Websites for Lawyers
Marketing can be a rather tricky thing given how much it evolves and changes, requiring marketers to evolve and change with it. Law firm marketing is its own beast, with a number of facets and nuances that you need to consider when deciding how you want to market your law firm. One of the best ways to market a company, a law firm included, is to create a website to get your services to reach as much of your potential audience as possible. Today, we have prepared some helpful tips to make your law firm marketing that much slicker with a more professional and interesting website for readers to use and navigate.
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The first step is one step that needs to be handled carefully. Namely, the first thing you should do is look at other websites to get inspiration for how you want to design your law firm website. Mind you, this is not advice to say that you should straight up copy and paste their website design into your content management system (CMS).
After all, that would not look good for you at all and would prevent your brand from having its own unique identity. Standing out is an incredibly important step of the process of putting you and your law firm’s brand out there, after all. Yet, it cannot be denied that there is such a thing as standing out too much.
If you fail to do certain things that are considered fairly standard for website design, particularly law firm website design, then it may be ultimately seen as a pretty uninviting and cumbersome website for your prospective customers to visit. You can perhaps use a template to start out, but by the end of the day, you should only use that to get the basic structure going. Once things are actually set up, you can and should begin to transition into design changes that will give your brand identity all its own. This is a key approach to website creation, no matter how it is.
Your contact information should not only be easily accessible, but it also has to be thorough too. One problem all too many businesses face is that their readership simply may struggle to find the contact information they are here to get. In order to alleviate this, you should have your phone number front and center at the top right corner of your website, so that they never have to worry about getting to your contact information page if all they need is a phone number.
If they are in need of something more, however, you should have a Contact Us page accessible around the same part as your number, and certainly not buried menus deep into your website. Once you actually get to the design of your Contact Us page, make sure to include as much relevant information that you think is valuable.
Any relevant phone numbers that you are willing to include should be featured, as well as the address or addresses that are associated with your law firm. Email addresses are also vitally important to include, which makes sense to do when you are working towards making your online presence more apparent. In general, navigation is of the utmost importance for good website design, as the one thing we can assure you of is that people can be pretty impatient. If they cannot get to where their destination in a reasonable amount of time, don’t expect them to stick around and work with you.
One thing that a lot of people fail to do is make compelling content for their viewers to consume. It is undeniably a valuable resource to have a website for your prospective customers to find you through, but at the same time, not only do you have to hope that customers CAN find your website, but you also have to hope that once they are there, they will be impressed by what is on display. One good way to do this is to have a page demonstrating the various accomplishments you and your law firm have made, as well as providing information about some of the people employed through your law firm.
Make sure that everyone included on the website is given a well-written and well-researched summary, just to make sure that the readers have a good idea of whom they may be working with. And remember in the grand scheme of things, the readers are the most important part of this whole matter. You are running a business, but this is a business in a field that is largely customer-driven. As such, a satisfied client can go pretty far for your law firm.
You are also well-advised to prepare resources for your website, as this can have a double benefit to it. Firstly, it makes your website more than just something for people to go to get your contact information on. Not that this is not a valuable thing to have, mind, but a good website will be multi-purpose and offer a lot of value.
It can also be a good way to distinguish yourself from the competition. After all, every competitor is, at the very least, offering contact info and other very basic aspects of a law firm website, so when you come into the market with your law firm website, it is important that you have something to you that isn’t just that.
For example, an attorney who deals with personal injury can have articles crafted for their website that teaches people about liability and ways to protect themselves from harm. The more content you have going onto your website on a regular basis, the more likely it that a person is going to want to visit your website beyond the initial contact. That not only ensures a likelihood that they may be a repeat customer, but it also means that they may very well recommend you to friends and family who may need the services of a law firm.
The other benefit mentioned above is mainly how articles can be used to be the thing that attracts people in the first place. For example, let’s say that you want to compete with law firms in your city, and one way you hope to do so is by getting your website higher ranked on the Google search results. The problem is, this is not a simple process, and if you do not take specific measures, you are likely to just be rolling the dice and hoping that you get lucky and get a solid position in the search algorithm.
The big trick to having a strong presence in Google search results is to employ the services of a search engine optimization (SEO) marketer, which would help attract visitors and drive conversion. What an SEO marketer does is they try to make a keyword-rich article that uses a certain search term that you want to get higher on the results for. For instance, if you want to get high up in the results “bankruptcy lawyer in Cincinnati”, you would pepper this phrase throughout an article on your website.
However, you do not want the article to just be about a vague or general term, and you don’t only want to look at too specific a term. For example, a keyword relating to auto accidents would be great to use for an article in order to garner attention from people looking for information about auto accident injuries, but not necessarily looking for a lawyer in any particular city.
In terms of the text on your website, you want to make sure that you achieve a certain type of tone. Perhaps someone can get away with a lighter, more jovial tone when it comes to legal matters, but for the most part, you are not going to be able to pull it off. The best approach is to keep it professional, keep it serious, but maybe don’t be too serious? It is important to walk a careful tightrope with this kind of thing; not serious enough does not explain the gravity of the situation to your readers adequately, but if you go with a more serious approach, you run the risk of coming off as off-putting to your readers.
You also need to be sure that your marketing is being done in an ethical manner. As the first step in this, you have to make sure that you know what the rules of marketing are. Do your research into these or ensure that you work with marketers who do know these rules. Firstly, if testimonials are included on your law firm website, you have to make sure that you are absolutely thorough in how they are handled, and the way they are handled is going to vary from state to state.
Consult the rules on how they are to be handled. Next up, some blogs may be needed to marked as advertisements, again, depending on what state laws you are expected to follow. As far as the blogs go, you should absolutely ensure too, that the blogs you have posted on your website meet a certain standard of quality.
Having a fact-checker look over the articles and make sure everything in them is accurate. Especially for certain topics, the last thing you want to have are articles that mislead them. For instance, what if someone has a medical blog and gives incorrect and potentially dangerous medical information that winds up causing damage to one or more of the readers? Avoiding that should be paramount for a quality law firm website.