, “How do I get reviews for my law firm?”
When people research a lawyer, the vast majority — nearly 92% — predominantly search on Google. But whether they’re using Google or an industry-specific site like Avvo, many are going to seek out the opinions and experiences of your past clients to gain an overall sense of who you are and if you’re a good fit for their needs.
Client reviews provide key details about your law practice and helpful breakdowns of your strengths and weaknesses. And because reviews are written by real people, the content is usually seen as far more authentic and credible than any marketing messages you might put out there about yourself or your firm.
Given how much is riding on client reviews, it should be every lawyer’s goal to build up a body of quality reviews — which makes asking for reviews one of the most important things you can do. To better understand the impact of review requests, we recently analyzed our customers in six different industries — including the legal industry. Here’s how the data stacks up for lawyers and law firms.
Greater review volume
Let’s dig in to the details of how to get more reviews for your law firm. The more client reviews you have, the better. Not only does having a lot of reviews — especially recent reviews — give potential clients the critical information they need, it also impacts Google ratings, in the sense that if you have more positive reviews than negative reviews, it can increase your overall star rating.
Therefore, to ensure greater review volume, you need to continuously ask for reviews.
Key data insights:
- We found that lawyers got 6X more reviews when they sent review requests, with an average of 176 total reviews per location — as opposed to just 24 total reviews per location when they didn’t send requests.
- The number of first-party reviews showed a particular improvement. On average, lawyers had 2 first-party reviews per location when they didn’t send requests. But when they did send requests, that number jumped to 21 first-party reviews per location.
First-party reviews are given directly to you by your client — as opposed to third-party reviews in which customers post them to independent review sites. This means you own your first-party reviews and can share them on your website. You can also apply schema markup to them to help your website become more visible in search results — earning an important SEO benefit.
So, if you want to increase your overall review volume — or you have a specific interest in earning more first-party reviews — a great place to start is to dial up your review request efforts.
Better NPS and ratings
Two of the best indicators of your reputation as a lawyer or law firm is your Net Promoter Score (NPS) and star rating on Google. NPS measures how likely your clients are to recommend you to others, using a scale of 0 (very unlikely) to 10 (highly likely). Your star rating is what people see when they view your business profile, ads, local pack results, and more on Google and is calculated as an average of all the reviews you have to date.
To summarize, NPS is an internal measure you can use to understand client satisfaction while ratings are an external measure that the public uses to form an at-a-glance perception of your reputation.
Key data insights:
- Here’s something very interesting: Simply by sending review requests with GatherUp, lawyers had a higher average NPS than their industry peers — 69 vs. 37.
- They also had a higher average star rating than their industry peers when they specifically requested third-party reviews — 4.7 vs. 4.5.
The hypothesis here is that the act of requesting reviews is a powerful signal to your clients that you’re sincerely interested in their feedback, and furthermore, that you take their feedback seriously and intend to use it to improve the client experience. It strengthens the emotional connection your clients have with you — turning them into promoters who actively champion your practice to others and give you rave reviews. The end result is both a higher NPS and rating.
In other words, requesting reviews isn’t just about getting more reviews. It’s also about actually wanting to understand the client experience and implement changes for the better, which can reverberate far beyond your current client base and attract new clients.
Broader reach using a multi-channel approach
So, this leaves us with the question: How should you request reviews? There are many ways to ask — from doing so during an in-person or over-the-phone interaction to providing a review link on brochures, your website, or your social media.
Two of the more relevant methods today are to ask for reviews via email and SMS (short message system — otherwise known as texting) since these are reflective of how people prefer to communicate. Since most people keep their smartphones handy all day, they can access both text and email on the go and in real time.
Key data insights:
- When lawyers only used email to ask for reviews, they had an average of 36 total reviews per location. When they only used SMS, they had an average of 14 total reviews per location.
- But when the lawyers combined both email and SMS, they had an average of 65 total reviews per location.
The salient idea here is that you can reach more clients and get a better response when you use more than one channel for requesting reviews. You can easily reach those who prefer email over SMS, and vice versa. Either way, your clients are less likely to overlook your request and more likely to act on it.
More review strategy best practices
Review requests clearly matter. But there are other important actions to take to ensure your entire review strategy delivers results for you.
Make sure to:
- Monitor your reviews across social media and industry-specific review sites, such as Avvo and Lawyers.com, so you understand what’s being said about you and where.
- Claim profiles on those industry review sites and add pertinent information about your law practice and areas of expertise, so you can help steer the conversation in an accurate direction.
- Respond to reviews, even the negative ones. When responding to a negative review, without disclosing confidential client information or representation, you can invite the reviewer to have an offline conversation with you so you can help resolve the issue. That way you’re not ignoring the criticism altogether.
- Conduct an NPS survey to gauge how satisfied your clients are and if there’s room for improvement.
- Analyze your reviews and client feedback to get actionable insights into what’s working for you and what isn’t so you can make relevant changes.
To learn how GatherUp’s reputation management platform can support your insurance business, request a consultation with one of our reputation experts today.
