A law firm website is more than just a digital brochure for online visitors. It is a powerful lawyer marketing tool that can attract, engage, and convert potential legal clients. To create a successful law firm website, you need to consider several components, such as design, content, SEO, usability, analytics, and more. In this blog post, I will discuss each of these components and provide some best practices and examples to help you improve your law firm website and set it up for success in 2023 and beyond.
Almost all websites today are built on some kind of content management system or CMS for short. As someone who has used WordPress since its inception in 2003, I am an emphatic fan of the platform. WordPress is SEO-friendly out of the box and with an enormous community of developers constantly upgrading and creating new features it is unmatched in my opinion. The WordPress CMS is also responsive and mobile-friendly so that takes care of another must-have for law firm websites. So, for the purposes of this post, we will be discussing website development using WordPress as the CMS.
WordPress websites are built using themes that are customized by experienced developers to present an attractive platform to present your law firm to potential clients. At Forward Lawyer Marketing our focus is on law firm website design and lawyer marketing and we’ve been doing it for more than a decade for hundreds of clients. Internet users are more savvy these days and they expect more from the websites they visit. If you have an older website that also doesn’t render properly on a mobile device you are beaten before you even get started. Some of the necessary components of a successful website design include:
Examples of Responsive Website Designs for Lawyers
Some people have the mistaken belief that they can just do the search engine optimization themselves. Just as an attorney would advise a client against representing themselves in a legal matter, it isn’t advisable to perform your own SEO. Even if someone at the firm has the time I can assure you that they don’t have the skill and knowledge to perform thorough SEO for your practice. You could spend $20,000 on a professional website but without professional SEO it is unlikely to be found, much less be competitive. Below are just some of the skills needed for professional SEO:
The organization of the content on each page matters not only to your visitors but also to search engines. Two of the most obvious aspects of this are navigation and internal linking. Your navigation should include siloing of keywords such as practice areas. An example of this would be having a main page of “Personal Injury” and then having pages such as Car Accident, Truck Accident, Motorcycle Accident, etc beneath it. Siloing helps with website authority and makes it easier for search engine spiders to understand your content.
“Make a site with a clear hierarchy aligned by words users would type and with pages containing a reasonable number of text links that point to the important parts of your site.”
–Summary, Google Webmaster Guidelines
What many website owners do not understand is that the very act of creating a website makes you a publisher. What this means is that in addition to creating your main pages such as your practice area pages and Law Firm About Us Page, you must also provide updated content such as blog posts. Writing regular blog posts targeting the keywords you are trying to rank for is key to ranking higher in the search results.
Our law firm clients that get the best results are those that most quality content on a regular basis. For example, we have a criminal justice law firm that has doubled its revenue in a year by following this advice. Best practices for law firm content writing include the following:
Consumers of information today are extremely impatient. If they are attempting to access your website and it is loading slowly many people will simply move on to another, likely your competitor. To keep on top of this you must know technical aspects of SEO such as Core Web Vitals. From Google’s own page on the subject:
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. This, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward. Learn more in Understanding page experience in Google Search results.
It is crucial to utilize the tools available to check for issues and repair them so that there is nothing slowing down your website, or even worse, that there are broken links or pages that cannot be found.
As previously mentioned, your website must have maximum availability. Your Google Analytics account will give you data on bounce rates and how many page views you have per user which can help you better optimize your site. It will also tell you the percentage of users accessing your website from desktop/laptop, tablet, and phone as well as the Operating System. It’s interesting how different areas of law see different device access statistics. As one can imagine, someone thinking about getting a divorce is unlikely to be researching on the family computer!
Hopefully, you can now see how much skill, time, and knowledge is involved in building, maintaining, and optimizing a law firm’s website. It just makes sense to hire professional lawyer marketing experts who have the knowledge and expertise to make your law firm’s website a raving success in 2023 and in the future. Contact Forward Lawyer Marketing at (888) 590-5947 for a free marketing consultation for your law firm.