Justia Marketing Review

We’ve weighed the pros and cons to provide you with the info you need before committing to Justia’s premium membership and digital marketing services.

Why Justia’s Marketing Services Are Not Worth it for Lawyers

Putting together a great digital marketing strategy can be a daunting task, and your average legal professional already has enough on their plate without having to worry about their web design or social media. Nonetheless, developing a strong online presence is crucial for any business in today’s day and age, and any lawyer would be smart to ensure that they are easily searchable and have a user-friendly interface for their clients. A great digital marketing strategy offers the potential to convert online traffic into new customers, creating valuable business opportunities for the future.

Justia has become a popular resource for lawyers, law students and citizens seeking legal advice. It’s easy to understand this online platform’s appeal, with a number of great features including a detailed lawyer directory and public availability of legal information such as Supreme Court documents and judicial reviews. While lawyers can list their legal services for free, the platform also offers premium membership and a number of extra features such as web design, social media marketing, and SEO. But is it worth the added expense? We’ve weighed out the pros and cons of this popular online service to provide you with all the information you need before committing to Justia’s premium membership and digital marketing services.

Is free Justia membership enough?

Lawyers can easily create a free Justia listing with their contact details, practice areas, professional associations, and more. Free users can also take advantage of the website’s peer rating and client review system, which can be an excellent way to promote legal services. Justia’s wealth of useful data including Supreme Court documents and judicial reviews requires no membership at all to access. It goes without saying that every lawyer should take advantage of these free features which can be accessed with little effort and at no expense.

The problem is simply that so many legal professionals already use this service, with its directory listing thousands of lawyers across the US. Premium membership will help your profile stand out to a certain extent, offering prioritization in search results. It can also offer valuable insights from back-office data such as traffic statistics. Nonetheless, the fact remains that even with a premium membership, you remain in a very large crowd of highly qualified professionals. Many lawyers using Justia have pointed out this lack of exclusivity as a major drawback.

Helping potential customers find you on the internet is an essential step in creating valuable leads. But actively looking for your customer base yourself is just as important. Ideally, you should outsource your digital marketing to a company that understands who your key audience is, and actively makes an effort to build a connection with them. Engaging in strategic audience targeting is a great deal more effective than relying on organic results from online platforms, such as Justia’s online directory.

How useful are Justia’s web design services?

In addition to premium membership, Justia offers a number of web design and content management services for lawyers. These services include:

• Custom website design.
• Content and copywriting.
• Traffic monitoring, data analytics, and SEO.
• Paid advertising.
• Social media management.
• Blogging services.

If outsourced management of all your online platforms is the ultimate goal, perhaps this all sounds too good to be true. While opinions on Justia’s web design aesthetics will vary from one person to another, it is of undeniable importance that your website offers smooth functionality, loads quickly, and is fully search engine optimized.

Several review sites indicate that while Justia succeeds in creating attractive websites, it falls short with SEO and generating inbound traffic. Third-party testing of Justia’s websites has shown they often have low page loading scores. Further investigation shows that a number of technical issues on Justia’s websites may lead to search engines omitting them from their results.

If you’re going to the effort and expense of creating a great website, you want to make sure that it gets all the attention it deserves and serves its purpose of bringing in business. Working with a creative agency that offers thorough and effective SEO will offer a much better return on investment.

Does Justia properly integrate multiple online platforms?

Having your online platforms fully integrated is key to building a strong online presence. While Justia does claim to offer total integration of social media channels, blogs, and websites, how well it succeeds at this is questionable.

A quick browse through Justia’s portfolio shows that not only are blogs often formatted differently to their associated websites, but they’re also frequently assigned to separate URLs altogether. This creates a fragmented online presence, and reduces the efficiency of SEO.

Effective content management systems bring blogs, social media profiles, and websites together to create a seamless experience for your followers. In addition, proper integration of different channels has the added benefit of offering optimal results from SEO. If one of your channels is succeeding, the others will reap the benefits.

Is it easy to switch to another service from Justia?

To create a great online presence, you have to play the long game. Building a following on the internet takes time and involves effective audience targeting, high-quality content, and consistent communication. As a legal professional, you understand the importance of creating a good long-term relationship with the client and the value of word-of-mouth marketing. So what happens if you decide to switch from Justia to another service for your digital marketing needs?

Investigative reports show that Justia will not hand over your website or digital marketing strategy to you or another marketing agency if you decide to terminate your membership. Justia retains the rights to all content created and will remove the existing site after you stop using their service. This puts clients in the dangerous position of having to rebuild their websites from the ground up, after putting in a large amount of time and resources.

Working with a digital agency that offers total ownership of any content created is critical. You want to make sure that no matter what changes your business goes through, you’re holding onto your valuable customers in the long run.

Does Justia have a good reputation?

Outsourcing your digital marketing requires a big leap of faith, and you should conduct thorough research of any company before making long-term commitments to them. A good online strategy can help your business grow in leaps and bounds, but working with a disorganized or unresponsive company can achieve the exact opposite, and damage your business in ways that are hard to reverse.

While Justia’s website offers a great deal of positive feedback in the form of customer testimonials, external reviews and ratings from other sites such as the Better Business Bureau paint a very different picture. Complaints greatly outnumber the positive reviews, with many indicating that a major drawback of working with Justia is inconsistent communication and slow response time on technical issues.

The Verdict

Justia has earned a well-deserved status as a leader in legal information retrieval. From detailed directories to informative databases, the site has become an invaluable resource for lawyers, law students, and citizens seeking legal advice.

Nonetheless, lawyers looking for turn-key management of their websites, blogs, and social media channels may want to look elsewhere. Upgrading to premium membership does not offer a large enough increase in visibility to justify the added expense. Furthermore, it will never be able to compete with a digital marketing strategy that actively engages with the target audience rather than relying on organic growth.

Justia’s web design and content management services are comprehensive and designed for legal professionals, however they fail to offer a customized level of service. While Justia arguably creates attractive web design and original content, often its websites are not properly integrated with other channels and are unsuccessful in generating inbound traffic with effective SEO.