Lawyer Marketing
Website Design & SEO Experts
A big part of running your own law firm is also running your own business, which includes implementing quality lawyer marketing strategies. Some of the most effective and most affordable means of marketing your law firm today are online, but there is a lot to know. So, where do you begin in your legal marketing efforts? You can start with the tips below. Another option is to contact our skilled lawyer marketing team to walk you through our process and see if a custom legal marketing plan is right for you, we offer the best service and results in the industry.
- Law Firm Marketing
- Law Firm Website Design
- Law Firm SEO
- Law Firm Social Media & Blog Marketing
- Law Firm PPC
- Law Firm Videos
Cutting Edge Website Design
Promoting your law firm online is an art, or rather, it is a combination of several arts. None of them though, affect the user’s experience more than your lawyer website design. If a potential client finds your site cluttered, slow, or confusing, they will leave before they can learn about the many ways in which you can help them with their legal issue. When creating your lawyer website design, it is important to work with a professional that knows the strategies that will improve your conversion rates.
The Appearance of Your Lawyer Website Design
Many people think lawyer website design is only about the appearance of a site. While that is not entirely true, the appearance of your site does play a big role in whether leads stay, or leave and head over to a competitor’s. The below tips can help ensure potential clients stay to learn more about you:
- Keep your lawyer website design clean and simple
- Use standard sizing for texts and photos
- Ensure the look of all pages on your website is consistent
- Use a font and character size that are easily readable
- Make sure photographs and images add to your message and do not detract from it
The images you choose to use on your site are also of particular importance in the legal industry. Just like all other content on your site, pictures need to engage the user and tell them more about how you can help them. There are no right or wrong images to use, but it is critical that they reflect your message. For example, you may use a picture of a courtroom if you are a trial lawyer, but that same picture may not be appropriate if you are a real estate lawyer that rarely appears before a judge.
The Architecture of Your Lawyer Website Design
It is easy to assume that the way your website looks is the only part of lawyer website design, but it is not. A big part of website design is how it is built and how easy it is for users to navigate. Quality navigation tools can include clear sections for your practice areas on your website and a menu that can point potential clients in the right direction.
The best lawyer website design also includes links to the homepage and contact page on all other pages. If it is not easy for leads to find the information they are looking for, or they do not know how to contact you, your website design is not functioning as well as it could.
Website Redesign
Your Website is Difficult to Navigate
Online users are accustomed to getting the information they are looking for in a matter of seconds. If they become confused on your website and do not know how to find the information they are looking for, they will leave and they may never come back.
Your Website is Not Optimized for SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) includes many different tactics and strategies that get your website noticed by not only online users, but the search engines, as well. If your website does not incorporate keywords, on-page optimization, as well as optimization on the backend, it is not performing as well as it could.
Your Website is Not Optimized for Mobile
The majority of online users today are using mobile devices when they go onto the Internet. If your website is not optimized for mobile, it will not display properly on these pages. Users will become frustrated at the endless amount of scrolling they have to do, as well as the fact that your website does not load properly. This will also make users leave and go to a competitor’s site, which means it is time for a lawyer website redesign.
Your Website Does Not Have Quality Content
All websites must have quality content that does not only include relevant keywords, but that is also helpful to users. If you do not provide quality content that users find informative and engaging, they will not remain on your page. Also, if your content is not original, Google and the other search engines will penalize you by giving your website a lower ranking.
You Do Not Have a Blog
Blogs are a great way to generate more traffic to your site, and give you even more opportunity to rank well within the search engines. Online users also love to share blog posts on social media, which will give your law firm even more exposure. If you do not currently have a blog, you need a lawyer website redesign.
Your Website Consists of Long Pages of Text
Online users are much more receptive to images and videos than they are long pages of text. Images and videos are not only more interesting, but they are also useful when breaking up long paragraphs. A good lawyer website redesign will incorporate videos and images to attract more users and ensure they stay on your page.
Website Audit
You launched a website so you could expand your reach to qualified leads, in the hopes that they would convert into clients. Unfortunately, many times lawyers realize their website is not performing as they would like, but they do not know why. Other times, lawyers do not know how their website is performing at all.
Eventually, these law firms are surprised to learn that their website is not reaching users, or that the majority of visitors are bouncing, or leaving after seeing just one page. Regardless of how well you know your website, it is important to perform a lawyer website audit periodically so it will always perform its best.
What Does a Website Audit Entail?
