An Optimized Website for Attorneys: How to Drive More Traffic and Qualified Leads
- Brooke Mathieu
If you’re an attorney, then you know that having an optimized website is crucial to your success in today’s world. Not only does it help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), but it also helps improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and it helps potential clients find you online. Search engines make it so prospective clients are able to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily, which is why it is so important for your firm to outrank the competition in your market. In this blog post, we will discuss some of the most important elements of a highly optimized law firm website that will drive more traffic and attract qualified leads that actually convert to clients!
Website Layout/Design: Think About the User Experience
Design your website with the user experience in mind. Having a visually appealing website is important, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. Your homepage should have a clear and concise message, your services/practice areas should be easily accessible, and your contact information should be easy to find. Additionally, your firm’s website should be aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, have a clear theme, use high quality photo/video content, have high quality written content, fast loading page speeds, and be optimized for mobile devices. If your website is hard to navigate and information isn’t easily accessible, it’s highly likely for a prospective client to move on to a competitor’s website.
Make Sure Your Website is Optimized for Mobile
Your website should look as good on a mobile device as it does on your desktop. We asked our Senior Search Engine Marketing Manager, David Davis, what he thinks is one of the most crucial elements of having a highly optimized divorce & family law firm website was and this was his response, “With family law and divorce cases being a very private matter, the user experience via mobile must be intuitive and provide an easy avenue for your firm to capture potential new clients. Poor mobile user experience and SEO will translate to poor local SEO, thereby potentially hurting your ability to attract local customers.” According to statista.com over 50% of all website traffic throughout the world comes from mobile devices. Aside from making sure your website translates well onto mobile devices make sure it is just as easy to navigate.
Content:
Content is king whether it is social media, an advertisement, website, etc. A great idea is nothing without relevant content to help move the needle. When it comes to the content on your website, quality is always more important than quantity. Your potential clients are looking for information that is relevant, accurate, and helpful. Before you start creating content, think about what your overall goal is, who your target audience is, your service offerings, and your firm’s main messaging. Considering these things will help you create high quality, relevant content that your target audience can relate to and engage with. Additionally, your content should be well written and free of grammatical errors. Here is an example of one of our clients websites:
Target Audience: Any individual seeking a divorce or family law attorney.
Service Offerings: Divorce services, Child Custody services, Family Law services
Goal: Attract high quality leads (prospective clients) that convert to clients
Colorado Legal Group’s Main Message: Divorce without the drama.
With all of the above considerations we can assess how well Colorado Legal Group’s website does at providing this information. It is clear from the homepage that this website is for a divorce & family law firm. There is a clear and consistent theme. The site is easy to navigate and service offerings are made clear. Throughout the website there is copy that is consistent with Colorado Legal Group’s main message of “divorce without the drama.” All content is high quality and relevant to the target audience. Most importantly, you can see that the site is optimized for both desktop and mobile devices.
URL Structure:
The best place to begin is designing a thoughtful sitemap. Understanding how all of your website’s content works together and the hierarchy of content is critical.
A well-structured URL is another important aspect of SEO. When creating your website’s URLs, make sure they are concise, keyword rich, and easy to remember. URLs are what link your content to your user. Make sure your URLs make sense to your users. This will also help your URLs make sense to search engines, which in turn will make it easier for your pages to rank higher. Additionally, use hyphens (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Search engines view hyphens as word separators while underscores are seen as a single word. Here are a few examples from designpowers.com of what you should and should not do:
Another reason URL structure is so important is due to the fact that Google does take them into consideration when it comes to page rankings. Who wants to rank on any page other than the first page of Google? We certainly don’t and you shouldn’t either.
SEO
Now that you have a well-designed, high quality website with relevant and helpful content it is important to make sure your site is optimized for search engines. What does this mean? It means using specific techniques to help improve your website’s visibility amongst search engines. This includes using keywords throughout your website, optimizing your titles & meta descriptions, creating content based around your keywords, schema-markup, etc. There are three specific areas you should be focusing on when it comes to SEO; local SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Local SEO is when people are searching for a business in their area with similar service offerings. On-page SEO includes all content and technical performance. Off-page SEO has implications from other sources such as backlinks.
Website Security
Making sure you have a secure website is important for any business, especially law firms. Hackers are ruthless and no one is off limits, not even you! Having an SSL certificate is a must. This will ensure all information passed through your website is encrypted and secure. Google also gives preference to websites with an SSL certificate, which means higher page rankings.
Here are a few other things you can do to ensure your website’s security:
- Install a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Use strong passwords
- Patch your software regularly
- Monitor your website for malware and virus activity
- Make sure you have an uptime monitoring service in place so you are alerted if your site goes down
If you take all of the above into consideration, you will have a high quality, well designed, and secure website that drives more traffic.
Optimizing Your Firm’s Website and Where to Start
Now that you understand the basics of what goes into a high quality website, it’s time to start optimizing your firm’s website. But where do you start? The best place to start is with on-page SEO. On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s content, titles, and meta descriptions for search engines. When you encompass this with the other topics discussed in this blog, your firm’s website will stand out from your competitors. This might seem like a lot of information to digest, but having a high quality optimized website is extremely important for your law firm and will help set up your website for long term success.
How Cardinal Concepts Can Help
If you need help getting started or don’t have the time to do it yourself, our team of experts can help. We are passionate about helping attorneys grow their firms and gain more clients. We cover all areas of digital marketing including websites. Whether you need a new website build, website refresh, custom landing pages, or all of the above, we have you covered. What is even better is that we understand the importance of having a high quality website and what an expense it can be. This is why we offer a 12-month, 0% financing option for all new website builds. Your website is the hub of your digital marketing and a huge part of your digital success and we are here to help you succeed.
If you have any questions about websites or any other digital marketing services, don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss further and receive a free competitive analysis.
