How Many Website Visitors do You Need to Get One Client

Marketing for attorneys: key factors

Here are the two things that influence your marketing performance on a massive scale.

Competition

In digital marketing, we look at two competition determinants: location and practice area. If you’re in a major city like Chicago, you have a lot of direct competitors, people browse more websites and talk to more attorneys before they make a decision, so you’ll need more visitors to sign up for one client.

Same goes if you’re a general practitioner or have chosen a high-in-supply practice area. All other variables held constant, attorneys who focus on a narrow practice area (think trust litigation) will need fewer visitors to get one client, than general practitioners, or those in the highly competitive niches (think personal injury).

User experience on law firm website

User experience refers to the overall quality of experience your website delivers to the visitors and how it compares to that of your competitors’ websites. In essence, your website is supposed to match or exceed prospects’ expectations. However, we often see law firm websites that do anything but match visitors’ expectations.

If your website is outdated and under-developed; if it looks worse than your competitors’ websites; if it’s difficult to understand what is it that you do or there’s no proof that you are good at what you do (links to reviews, testimonials, case studies), then you could be getting a lot of traffic, but struggle to sign up new clients.

Visitor-client conversion rate

According to WordStream — a software that simplifies online advertising and a company that’s an authority in online advertising statistics — an average law firm website converts at 2.07%. To simplify calculations, let’s round that down to 2%.

High-performance websites for lawyers, on the other hand, can convert at 10% or even higher. We know this because we have clients whose websites convert visitors at that rate. However, WordStream tells us that top legal websites have 6.4% conversion rate, which we accept as a reasonable top-tier performance for most great websites.

Now, let’s do the math and see what this means for you.

Say you get 2000 website visitors per month. If your website converts at 2%, this means 40 people will contact you: either by calling, or by filling out a contact form.

From these 40 people, around 75% won’t be a good fit. Statistically, it’s just the way it is in any professional services industry. Whatever may be the reason (I bet you heard them all before), now you’re down to 10 genuine qualified leads that are interested in working with you.

Out of those 10, if you’re good on the phone and answer all their questions, you’ll manage to convert 2-4 clients. So, an average attorney website would need 2000 unique visitors to sign up 2 to 4 clients.

If you have a high-performance website, then you can aim to convert at 6% rate — rounding down the 6.4% conversion of top legal websites, according to WordStream — you’d around 12 clients signed up from 2000 website visitors. The difference is projected revenue is likely to be in tens of thousands of dollars, monthly! There are numerous web design agencies for law firms. If you specialize in real estate, here’s the list of the top real estate website design companies that can increase your law firm conversion rate significantly.

Digital marketing for lawyers at its best

Here’s what you can do to ensure you make the best of your digital marketing investment.

Have one of the best websites for lawyers in your market

Your website should always look at least as good as the website of your biggest and best competitor. People do judge every book by its cover. Your website has to deliver the right first impression or you’ll be out of the race before you start.

We won’t get into details about what makes a website perform better than an average here, as you can find detailed info here. If you’re serious about growing your firm and personal prosperity, I do recommend you get familiar with this.

Asses the demand

It’s good to have very ambitious goals, but you must know whether they are realistic. Here is how you can determine that: speak with your marketing experts, tell them your goals — say you want 10 or 20, or whatever new clients every month — and then they can check the potential of the market online and tell you if that’s feasible.

Yes, marketing agencies can do that, they can tell you how many people have looked for your services in any given area, for any given period.

Strategy, execution, reporting

Once your goals are validated through research, your marketing agency should craft and present you with comprehensive marketing strategies for achieving them.

They should send you monthly performance reports so that you can track progress – and hold them accountable for the money you spend and the results they should be delivering—and they can optimize your strategy for maximum results.

If you want us to look at the numbers in your market and assess where your website is now versus where it could be, contact us here and let’s discuss!

Comrade is a Chicago based digital marketing company that specializes in website design and marketing for attorneys. Read more about our content marketing service for law firms.