What Clients Expect to Find on Your Law Firm Website

What is a conversion? It is a web visitor who has called you or has filled out the contact form on your website, so you’ve converted them from a website visitor to an opportunity for your firm to serve them.

Now, while the average conversion rate for the industry is 2%, high-performance websites convert at a much higher rate. We have clients whose websites consistently convert 5-10% of all visitors. Imagine the difference! If you’re at industry average, for every 1000 web visits, you’d get 20 phone calls. If you’re working with an expert digital marketing agency for attorneys, you’d get 50-100 phone calls for the same amount of visits.

The reason why most websites do not convert at higher rates, aside from highly-competitive environments, often lies in the website itself; or, more specifically, in the difference between what clients expect to see on the site, versus what they actually see.

In order to get more clients, your website has to match visitors’ expectations. Here is what they expect:

Great user experience

There are multiple factors that define a website user experience, but here are the main ones.

Speed

3 seconds or they are done. That’s right, either your website loads fast, or the visitor will go to another site, fast.

Get a great hosting service set up by your marketing agency and have them optimize the site for speed. You can always check here how well your site performs https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

If you see “slow”, call your agency and demand that they optimize the site and hosting for speed. If the site is older, this may cost you money, but it is worth the investment.

Readability

Post your content in a way that makes it easy to consume. No one will read long paragraphs, especially on mobile devices, and that’s what most people use to browse the internet nowadays.

Pictures and videos should fit well on the page; the menu should make it effortless for anyone to navigate your website.

Be careful about using pop-ups; they are annoying and worsen user experience.

Make sure your contact details are visible.

Useful content

Talk in layman’s terms and explain the problems you solve. Your potential clients aren’t lawyers and they don’t understand your industry jargon. They may also have a hard time associating “practice areas” with the problems they have. Make it simple!

Offer advice and make it easy for web visitors to stay on your website and get all the information they need by connecting relevant content to each other via links (think of this as a series of information relevant for a prospect with a specific problem) in the text and featuring an obvious call to action tab.

Competitive web design for attorneys

Here’s a simple rule: your website should look at least as good as your top competitor’s website. If it doesn’t, visitors may choose them over you, because no matter what, we still judge a book by its cover.

Your website creates a perception about your company. Your potential clients will hit the back button if your website looks old and abandoned, or if it just looks poor in comparison to your competitors. After all, you don’t go to a client meeting looking unkempt, why should your website look out of date?

Poor appearance means more than just lost opportunities. A higher bounce rate (people visit your site and leave without so much as clicking on another page), affects SEO rankings, which leads to lower positions in Google, and, if you are advertising, leads to higher cost per click.

Good website design for law firms enhances credibility, is easy to navigate and makes it easy for people to contact you. And it should help you make more money. Top law firm web design companies always know how to create a user-friendly website so that you could get more clients.

Give prospects what they want

We already mentioned that your content should be written in layman’s terms describing the problems you can solve, instead of being just a list of practice areas. This will allow you to develop an emotional connection with your target audience, which should result in more phone calls.

Another important aspect of a lawyer’s website content is building credibility. Ideally, you’d be able to post testimonials on your website, but if your Bar association doesn’t allow it, you can use badges from online directories that link to your profiles. If you consistently work on getting reviews on Google, Yelp, Avvo, Super Lawyers and other directories for lawyers or even Facebook (yes, Facebook marketing works for lawyers too, especially because of the reviews), just link your website to these platforms and people will be able to click there and read all the great things your previous clients have to say about working with you.

So, if you have a website that meets all these criteria, you will get more clients. If you need help with implementing any of these, do not hesitate to reach out and ask us for more information on info@comradeweb.com

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.