4 Ways Your Law Firm's Website Should Be Working for You

Does Your Current Law Firm Website Do These Things to Increase Traffic and Bring You Quality Leads?

Most law firms and attorneys have some sort of business website already in place. But is it a true, comprehensive solution to their online marketing needs?

In the legal industry, client acquisition can be expensive and time-consuming. A well-designed legal website can be one of your most powerful marketing tools.

So, what should your website be doing to increase traffic, bring in targeted leads, and give your firm a return on its online marketing investment? Here are the top four things your law firm website should be doing for you!

Engaging Potential Clients with Calls to Action and Interactive Elements

Multiple studies show you have about 3–8 seconds to hook an online visitor before they leave your website. As such, the visitor must be able to find value in what they see during the first few seconds or you may lose them to another attorney or law firm.

What are some ways you can engage the customer in just a few seconds? Calls to action—or  CTAs—are a great start. CTAs are links or buttons featuring explicit instructions for the user, encouraging them to complete a task related to your primary objective for the site.

For example, featuring a line of text that stands out from all other design elements, perhaps on a bright-colored background, and that says "Call Now for a Free Consultation" grabs the visitor’s eye and inspires them to give your firm a call. This is what we call a "conversion"—a website visitor has completed a desired task and your firm now has a new lead.

Other means of engaging potential clients may be to include subtle on-screen animations throughout the site (like images fading in on scroll), image swaps or fades on hover, videos related to your team or what you do, and interactive elements like sliders that users can control on click or swipe.

Increasing Visibility in Search Engine Rankings

Is your law firm website a “silent salesperson” that hustles well beyond office hours?

All good law firm websites act as marketing tools to support the firm’s legal practice. A well-designed, well-developed website helps grow your business via organic search engine optimization (SEO). When strategic SEO is built into the core of a legal website, its effects are long lasting. Given that users are increasingly turning to search engines to start their search for a good law firm fit, it’s more important now than ever to build a solid website that will rank well for key search terms.

So, what kinds of things are search engines looking for? The list is long, but for starters, your site architecture should be navigable and intuitive, each page should load quickly, metadata tags should be optimized, other established websites should link back to yours, and more. (Feeling overwhelmed by what it might take to get your law firm’s website up to snuff on SEO standards? We got you covered.)

Making Updates Easy with a Powerful and User-Friendly Content Management System

Is your law firm’s website helping your whole team be more efficient? A good content management system (CMS) tailored specifically to your law firm’s needs can simplify the mundane parts of your business through automation.

For example, many attorneys and their support teams note that one of their primary objectives for a website is to have potential clients reach out using a contact form. A good CMS allows you to fully customize multiple forms for your site so that you can receive specific information from different user buckets and automate who on your team receives that information. This is a great way to reduce time spent managing client inquiries.

A good CMS will also allow you to automatically pull content from one area of your site into another without duplicating content entry work. For example, maybe you feature publications and articles written by your attorneys in a blog-type area on your site. A good CMS will allow you to easily select posts to pull into each respective attorney’s profile page without the hassle of writing out and manually linking every single one.

In general, if you find that your team seldom updates your website despite the fact that you have a ton of great new content to share with the world, odds are your CMS is hard to use and your staff is actively avoiding the responsibility of making updates as a result. Call us nuts, but we feel that a website that’s easy to update is also kind of fun to update.

Demonstrating Your Expertise

Does your website shine a spotlight on your expertise in the legal industry? Well-designed law firm websites not only showcase how great your team is and the services you offer, they make these areas of your site insanely easy to navigate. This is especially true if you’re part of a medium-to-large large practice—your site should be designed with ample filtering and sorting options so that users are only ever a few clicks away from the information they’re seeking.

Another great way to create value for clients—and help them understand that you are an expert in your field—is through the use of a blog. Every established and growing organization should have a regularly updated blog; this is the area of your site to post news about your firm, recent successes achieved by team members, articles about industry trends or developments, and much more. The best news? Not only do blog posts show off your team’s experience and accomplishments, they are great for organic SEO!

Let efelle creative in Downtown Seattle Design a Website that Works for Your Law Firm

Professional websites are one of the most important marketing tools for individual attorneys as well as law firms of any size. With millions of Americans utilizing internet search as part of their decision-making process, there’s a good chance your firm’s website may be a potential client’s first impression of you! With decades of collective experience in web design and development for law firms—and hundreds of satisfied clients—efelle can fulfill your internet marketing needs and help your firm increase revenue, build its brand, and more. Give us a call at 206.384.4909 or fill out our online contact form to set up a free consultation.