Does Your Law Firm Website Interfere With Client Acquisition?

    July 27, 2018

    Social media should be a critical aspect of your marketing plan, but if your law firm’s website is ineffective you will never be successful. This is because the purpose of social media is to attract someone’s attention and get them to act. For personal social media use, we post about our daily lives, hoping people will like, comment, or share our post with others. For developing clients on social media, we post strategic content designed to attract attention from our ideal clients and get them to act in some way that helps identify them as a lead so you can nurture them into a potential client. While we may enjoy when someone likes, comments, or shares our post, we likely want them to perform some other action in response to our social media content – such as visiting our website. But if your website lacks the basic elements to convert leads into a client, then your marketing efforts were fruitless.

    What are the Basic Elements of a Law Firm Website?

    Since nearly all social media or digital marketing strategies will ultimately lead potential clients back to your law firm’s website, your website optimization strategy should include, at a minimum, the following pages:

    • Homepage: Your law firm’s homepage should highlight who your firm helps, how you can help them, and what makes your firm unique. It should also direct visitors to other pages of your website where they can learn more about your services, credentials, and easily contact you for help.
    • About Page: You should have a page on your website that provides potential clients an opportunity to learn more about you and your firm. The page should highlight the unique characteristics that set you apart from your competition. If you have multiple attorneys at your firm, then create separate pages for each attorney. And above all, don’t simply list a bullet point bio of every court you’re admitted in, articles you’ve wrote, and speaking engagements. No one cares about that stuff. Trust me.
    • Practice Area Page(s): You should maintain a separate page on your website for each of your primary practice areas. Therefore, if you practice criminal law, family law, and personal injury, you should have a separate page on your website for each service. Why? First and foremost, you need to have a separate page for each service so that they can easily be found (or ranked) in search engines. Secondly, a client interested in family law doesn’t care about your DUI cases. Provide prospective clients with only the information that is relevant to them and will make them want to hire you (such as testimonials from past clients in that practice area). Third, by creating separate pages for each practice area, you can perform more robust social media campaigns and track exactly where leads are spending the most time on your website. This helps you track your return on investment and allows you to make educated decisions on how to improve your marketing in the future.
    • Contact Page: While each of your webpages should feature a clear call to action to contact you, a standalone page that provides your contact information and an easy method contact you via a contact form  or phone is simply a best practice.
    • Blog Page: Blogs enables you to establish credibility and demonstrate your expertise in your area of law. While a blog is not absolutely necessary for bringing in new clients, it can serve as an incredibly powerful lead generation tool as it can establish you as a subject matter expert and help drive traffic from social media to your website. Thus, I believe you could get away without one, but with its meaningful benefits for your marketing – the question is: why wouldn’t you want one?

    Your website can certainly have more pages and sophisticated features (mine sure does). But from the standpoint of making sure you’ve covered your basics, you’ll be in good shape so long as your website is easy to navigate, features your primary services, and includes the basic pages set forth above.

     

    Start Attracting New Clients Today

    In my book Social Skills: How to Attract More Clients for Your Law Firm through Social Media Marketing, I teach you how to conduct a website audit that will help you analyze your website from a marketing perspective before you begin executing your social media campaign. This audit goes beyond these basics to help you identify and remove any major roadblocks that may hurt you from converting leads that you receive from social media. It will also provide you valuable insight on what other elements you can easily add to improve your website for online marketing.

    Click the image below to learn more about the book and how it can help you bring in new law firm clients:

    If you just prefer that I build or audit your website for you – well, that’s what I’m here for. While you’re at it, feel free to check out all the ways in which I can help your law firm through social media marketing.


    Contact Us Today for a Free Consultation