Web templates and themes have made it easier than ever to design a website. If you’re a law office that needs a new site, it’s not out of the question to build one yourself.
There are a few things you should know about creating a law website in today’s market, however. Websites for law practices can entail a variety of back-end work, from SEO promotion to advertising.
This goes beyond just selecting a useful template and uploading your content. It may demand careful planning and an understanding of what is likely to bring clients to your door.
Here are six elements that every successful law website probably will require.
- Content That Sells
Your content should be designed to sell to your target audience. When you’re a law practice, showcasing a successful track record is one of the best ways to do this.
Start with reviews from satisfied clients. Recommendations go a long way toward persuading potential clients to enlist your services.
If you have numbers, be sure to share them. For example, this website for a personal injury office in Chicago describes several successful cases and the settlement amounts for their fortunate clients.
If massive dollar awards don’t make potential clients want to sign up for your services, nothing else is apt to!
- Keep It Simple
Too many law offices clutter their site with too much information. Anxious clients may grow exasperated if they find it difficult to get to the basics of your services and areas of expertise.
Take a look at this website from a law office in San Diego. There’s plenty of information, but it’s well organized, with call-to-action buttons and contact information throughout. There’s just enough info that clients can find what they want, but not so much that they’re likely to get lost and give up.
- Clear Contact Information
There’s no point in building a website that’s not going to get you referrals. Web visitors are often lazy. They can be intrigued but don’t bother to contact you if it’s hard to find your contact information.
You’re more likely to attract both cautious and thoughtful and impulse clients if you make your contact information visible and accessible throughout your website. To maintain credibility and allow visitors to make contact in their preferred method, you should include your phone number, email address, and street address at a bare minimum.
If you have chat capability, include that as well. Chat is currently one of the most popular forms of online communication, so you can appeal to a wide audience if you have it.
- Responsive Design
The ability to access a website on any size of device is vital for businesses these days, but especially for brick-and-mortar services like your law office. According to research, 76 percent of people search for nearby services on their smartphone.
What’s more, 28 percent of those searchers end up purchasing from a company they turn up on their electronic device. If your site has not been updated for responsive design, you’d better do that right away.
If you have advanced website design capabilities, it’s not a hard transition. It could be as simple as swapping a template so you’ll get far more mobile referrals.
- Speed Up Your Site
Thanks to the rapid conveniences offered by technology and the Internet, people are more impatient than they’ve been in the past. If your site loads slowly, you’re going to lose visitors.
In fact, according to research gathered by KISSMetrics, nearly half of all consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less. Every one-second delay beyond that can result in a seven-percent drop in conversions.
If your site doesn’t pass the two-second rule, track down the primary reasons for the lag. Perhaps you have a graphically intense website, or you use a lot of plugins.
Caching images and deleting unnecessary plugins may solve your problem. You might also need to increase your bandwidth or get on a private server.
- Utilize SEO Best Practices
This is our final item, but it might the most rewarding for your website and business. Your site will accomplish little or nothing if your target audience never gets to see it.
Legal services are highly competitive. If you haven’t mastered best practices for search engine optimization, other law firms will grab potential client views instead of you.
Best practices include beefing up your website with plenty of quality content; using local keywords in a natural way that can also make it easier for web surfers to find you; installing plugins like Yoast SEO and other SEO-friendly plugins so Google will categorize your site.
You can also take advantage of exterior SEO practices, such as link building and guest posting. There’s so much more to the techniques of SEO than can be covered in a single section of a blog post, so do your research and try to incorporate SEO tactics as best you can.
The handful of sound tips above will generate a more compelling website for you, so make a plan and put it into action. You’ll learn as you go, of course, but before long, you’ll see more conversions from your efforts.