Legal competitors: A guide to analyzing firms and professionals

Legal competition analysis is crucial for gaining vital insights into your competing law firms. This strategy helps reveal the strengths and weaknesses of those looking to attract the same customers as you. However, most bureaus make the mistake of monitoring only legal firms when they should also be tracking individual lawyers: the professionals that make up those competing companies and who may also be going after your same clientele.

You should always include lawyer profiles in your legal competitor monitoring strategy to avoid missing out on vital intelligence. This detailed guide will teach essential tips for efficiently monitoring lawyers and law firm profiles. 

Law firm profile vs. professional profiles

Success in the legal field heavily depends on expertise and reputation. Today, instead of just trusting the big names, every client wants to know the background and skills of the lawyer with whom they will interact. Therefore, it's common practice for legal firms to create or promote personal, professional brands for lawyers in their teams. 

Moreover, both law firm and lawyer profiles can complement each other; hence, it can be an excellent tool for both parties. This illustration gives a fair idea about why monitoring both accounts becomes vital in these scenarios. Your legal competition analysis remains incomplete without monitoring the individual professional profiles of lawyers. 

Tips for analyzing your legal competitors

Now that we know what profiles our legal competition analysis should cover, let us provide a few tips to achieve it efficiently. 

Define who your competitors are

You need to identify whom you're going to analyze! Unfortunately, you can't keep track of all firms and professionals as that takes too much time and is pointless.

To define who your legal competitors are, you'll need to consider a few parameters. Consider the area you serve, your specific field or type of practice (family law, corporate law, etc.), reputation, partnerships, and fees. Look for firms that are similar to yours in these categories, as those are the ones who are most likely appealing to the same prospects as you.

With those names and brands in mind, you can start working! But, before moving on, check out our article for a more detailed plan to identify competitors. 

Look them up on search engines

A good start in your legal competitor analysis is a simple Google search. After all, don't we all go to search engines for a first impression? 

Run searches for your competitors and analyze the results. Vary the way you search, using the name or a broader term like "family lawyers near me". Pay special attention to the snippets, which are the previews of the results, as they are the first thing prospects monitor.

Most times, professionals and law firms collaborate with media sites to be mentioned and get better rankings. So, during this drill, see if news mentions come up and what sites they have collaborated with.

Check their search engine performance

If you want to go a step further, you can also include some technical analysis. Legal SEO should be one of the most vital aspects to insist upon, as most of the business-customer interaction heavily depends on the ranking of any firm or lawyer profile on search results. 

Compare their rankings on various keywords to your rankings. Are they ranking better than you? Use a tool like Wordstream to detect which keywords your competitors rank for with their websites. Can you target those as well?

Last but not least, check out external sources linking to their content, like media sites (as we mentioned earlier), blogs, and social media. Those are called backlinks, and they contribute to better SEO rankings.

If you detect reasonable efforts from your competitor in this area, it might be time for you to start working on this.

Analyze their website

A brand's website is its source of truth. Browse it to find out how they approach first-time visitors: they'll most likely be using their site to showcase their services, value propositions, and current clients.

Besides the homepage and about us section, look for any other valuable information they offer, like a blog or reviews. Check for a profiles section; if they have one, focus on the attorneys' bios, key strengths, and expertise.

Take all these learnings and compare their site to yours to find areas of opportunity. 

See what they're up to on social media

It is doubtful that any modern business doesn't have a social media page or account. The same is also true for law firms and legal professionals. 

They could use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Meetup, and even Facebook to create a network or connect with their target audience. After detecting which platforms they're active on, there are a few questions you can ask:

• Are they building a community? Or are these profiles just for updates?
• What do they post? Is it any good?
• If it's the profile of a firm, are their members also active on social media?

When choosing a legal representative, social media can be a dealbreaker for a client.

Search for past reviews

Lastly, see what their clients say about the firm and its professionals. Look at what directories they're on, read their reviews on Google, forums, and social media, looking for opinions on their work.

You can gain useful insights about their most impactful strategy through reading reviews. For instance, when a major percentage of customers talk about a solution or service they liked the most, this could become an inspiration and source of research for you. 

Tracking all kinds of legal competitors with screenshots

Tracking law firm and individual attorney profiles are equally important for the best legal competitors analysis. Several advanced, competitive tracking tools are available that could do wonders for you. However, if you want to keep it simple while not compromising the quality, you can consider a screenshotting tool like Stillio to track your legal competitors. 

With Stillio, you can fully automate checking competitors online for interesting updates using screenshots. Stillio can efficiently capture your competitor's SERPs rankings, websites, and social media profiles at the interval of your liking. Also, you can capture their other activities, such as press releases, customer reviews, and news mentions. All this information will be automatically saved to your profile for future reference.

On the bright side, all you have to do is set the target URL, screenshotting frequency, and interval. In addition, Stillio allows you to take full-length screenshots to ensure content isn't cut out and you do not miss anything. 

Further, this powerful tool can automatically archive captures to a personal drive like Google Drive or Dropbox. Meanwhile, tags and time stamping makes these captures organized and easily accessible. 

Stillio offers a variety of plans that can adapt to different types of companies and professionals. Paired with your research, tools like this can be of great value for your legal competitor analysis. If not for competitor analysis, you can use this tool to monitor your firm and team member profile performance. 

Conclusion

You can effectively size up your competition based on an in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of your legal competitor. Tracking law firms' and individual attorneys' profiles lets you discover the trends, helps you avoid costly mistakes, and amplifies your efforts. 

Fortunately, tracking your legal competitors could be simple and affordable with apps like Stillio. Therefore, never lose sight of your competitors, and book a free demo to explore all of Stillio's features.