In today’s economy, lawyers have to find new ways to find their ideal clients.
A few generations ago, lawyers were told to provide great legal advice to market themselves. That was the extent of it. No need to worry about having a concrete marketing strategy aside from that.
The idea was that by giving amazing legal advice and services, your clients would be blown away by your legal prouesse and run to tell others potential clients to deal with you. Happy customer bringing other customers. Simple.
That strategy worked for a long time. Clients were loyal. Lawyers had a monopoly over the legal services. People did not have access to readily available legal information for free.
Today, the good old strategy of being a great lawyer is not enough. Not anymore!
There is too much competition out there. Lots of lawyers out there. Non-lawyers entering the legal markets in direct competition. People are looking for self-help websites. Darn!
What now?
You need to find a way to stand out and attract new clients like a magnet. Is it possible? Absolutely!
Get yourself a crazy amazing website!
Get your law firm’s website to for you 24/7 continually bringing in new leads.
Increase your profitability by developing an awesome law firm website and putting all the chances on your side to win new clients.
In this article, we will look at:
- You must have the best law firm website in the market
- Your website must be easily found by search engines
- Your website must be fast
- Your website must be mobile-friendly
- Your website must be optimized for user experience
- You must have a blog
- Conclusion
Let’s get straight into it.
1- You must have the best law firm website in the market
Do you currently have a website? Do you know how it is performing? Do you have any clients coming through your law firm’s website? How many? Do you track this data at all?
Let’s break it down for you.
97% of people inquire about a local business and law firm online before reaching out to them. This means that your clients will want to find you online before ever contacting you.
46% of all Google searches are people looking for a local business. Regardless of where your clients are primarily situated, you should not neglect your local market and possible clientele. This is a low-hanging fruit accessible to you with a great website. Take advantage of it.
4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find information about a local business or law firm. This number is staggering when you consider the billions of searches done on Google every day. There is no justifiable reason why your law firm is not tapping into this wealth of potential leads.
You MUST have a website to be competitive out there.
A fantastic website!
You can’t just put up a website, cross your fingers and hope for the best? Hmmmm, not really!
You need to be strategic, you need to orchestrate your attack, you need to play as they play in the big leagues.
What are the best practices to ensure you have a top-of-the-line website that ranks on page of Google?
2- Your website must be easily found by search engines
There is no point to having a website that is not found by search engines. You might as well avoid wasting your time building a website in the first place.
We are a bit harsh here but you know what we mean.
Your website will bring value to you when you get organically ranked on search engines. The most popular search engine is Google, so make sure your website is designed in such a way that Google will rank you well.
It is crucial to implement a search engine optimization strategy (SEO strategy) that will get you to be ranked on Google’s first page.
To set the stage, consider that 53% of all clicks go to the first organic listing. More than half of all searches go to the first organic listing.
Also, 92% of searchers will pick a law firm or a business to deal with that appears on the first page of Google. If you are not on the first page, you are on no man’s land.
To get ranked on the first page of Google, there are many techniques and best practices that must be observed. You should most certainly have a content marketing strategy and an awesome SEO strategy for lawyers.
You must be patient with your law firm SEO strategy. It will take time for you to rank on Google’s first page. However, when you start ranking there consistently, you will see that you will generate more sales directly as a result of that.
3- Your website pages must load fast
Your website must be fast to rank on Google.
When we say fast, we mean that your website pages must load within three seconds. If not, you will forever lose that potential site visitor.
Site speed is one of Google’s ranking factors. Make sure your website is optimized to offer the best loading speed possible.
You can test your website’s speed index by using a tool offered by Google.
If your website speed score is in the green, that’s excellent! Success.
If not, Google ranks you in the red or orange, then make sure you optimize your site by following Google’s own recommendations. Make sure you do it!
4- Your website must be mobile-friendly
Your website must be designed for mobile first.
More and more, people are searching the web through their mobile devices so much so that 63% of Google visits are through a mobile device.
