Competitor Analysis for Law Firms

Competitor analysis involves collecting, reviewing, and analysing data about the marketing activities undertaken by your competitors. The purpose of a competitor analysis is to identify opportunities to market to your ideal audience in a lower competition environment or to outperform (and outshine) your competitors, so your law firm gets noticed.

Obiter’s marketers use competitor analysis to guide strategic decision making about your law firm’s marketing. We will consider the marketing activities of your competitors alongside your law firm’s marketing budget and time resources to ensure your marketing plan is as effective and impactful as possible.

A competitor analysis for law firms looking to improve their digital marketing strategy includes:

• Identifying your competitors.
• Identifying the marketing activities your competitors undertake (eg. A website, social media, blogging, public relations and earned media, podcasts, etc).
• Assessing the websites that link to your competitors’ sites.
• Comparing and contrasting your competitors’ marketing efforts against your marketing efforts.

This analysis can go on to inform your law firm’s:

• SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).
• Marketing planning.
• Marketing strategy.

This depends on the precise marketing activity. In some cases, it’s necessary – like with SEO (search engine optimisation). This is because your law firm’s website needs to publish content that’s similar to (or higher in quality and longer than) your competitor(s) for relevant keywords to (potentially) rank higher than them for that specific keyword. In order to be competitive in this space, you will generally need to expand your website at a similar rate to or faster than your competitors. It’s very important that you don’t exactly replicate your competitors’ work, however. Copyright implications aside, search engines penalise websites for creating content that is too similar to an existing site. It’s called ranking cannablisation and it leads to incredibly poor visibility outcomes.

In other situations, it can be counterproductive and expensive. Pay-per-click advertising, for instance, is less effective and more expensive if you reverse engineer your competitors keywords exactly, since you’re all bidding on the same searches. In this case, unless you’re in a position to pay for more expensive ads, you’re possibly better off thinking outside the box.

The amount you need to spend on marketing your law firm can be guided by a comprehensive competitor analysis. A competitor analysis reveals what marketing activities your competitors are undertaking and which efforts (if any) are performing well. It also assesses their website and considers what pages are ranking well and what you will need to do to improve your search engine rankings over time.

Based on these findings, you can effectively allocate your marketing dollars to the marketing activities that will have the most impact for your law firm. The data also allows you to develop strategic mid- to long-term marketing plans, so your future expenditure is more certain.

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