If you’re running a website for your law firm you might be wondering what you can do to capitalize on the unlimited potential of the online world. Literally billions of people are online looking for the services you offer. However, there are billions of fish in the sea, as well, and you still need bait to catch them. Building a website won’t attract the level of traffic you desire any more than putting an empty hook in a lake will draw in a massive haul. So what’s your bait? Here are five of the top ten things successful law firms are doing to capitalize on their websites.
Expertise Up Front
You might be tempted to put a description of your expertise on the “About Us” page. However, current best practices in law firm SEO dictate that putting your expertise right on the home page is the best way to attract clients. Why? For one thing, your expertise has a lot of keywords that will help you to increase your SEO and attain a higher search ranking result (i.e. your niche, location, and awards or facts that aid your credibility). Additionally, people who search for businesses online, attorneys especially, usually give the home page a once-over and if they don’t like what they see, they move on. If your outstanding expertise is hidden several pages in, the people that could most benefit from it may never see it.
Comply with SEO Best Practices
There are still many websites offering black hat (or borderline unethical) SEO advice, even though it can get you banned from Google search and ruin your website’s reputation. For instance, never stuff keywords. Keyword stuffing is using a single term over and over throughout your content even when it doesn’t make sense or add value to the reader, simply to boost ratings. Do research using the keywords “SEO Best Practices” and follow the advice you see.
Multimedia is King
Once upon a time you could easily set up a website with a library of written content that was well optimized and achieve the success you desire. Now, however, you won’t gain the traffic you desire without multimedia. Multimedia can include YouTube videos, podcast episodes, clips of your services being reviewed on the news, or anything else that requires your users to “click play” or interact with your site.
Master Analytics
Many people who create websites get so involved with the content generation side of the process that they forget all about analytics. Analytics is a fancy word meaning the monitoring of website data. Analytics trackers either come with your website platform or can be accessed by using Google Analytics. Either way, this data set will show you who is visiting, when they’re visiting, where they’re from, how many repeat visitors you have, etc. This is extremely valuable information that will help you target your content.
Make Navigation Easy
Don’t send your visitors on a rabbit trail of links within links to get them where they need to go. Instead, if you have an article on your site with other articles that relate, put a sidebar that says “related articles” so they can easily access more information. Similarly, you should interlink between the pages of your website (i.e. instead of saying “click our contact page for more info” you can say “click here to contact us” and make “here” a link to that page). By spoon-feeding navigation, you will draw users into your website and make it more likely that they will stay, learn more, and contact you.
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