Lawyers: Do You Know How You Can Increase Your Reviews on Avvo?

There’s nothing more important to you as a lawyer than your reputation. It’s what earns you respect in the courtroom, and the reason why clients come to you for help. In this digital age, the internet is now the first place that people look when they’re searching for legal help. Whether this starts off with a simple search regarding their problem, or if they’re diving straight into looking for a lawyer, you want to make sure that your information is valuable and highly visible to those searching online. That makes your online reputation more important than ever.

On of the places many clients are going in search of a lawyer is Avvo. Avvo is a website that is specifically designed to match lawyers with clients looking for legal services within their area.

Like many service-oriented websites, Avvo allows users to search within their locale, and, to narrow down the results even more, users can also search for lawyers who have specific areas of expertise, or lawyers and offices by their name. This means that individuals in your general area will be able to find your profile and will use it as a big step in their decision to reach out to you or to move on.

Before we get into how you can increase your reviews on Avvo, let’s talk about what it offers as a professional platform.

Does Avvo Really Make “Legal. Easier”?

The goal of Avvo’s platform, according to its tagline, is to make legal easier for the regular person. In what is probably a difficult and confusing time in their life, looking for a trustworthy lawyer who can help them get through their legal problems can be an equally daunting task. After all, this is a huge decision that also requires them to consider areas of expertise, a lawyer’s case history, and the costs involved.

From the homepage alone, Avvo displays a rotating carousel of three lawyers and their rating, location, professional photo, area of expertise, and a large preview of one of their reviews.

This view allows users to clearly see a good outline of each professional, but it also allows them to see where an individual lawyer may be lacking. On Avvo, not having a professional image or a good rating and review is a clear deficiency that could work against you.

Which profile would you choose? Potential clients prefer knowing what their provider looks like, so having a claimed and complete profile is key. After all, no one wants to rely on a faceless person.

Getting More Positive Reviews on your Avvo Profile

Like the other industries that we work with at RepCheckup, professionals in the law vertical should be keeping a close eye on their online reputation. As we mentioned earlier, it’s exceedingly difficult to rely on word of mouth and referrals to get new clients. Instead, your professional reputation must be highly visible through your online profile in the way of good reviews left by previous clients and a high overall rating.

According to a 2017 study by BrightLocal, consumers need around a 4-star rating and 7 total reviews to trust a business and move forward in working together.

So, what do you need to do to boost your Avvo profile with new, positive online reviews?

Step 1: Finish Filling Out Your Avvo Profile

One of the first steps you’ll want to take, after claiming or creating your Avvo profile itself, is to make sure it’s completely filled out. Have a great professional picture that’s high-quality and take the time to fill out the detailed profile that Avvo offers.

Unlike other websites, Avvo does something interesting with areas of specialty: it creates a pie graph to depict your focus as a professional.

This means you can show potential clients exactly what percentage of your cases are related to specific areas, such as divorce vs. child custody.

Avvo allows you to fill in information regarding the location of your practice, equipped with a Google Maps view that can serve to better help clients narrow down how close they are to you, as well as your resume.

Make sure you fill in all the possible slots of information to present an up-to-date and complete profile.

Step 2: Ask Your Clients In-Person For a Review

The great majority of people would be happy to leave any business a review if only they were asked. It’s safe to say that many business owners simply do not take the additional step to train staff to ask for reviews when appropriate.

This means that, after a case is closed and a client has voiced their appreciation for what you’ve done for them, you may ask them to leave a review with their experience online. It’s at this point that you can point them in the direction of a specific website, like Avvo.

Step 3: Use an Online Reputation Management Tool

We hate to toot our own horn, but tools like RepCheckup were specifically designed to help exceedingly busy professionals, like lawyers and doctors, manage their online reputation without needing to log in and out of multiple review profiles.

Reputation management tools are able to take the information from all of your profiles and compile them into a single dashboard that allows you to view new reviews and respond to them directly, as responding to both positive and negative reviews is a huge must when it comes to showing your ability to communicate and appreciate clients. On a public forum, this small social proof is key.

Perhaps more importantly than allowing you to view and respond to your current reviews, tools like RepCheckup give you the capability to text past clients and request a review with the click of a few buttons.

Unlike email, text open rates are much higher and thus improve the likelihood of a review being left for you. Additionally, each text solicitation will include a personalized message and a link to a platform of your choosing, like Avvo. When a client clicks through and agrees that they would recommend you to a friend or family member, they are forwarded to your designated review profile and prompted to leave a review with their experience. In the cases where a past client would not recommend you, they are triaged and encouraged to leave their feedback privately and directly to you.

Start by compiling a list of your clients and their contact information. This will allow you to simply upload this list into your reputation management tool and send out messages in bulk rather than needing to reach out individually. Each aspect of these tools is ultimately designed to save you time and increase your reviews on Avvo and other platforms, like Google and Facebook.

For more information on how you can increase your reviews on Avvo or other platforms, or if you’d like to know where you should start the entire reputation management process, don’t hesitate to reach out to us! You  may also get more information from our blogs on online reputation management strategies and review-gathering methods for 2018.