There is probably no other vertical market where web design and search engine optimization (SEO) adds more value than Legal. The practice areas that are best served by a professionally designed and search engine optimized website are DUI defense, criminal defense, and personal injury.
So what are the key aspects of an attorney website that makes it successful? Here are a few of the top items to focus on:
Information Architecture
Most law practices are divided into discrete practice areas. Searches are only going to be interested in the topic that they searched for. They don’t necessarily want to see information that is irrelevant to their search. This is especially true if the law firm promotes a wide variety of practice areas. This means creating individual pages for each practice area, or group of practice areas, and then designing the homepage in such a way that the user’s attention is drawn to their area of interest, and entices them to click into the appropriate section that is all about that topic.
Targeting pages by practice area is also key to successful attorney SEO.
Landing Pages That Convert
Once a potential client has landed on an law firm’s website, it is important to give them every change to make contact. Most often the value of a free consultation is offered to drive that conversion from visitor to lead. Clickable phone numbers are a must for mobile phones. Contact forms are also a convenient way for the potential client to get the free consultation rolling. Chat services, like Apex chat, are also a good way of capturing the lead from desktop visits.
Because of the competitive nature of attorney marketing, spending time on optimizing your website conversions always has great ROI. Session monitoring with tools such as Mouseflow let you see user behavior for yourself, and often expose roadblocks to conversion that you would not otherwise detect.
External Directories
It is important to have both the law firm and all attorneys included in top attorney directories such as AVVO, HG.org and Justia, and to have the profiles completed to as close to 100% as is possible. This will not only improve the website’s ranking in search engines like Google and Bing, but can also lead to traffic from the directories themselves, many of which rank highly in competitive attorney searches.
So, for an attorney or law firm, it’s not enough to have a website designed according to the latest trend. Because the search space is so competitive, ignoring the fundamentals of designing and optimizing a commercial attorney website will lead to failure in the most important aspect of the site, which is lead generation.