Category: Design Tips / Law Firm Marketing Tips
Designing a website that brings attention to your law firm requires knowing what not to do. Here are common law firm website mistakes and how to avoid them.
What if you were ignoring your best marketing opportunity and you didn’t even know it?
For law firms, a professional website is key to any marketing effort. In fact, a whopping 74% of visitors to law firm websites are ready to take action. If you want to attract clients while they are warm, you need to get all the details “just right” on your site.
Unfortunately, many lawyers lose business due to simple law firm website mistakes. What are these mistakes, and how can your own firm avoid them? Keep reading to discover the answers!
One common mistake when it comes to law firm website design is only designing the site with desktops in mind. When potential clients visit such a site on a mobile device, it will look ugly and be difficult to navigate.
Here’s the thing: up to 70% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website only looks good on a desktop, you’re shutting out potential clients.
Instead, you should create a more mobile-friendly website using a responsive design. This resizes the site automatically so it looks good on any screen.
It may be weird to think about, but your law firm is a brand like any other. And getting enough clients often comes down to brand awareness.
If you want to expand your brand, you need to develop an engaging logo and slogan. Make sure this logo and slogan appear on your home page, your services page, and other important pages on your site.
For added synergy, make sure to use this same logo and slogan for things like billboard advertisements.
If they are being honest, many lawyers create a website with a “if we build it, they will come” mentality. However, to achieve real success, you need to build your website with a specific goal in mind.
For example, let’s say that your goal is to get more potential clients to contact you. That means you need to prominently feature your phone number on the site. In your office at work, you need to have a telephone messaging system in place to handle the increased calls.
To get even more clients, give customers additional ways to contact you, including automated chatbots and a contact form.
Whether they design it on their own or use a web design service, many lawyers make the same mistake. And that mistake is cluttering up their website with walls of text, annoying pop-ups, and other off-putting features.
Keep in mind that by the time a client finds your site, they want a quick answer to a major question. Streamline and simplify your site to help them get answers and help yourself get more clients.
A major part of any website is the imagery. If you’re not careful, you might fill your site with poor-quality images that turn off visitors.
If you use stock photos, make sure to find high-quality ones. And if you take your own photos, be sure to hire a professional photographer and use natural lighting where possible. Whatever the photo, make sure the background imagery is nice and simple.
It’s easy to ignore the technical aspects of securing your website. But if you Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol to secure your site, then you’re losing out on site visitors.
Why? The Google Chrome browser now gives dire security warnings when users try to visit sites not secured with this protocol. Switching to this new protocol creates a safer site that more users will visit.
Earlier, we discussed the importance of using high-quality, professional images on your site. Here’s a follow-up rule: avoid using too many images.
When you use too many images, it can be very distracting to a reader trying to get answers to their questions. These images make website navigation very difficult.
Too many images can also lead to one of the major sins of any law firm website: loading too slowly.
No matter what area of law you practice, chances are that you have some competition. And potential clients will seek competition out if your website is slow to load. Just like that, clients will hit the “back” button and go seek out your competition.
One way to improve loading speed is to use fewer images and compress and optimize each image. You may need to cache your website and even find a better website host.
If your site is still slow to load, you can always hire a digital marketing professional to redesign your site.
Law firm website design is about more than getting visitors to your page. Once they are there, it’s important to prompt these visitors with the right CTAs.
Many legal websites have bad CTAs or, worse yet, no CTAs at all. Make sure your own calls to action are simple, such as “click here for a free consultation.”
Whatever your CTA, it needs to be short and to the point. It needs to be easy to read (right down to font size and layout) and tell the user what you want them to do.
Most law firm websites rely on SEO to bring customers in. However, the “rookie mistake” many firms make is overlooking local SEO.
Local SEO is just that: SEO that is designed to help people in your town and the surrounding area find you. One major part of this is to fill out your firm’s Google My Business profile with the correct information.
This helps users get your phone number, address, and even directions to your firm via Google Maps. And it means you are likelier to appear in user search results for things like “good lawyer near me.”
Now you know which common law firm website mistakes to avoid and how to avoid them. But do you know who can help take your site to the next level?
Here at Dan Gilroy Design, we specialize in taking legal sites just like yours to the next level. To see what we can do for your own firm, just contact us today!
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