When conducting a comprehensive lawyer website audit, we examine your site from both a user and search engine perspective. Our website audits consist of checking the following:
- Content that uses description and title tags effectively
- Images and links that include alt tags
- The sizes of images on the page
- Verification that all links are still working
- Identifying anchor texts, or the lack of, for links
- Identifying all broken links
- Examining the architecture of the website
- Determining how much pages of content are on your site
- Determining how long your website takes to load
- Checking for duplicate pages
- Reviewing incoming links
- Finding errors, including 404 pages
- Determining if content pages have proper headings
- Finding the sitemap to determine the effectiveness of its construction
- Determining how easy it is for search engine bots to crawl your site
After conducting the audit, we will then prepare a report containing all of our findings. The report will allow you to see how your website is performing, the elements that are currently working, and those that need some improvement.
A Focus on SEO and More
Many lawyers want to increase their rankings within the search engine and they think SEO is the only way to do it. It is true that effective SEO tactics can help boost the ranking of your site, but there is so much to it as well. During your lawyer website audit, we will not only identify the structural issues that exist, such as links that do not work, but also the analytics of your site.
Through the analytics, we will determine the average amount of time users spend on your site, the average number of pages that are viewed when visitors reach your site, and your bounce rate. We will also pull other statistics from your site that will give you a clearer picture of how to increase traffic and convert more leads into clients.
Know Your Competition
As a lawyer, you know how important research is, and that holds true when it comes to knowing your competition, too. If you do not know your competition, you do not know what sets you apart from them. Only once you have this understanding can you let potential leads know what makes you a better lawyer, so they convert into clients. Research your competition thoroughly to learn what they are saying and what they are doing successfully, so you can make sure your campaign is more effective than theirs.
Know Your Audience
It’s critical to understand who you’re promoting your services to. However, it is important to note that not everyone who need legal assistance wishes to engage a legal practitioner. To effectively advertise your services, you must develop a marketing strategy that addresses the demands of your target client group. Your marketing plan should identify the services you provide and explain how those services might benefit your clientele. As part of your marketing strategy, you should do market research to discover your ideal target audience. The insights gleaned from market research may help you develop your law firm’s marketing approach and reach out to new clients.
Design an Effective Law Firm Website
Websites are an essential component of any law practice marketing strategy and branding. They are used to collect leads and turn visitors into customers. When customers visit your website, they should see a professional-looking landing page with a clear message about the services you offer. On your law firm website, you should be able to express your brand message as well as provide information about your firm’s practice areas. This allows potential clients to discover more about your company and the services it provides. It is advised that you take some time before you begin constructing your law firm’s website to consider how you want the page to appear and what information you want to include on it. Then, design a minimal layout for the page and fill it with appealing information to boost conversions.
Here are some of the most crucial components of a successful lawyer website:
- An appealing design – The landing page’s design should be clean, straightforward, and easy to browse.
- A clear call to action – Include a clear call to action on your landing page that encourages visitors to fill out the form on your website and submit their contact information. Include a social share button so that visitors may share the page on their preferred social networks.
- Persuasive copy – The copy you use to sell your services is one of the most crucial aspects of the landing page. You should produce enticing text for your landing page that gives a full overview of your services and advantages. The text on your landing page should be unique and focus on the features that are most important to your target audience.
- A visible phone number – The phone number should always be towards the top or bottom of your landing page so that it is easy to discover. Visitors should be able to call your legal practice by clicking on your phone number and learning more about the services you offer.
- An online form – To attract more responses from your visitors, keep the form on your landing page as short and straightforward as feasible. You should also strive to choose fields that are unlikely to cause confusion among your users, such as first name and last name, email address, company name, and address. This will help to improve your conversion rate and provide visitors with a better experience.
- Social proof – If you want to improve your conversion rate even more, you should incorporate some social proof into your landing page. You can use social proof to highlight positive reviews from your existing customers or testimonials from previous clients to demonstrate the quality of your services. A good landing page can be a great asset for any law firm that wants to generate more leads and convert a higher percentage of them into customers. By following the tips listed above, you can design a website that appeals to your target audience and encourages them to take action.
Use Strategic Geo-Targeting
Your clients will not travel further than they need to and if your online lawyer marketing only includes your main location, you are missing out on potential clients. For example, your law firm may be located in Atlanta, but you might also be willing to take clients in Summerhill, Westview, Piedmont Heights, and more. Your marketing should focus on all of these areas so the potential clients in these locations can find you.
Know if the Client is Ready to Find You
Much of lawyer marketing consists of knowing when the right time is to pay for a click during a qualified lead’s journey. If you pay for a click that does not result in a new client, you have wasted a valuable portion of your marketing budget. For example, you should state which area of law you practice in and you should state it early. Otherwise, you may pay when someone clicks on your ad looking for a personal injury lawyer, but then leaves your landing page once they learn you only practice family law.
