Websites have evolved to include sleeker design and stronger content. The best ones feature quality imagery, value proposition, buttons, and more to attract customers and boost conversions.
Whether you’re updating an old website or starting a new one, these days every law firm’s website requires certain elements to be successful.
- Responsive Design
If you’re inclined to dismiss the use of responsive design, you need to recognize that nearly 60 percent of all Internet searches take place on mobile devices, especially those for brick-and-mortar businesses like yours.
This is especially relevant with regard to potential clients of your firm. When they’re given referrals, clients are often at lunch or on the go. They might be on the subway or in their car.
They’re going to use that downtime to research law firms in their area, and if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll lose that essential traffic. It’s no longer difficult to create a responsive site, so take a few minutes to do it today.
- Compelling Landing Pages
During your marketing campaigns, landing pages will draw potential clients to your site. You’ll want to display specific pages with valuable information and clickable buttons that draw visitors from social media, guest blog pages, and Google searches.
As a great example of landing content, take a look at this page for a law firm in Texas. Apart from the clickable call-to-action buttons that are all over, the firm also provides statistics that illustrate its past success.
Potential clients encounter detailed information that encourages them to proceed. The value is clear, and supremely valuable on this law firm website.
- Consistent Branding
Do readers recognize your name and color scheme on every page? Websites for law firms can closely resemble one another, so you need to find a way to make yours stand out.
You might create a logo for your brand, use a catch phrase, repeat imagery, or develop a consistent color scheme. Take another look at the website for the Texas law office above, and note the branding elements that carry throughout the site.
- Appealing Visuals
According to neural research, a visual translates thousands of times quicker in the brain than a block of text. The use of visuals throughout your website will likely be the first thing visitors notice and typically make your content easier to understand and applicable for each person.
Include photos of smiling people receiving services. This sends an image of positivity and problems solved. You might also feature videos and infographics to establish value proposition.
Include photos of your team as well. Clients like to know what their potential legal representative looks like before they take the plunge and visit the office.
- A Regularly Updated Blog
A law-focused blog also helps your website get noticed. It plays a vital part in search engine optimization, because a blog helps search engines recognize how and why to index your website.
Most important, it makes your online presence searchable compared to competitors in your area. If your website has more valuable content than your competitors offer on theirs, it will more likely turn up first in search engines.
You can also use blog posts to share on social media, link in guest blogs, and provide useful information for your current clients. Your blog can spread the word about your services and increase traffic on your website.
- Rapid Load Times
You don’t have long to grab clients. In fact, according to Kissmetrics, you have about four seconds. If it takes more than four seconds for your website to load, you’ll lose 25 percent of web viewers. As much as 73 percent say they’ll leave a website if it takes longer than 10 seconds to load.
To increase your website speed, you’ll have to determine the cause of its sluggishness. It could be a slow shared server, too many un-cached files stored on your website, or graphics that are too large.
- Calls to Action
What good is the information you’ve labored to add to your website if you don’t get clients out of it? They need call-to-action buttons (CTA) that transform them from web visitor to customer.
Good CTA buttons explain why an action should be taken. Study the CTA buttons at the top of the page for the Texas law office mentioned above. The positive button is large, orange, and features the positive expression “YES, start now!” to do the job.
Other CTA buttons and phrases appear throughout the page as well. Each is clickable, which invites the urge all humans feel to push a big button. They also use positive imagery and phrasing to drive action.
- Lead-Capture Forms
Many first-time web visitors are not ready to buy when they land on your website. They’re doing research before they’re ready to move down the sales funnel.
Don’t let visitors slip away from your site without leaving their information. Provide lead capture forms with compelling calls to action to obtain their name, email address, and possibly a phone number.
Follow up with potential customers with targeted emails to try to swing their interest to your brand.