If your site does not offer your users the best possible experience on mobile, you will shave 63% off the number of potential leads. That’s a fact!
To make sure that we drive the point home, consider that 61% of mobile searchers are likely to contact the business or law firm if their website is mobile-friendly. Not mobile-friendly, not interested.
If your law firm website developer does not have a mobile strategy for you, then you are spending your money on futility.
Demand and expect the best possible mobile user-friendly website as this will help drive your sales.
Remember, you want your website to be your 24/7 sales representative greeting and engaging with your potential clients.
Greet your prospects well, you can hook them and drive a sale.
Leave them hanging at the door, they will leave.
5- Your website must be optimized for user experience
So your website is ranking on the first page of Google, excellent. It is optimized for mobile since you know most people search on mobile, woot woot. And your site loads super fast when a user clicks on your site, cheerio. You’ve done an excellent job so far.
Now, make sure you engage your user through a super-duper user experience and keep them on your site.
Have your visitor get to know you quickly and show them that you are the best lawyer in town, all within the first ten seconds of the user getting on your site.
The quality of your website and your user experience is so important that if you don’t nail this, you can actually hurt yourself.
Studies show that having a bad website will hurt your practice and push away a client that would have otherwise mandated you for legal services.
We think that you should know, 75% of people judge a law firm’s credibility based on its website design and user experience.
This is crucial, so don’t neglect it or cheap out.
Make sure that your website provides value to your user, is easy to navigate, your information is clearly spelled out and the user can easily figure out how to reach out to you.
For more advanced website strategies, you can consider devising a website conversion funnel strategy so you can maximize the conversion of your site visitors to paying clients. But that’s another topic for another article.
6- You must have a blog
To have your visitor stick on your site like crazy glue, you should provide them value.
When people search on the internet, they are looking for information, they have questions, they need answers, they are looking for a solution to their problem.
Make sure you have a blog that provides relevant and useful information on your field of expertise. Help your site visitors with their problem. Guide them. Offer them valuable information.
Answer your client’s common questions related to your area of expertise and provide them the best content ever.
If your site visitor sees value, they are more likely to do business with you.
Having a blog is very important for increasing the traffic to your website as well. In fact, a blog will increase your changes in ranking in search engines by 434%. Nuts!
Once you finish reading this article, you should quickly turn to Google to find a website developer that will implement our recommended best practices in this article.
Chances are you are likely to do a search on your mobile device for a local web developer, click on the top three organic search results, if the site page does not load fast, you will skip to the next search result, site loads, then you assess the credibility of the web developer’s website in the first ten seconds, get to know their area of expertise, and if their website is well-designed, you will get sucked into their website conversion funnel! Boom. Next thing you know, you are dishing over your money to them. Wink, wink!
This is how you must manage your law firm’s website. Period.
7- Conclusion
In the good old days, things were simple.
Lawyers did not have to worry about sales, funnels, websites, loading speeds, competition, globalization, earthquakes, volcanoes and going vegan!
Back then, lawyers had to give great legal advice and the word-of-mouth machine would go to work giving the lawyer enough clients to sustain a career.
David B. Wilkins, professor of law at Harvard Law School and the faculty director of the school’s Center on the Legal Profession states:
“the thinking was that if you do excellent work for your existing clients, not only will those clients continue to come to you, but you’ll get new clients, and if you have enough clients, good lawyers will want to come and join you”.
Nice to reminisce.
Now, let’s get real. You must have an online presence that is meaningful, that sets you apart.
Your website is one great marketing firepower that you can immediately deploy.
Elevate your firm’s credibility, increase your inbound leads, engage with your clients and prospects, provide value, beat the competition. Without a website, you are fighting an uphill battle.
We cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have a great website that packs a punch. So go out there and get to work, make sure that you have the best website that you can afford and reap the benefits.
We hope that this article helped you define your law firm’s online marketing strategy to dominate the online space in your niche.
Share your website experience with us? What is working for you? What is not? We would love to hear from you. Drop us your comments below.