Go Mobile
Mobile customization is everything today, as more and more people are relying solely on their mobile devices to find businesses in the area, including law firms. While you must customize your website so it is mobile-friendly, you should also customize your PPC ads to make it easier for clients to contact you. One-touch call buttons and other instant means of communication should be a very important part of your lawyer marketing campaign.
Track Everything
Lawyer marketing is a combination of implementing SEO strategies, having a great web design, running PPC ads, and more. You must track your results across all platforms so you know if your marketing campaign is performing, what is working, and learn what is not. You can then base future campaigns off of that information to ensure future success.
Website Hosting
All websites need a host, which is essentially where the website lives. Hosting providers have many large servers in which they store websites, along with all the code that allows sites to operate. When choosing a lawyer website hosting package, you can choose from a number of options including shared servers, dedicated servers, and virtual private servers (VPS).
Shared hosting is very cost-effective, and is sometimes suitable for small to medium-sized firms. When choosing a lawyer website hosting company, it is important to consider all their packages, what they offer, and how the prices of those packages fit into your budget.
Factors to Consider when Choosing a Host
There are a number of factors to consider when choosing lawyer website hosting, and it is sometimes difficult to determine which factors are most important. Some of the main factors to consider are as follows:
- Server uptime: Uptime refers to the amount of time your website is up and running. If your site is down, no one can access it and therefore, they cannot reach you. Look for a host that offers 99 percent uptime. Anything less than that is unacceptable.
- Backup: New malware and viruses are coming out every day and they all put your website at risk. Your host should provide a rolling backup of all content on your blog, including recent changes, so you do not lose everything if your website gets attacked.
- Security: Having a backup is useful if your website gets hacked, but you also want to prevent that from happening. For this, your lawyer website hosting provider should have strong security measures in place.
- Good customer support: If something goes wrong with your website, such as if it suddenly shuts down, you need to know your host will respond quickly. The only way they can do that is if they provide good customer support, which means your host should not only be accessible, but also have good technical know-how to help you.
- Bandwidth allocation: The amount of bandwidth your site has will affect the network, speed, connectivity, and systems of the provider. You should choose a hosting provider that offers scalable solutions to ensure you get the bandwidth you need.
Lawyer Videos
Online users today are much more likely to watch a video than read a page full of long paragraphs of text. Lawyers and law firms do not always know this and even when they do, they do not know how to incorporate lawyer videos into their marketing campaigns. Fortunately, our marketing experts can advise on what type of videos you can create, and where to distribute them so you can boost awareness for your firm.
Benefits of Lawyer Videos
Many attorneys do not see the benefit they will get from creating lawyer videos, but there are many. After creating your videos, you will:
- Connect with more leads that will convert into clients
- Encourage more leads to get in touch with your firm
- Showcase your firm’s expertise
- Boost brand awareness for your firm
- Appear as the professional that can help users with their legal issues
- Separate yourself from the competition
- Broaden your reach
Just like other pieces of online marketing, once you start creating lawyer videos, your firm will be seen by more people, and you will start to bring in more clients.
Ideas for Lawyer Videos
Once you understand the benefits lawyer videos will bring to your firm, you may wonder what type of video to create. Fortunately, once you start creating videos, you will likely come up with a number of other ideas. To get the brainstorming started, a few ideas for lawyer videos are as follows:
- Telling the story of how your firm got started
- Exploring the areas of practice you specialize in, and speaking about the legal issues that arise within those practice areas
- Providing answers to some of the most common questions you are asked
- Debunking myths surrounding a certain area of law
- Messages about current news that can increase a lead’s comfort level with you before they contact your firm
Again, once you create one or two lawyer videos, you will not only start thinking about even more videos you can create, but will start reaping even more benefits from online marketing.
Lawyer Video Distribution
It is a great accomplishment to create a few lawyer videos for distribution. Still, where do you distribute them? Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to do this online, too.
- YouTube: YouTube is the most obvious place to post your video, as it is one of the most highly ranked websites in the world.
- Social media: Post a link to the video on all of the social media sites you are currently active on so those that follow you are aware of it.
- Your website: Your website is another obvious choice for your lawyer video, but proper placement is important. Videos on the homepage of a website have been shown to increase conversion significantly, but a video posted to a relevant blog post could also be helpful.
Just as there are an endless amount of ideas for what to include in your video, you also have more options for distribution than you may originally think.
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Work with an Experienced Lawyer Marketing Firm
There is a lot that goes into legal marketing and you must do it all while trying to run your law firm at the same time. Fortunately, you do not have to do it alone. At MileMark Media, our lawyer marketing experts will take care of all your marketing concerns and deliver a campaign that is effective and converts leads into clients. Call the best lawyer marketing agency of 2022 today at 866-598-6235 or contact us online to learn more about how we can help.