If you are not treating your website like a business card, you miss a huge opportunity to generate leads. Your small law firm’s website can eventually become a lead generation machine when you have the right tactics and strategies in place.
The most sensible way to start is with a steady, well-thought-out approach when building a law firm website. Making uncertain decisions can result in costly future mistakes.
Get it right the first time you build it by following these seven powerful tactics to a lead-generating law firm website.
1. Know Your Target Audience
Defining target audiences to enhance legal marketing efforts and is the first step in your website strategy. It is important to know your target audience and what they are looking for in a website. Not only do you want to attract new clients, but you also want to ensure that they are the right fit for your practice.
2. Make Your Website Client-Centric
Aesthetics are an essential component of any lead-generating law firm website, but it is not the only aspect you should focus on. The golden rule is to develop your website for the end-user.
When planning out your website, ask yourself a few questions and take note:
- How am I going to prioritize the most important pieces?
- What path do I want my users to take?
- What issues are my clients potentially facing?
Ultimately, prospective clients are there to learn about you as an attorney. They may also want to contact you directly. Oversimplify their ability to accomplish these tasks by implementing lead capture forms and call links.
3. Build Authority and Credibility as a Lawyer
A long-standing law firm marketing adage is that you want prospective clients to know, like, and trust you. Demonstrating authority and building credibility is a surefire way to make it happen.
All of your law firm’s website pages, such as the one below, should focus on your authority and credibility.
- Homepage
- Attorney biographies
- Blogs posts
- Practice area pages
- Testimonials
Another important element is your unique value proposition (UVP). What can prospective clients get from you that they cannot get from other lawyers? Weave this messaging into your website while remaining approachable.
Google rewards websites that focus on narrow topics. Become the go-to expert, and you will earn the coveted top spot of your prospective clients’ minds.
4. Invest in Your Website by Investing in SEO
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy. It is probably the longest marketing campaign that you will ever run on your website because it is continuous. Since your website traffic will come from web searches, you are not paying to drive leads to your law firm website.
At a minimum, your SEO campaigns should include the following strategies:
- Identify and implement keywords in your website’s content
- Build and optimize landing pages for conversion tracking
- Write and optimize detail practice pages designed to convert
- Prioritize developing high-quality content since it is the biggest traffic driver
- Install Google Analytics and monitor your progress
- Install Google Tag Manager to track specific website events
- Ensure that your website passes all relevant speed tests
5. Use a Call-to-Action Every Time
A call-to-action is a specific directive that you offer to website visitors. When used correctly, calls-to-action are quite powerful in moving your clients through your lead generation funnels.
Here are a few tactics that I recommend for using calls-to-actions:
- Your contact forms should be short and direct
- Leverage your free consultation offer to get calls and form submissions
- Use gated content to build a small email list
- Conclude every blog post with a call-to-action
- Identify calls-to-action that deliver the best ROI
6. Focus on Lead Generation
If you consistently focus on lead generation for your law firm’s website, then you will go down the right track. By developing sales and marketing funnels, you can effectively direct clients to where you want them to go.
This tactic is advanced, which means that you will want to automate your business workflows. Your forms are essential in this regard, so keep it short and install conversion tracking events to monitor your progress.
7. Choose the Right Website Platform
Selecting the right website platform is critical to the success of your website. If you choose the wrong one, the results can be dismal, and you will end up moving your website to a new platform in the future because it is too complex to update.
Squarespace is a great website solution for small businesses, but they also offer room to scale up as your small law firm grows.
Other benefits of running a Squarespace website include:
- Easy to manage and update
- Offers a user-friendly interface
- Very inexpensive
- Comes with a free domain and SSL certificate
- Creates professional and modern websites
Small law firm websites do not have to be shockingly expensive. There is a huge myth that Squarespace only works on a template and limited creative freedom and function.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Squarespace websites are fully customizable, fast, and responsive. You can also easily optimize them for SEO while offering lead-generating capabilities.
Final Thoughts and Considerations for Small Law Firms
Rather than looking at your website as a single point of focus, look at all the pieces of your legal marketing efforts. Every component needs to be cohesive and coordinated to with your target audience’s in mind.
Monitoring and controlling your efforts are critical as well. If you do not know what is working (or what is not), you cannot efficiently and effectively optimize your campaigns.
Finally, follow-up with your leads in a timely fashion. Responding within 24 business hours is a good rule of thumb to follow. Regardless of business formalities, it is better to connect with your leads before another law firm does.
Planning Your Law Firm’s Website? Let’s Talk
If you need to build a website for your solo practice or small law firm, get in touch with the Denver Legal Marketing team today for a free consultation.
