When you employ the right marketing and design strategy, your law firm’s website can become a lead generation machine.
There are several changes you can make to your law firm’s website to get yourself noticed, but which will have the biggest effect on your law firm lead generation and bottom line? To ensure that you’re optimizing your law firm’s website design for lead generation, employ these five essential design tips.
Simple, Magazine-Like Pages
Page layouts are an important element of your law firm website design. You need to choose a layout that is accessible and engaging to draw people in with your service offering. Magazine page layouts are familiar and easy on the eyes, and they direct attention to the information you most want your potential clients to see—your contact information, client testimonials, attorneys, areas of practice, etc.
If your site is visually appealing, relevant, and easy to use, your visitors are more likely to stick around and explore your site. The longer they spend on your site, the more likely they are to convert into a lead by requesting more information or scheduling an appointment.
Deploy Engaging Calls-to-Action (CTA)
Don’t be shy about asking people to sign up for your newsletters, request more information, or otherwise take action. You don’t have to annoy them with big pop-ups on every page—which is a great way to lose potential customers—but you can give them plenty of opportunities to make a choice to connect with your law firm through thoughtful CTA buttons.
Be sure that every piece of content and every page on your site gives your visitors an opportunity to take some kind of action. Place forms in the sidebar of your blog page, design landing pages for each of your practice areas and send people to them with a “Learn More!” CTA button.
Use clean lines, bright colors that tie into your brand, and visual hierarchy to draw the eye and lead potential clients directly to your door.
Plenty of Teasers
Don’t leave your visitors with dead end pages from which they have to click back. Once they finish reading anything on your law firm’s website, you want them to provide them with relevant and personalized options for moving forward.
Offer your visitors related videos or articles at the end of each article or page to keep them on the site longer, which ups the chances of conversion. You can use personalization tools and widgets in your website’s development platform to create a unique experience for each potential client.
The longer they stay on your site, and the more useful content you have, the more authority you build with your website visitors. This authority makes them much more likely to contact you when they need legal services.
Use Images Wisely
People are visual creatures, and the more you give them to look at, the happier they are. Add images to all of your blog posts and include them as an integral part of your site’s pages. Always post pictures of your team on the “About Us” page – people want to know who they’re working with, especially in sensitive legal situations.
Images have power. Articles with images get 94% more views than those without. Having images of your attorneys and your office building for search engine crawlers to pull from affects your local search rankings drastically. 60% of consumers are more likely to consider a business when their images show up in search engine results.
Just be careful: don’t use so many images that you overshadow other important content, and make sure that you are using images that are relevant to your practice areas and firm branding.
Don’t Forget the Keywords
You want people to see everything that your gorgeous website has to offer, but first you have to ensure they’ll be able to find it. Working keywords into your design means working them into the content, but it also means using them in the coding of your pages, buttons, widgets, and images.
Be sure to use keywords wisely by focusing on targeting the people who will be most likely to need and use your law firm’s expertise. What are they searching for? What kind of help do they need? Most importantly, use your keywords naturally—Google’s new algorithms will penalize your site for keyword stuffing and extraneous use.
Law firm website design can be especially tricky when you take into account your state Bar Association’s regulations on advertising. On the other hand, ignoring your site will put you at a significant disadvantage, and could potentially cost you clients and revenue. Consider hiring a professional law firm advertising agency that specializes in lead-generating web design.
If you want to learn more about optimizing your website for law firm lead generation, contact Kirkpatrick Creative at 866-864-9425 to talk about our propriety lead-generation platform. We specialize in law firm website design, advertising, and marketing.