How to Increase Conversions on Your Law Firm Website
By: Aaron George
Tags: SEO, Google Analytics, Online Marketing, Marketing, Law Firm Marketing

You would not intuitively expect that changing your contact button color from green to blue would help you land more clients. But in the world of web marketing, those minor changes can make a major difference in terms of accomplishing your goals. It may seem dumb, but if your goal is to grow your law firm through online marketing, optimization is extremely important. In this post, we break down 5 ways that you can increase conversions on your law firm website.

Have a Clear Value Proposition and Call to Action

Studies show that you have, on average, about 8 seconds to capture a website visitor’s attention. 8 seconds! Clearly that is not a long time, so it’s extremely important that you instantly form a connection with your visitors, and let them know they’ve come to the right place.

This is why having a clear value proposition is so important to increase conversions on your law firm website. What’s a value proposition? Think of it like the answer to someone’s problem.

So, your goal is to immediately make it clear to a website visitor that you are the answer to the legal problem that they’re facing. If their issue is that they just received a DUI and don’t know what to do, you want to let them know that you’re a reputable DUI attorney, that you have deep knowledge and experience with DUIs, and that you’ve helped many other clients like them.

In addition to a compelling value proposition, you also need a clear call to action. What’s a call to action? Think of it like the goal you’re trying to reach, or what you’d like your visitor to do. It’s essentially the next step you’re asking a visitor to take.

For a law firm, the call to action (CTA) is almost always likely to be something along the lines of “contact us.” You want people to get in touch with you so that you can ultimately convert them into paying clients.

However, “contact us” may not be all that compelling to people. The specific language you use in a CTA is what’s key. Why would I contact you? What should I expect when I do? Those are the things you need to help people understand in your CTA.

You should consider something stronger and more in-depth, like “Call now to schedule your free consultation” or “Contact us to learn how we can help you,” etc. Also, ideally you should use A/B testing and track the results with Google analytics to help gain insight into what CTAs work best. You may be surprised by how even the littlest changes can make a huge difference.

Create as Many Landing Pages as Possible

Think of a website like a huge building. If there’s only one entrance to the building, it’s not very easy for people to get to where they need to go inside, and they’ll probably have to go out of their way. The more entrances there are, the easier it becomes.

Landing pages work the same way — the more you have, the more entrances there are to your website. In fact, businesses with over 40 landing pages have been shown to convert 12 times as many visitors as those with 5 landing pages or fewer!

The reason why having more landing pages increases conversions is because when people land on a page that is targeted to their needs, they are much more likely to click through and take the action you want them to take. For example, if someone lands on your homepage that says “we’re a general law firm covering many practice areas,” that is nowhere near as relevant or intriguing as “we’ll help you start your business today!”

There are additional, less direct benefits to having more landing pages as well. For one, your website will be bigger and have more pages indexed in search engines. Not only that, but you’ll also have higher keyword density for important terms related to the types of services you provide. Both of these things are really important for driving organic traffic from search engines, as we explain in our post about SEO for law firms.

Use Short, Simple Contact Forms

When it comes to forms, short and sweet is generally much more effective than long and comprehensive. As we covered in our previous post about law firm e-signatures, each additional step you create in a conversion process is just another obstacle for the prospect to overcome.

To give you an idea of just how powerful eliminating steps in your funnel really can be, in a marketing study, it was shown that reducing the number of input fields on a contact form from 11 to 4 resulted in a 160% increase in conversions. That is a remarkable statistic.

But a problem often arises for law firms because they need a ton of information in order to resolve a case, so they try to capture some of it from the initial contact form. As the numbers indicate, this is actually a big mistake.

It’s much better to use an online intake form to collect the additional information after the person has already contacted you, because at that point you have their contact information and you’re able to follow up with them.

Your contact form should be short and simple, with just the necessary info like name, email, phone number, and a message. For example, check out the Lexicata contact form for Wordpress.

By having a more in-depth contact form, you’re just filtering out some legitimate potential clients before you even have the chance to find out about their needs. Our general recommendation is to start with a funnel that’s as wide as possible, and filter it down later. So you should keep your contact form short to capture every lead possible and increase conversions on your law firm website.

Leverage Video Content

As the technological infrastructure of the web becomes increasingly powerful, websites and social networks are shifting more and more toward video content.

YouTube is the 3rd most trafficked website in the world, and Facebook has seen rapid adoption of its video platform, with the number of videos being shared and viewed on Facebook increasing dramatically in recent years.

If that isn’t enough to convince you of the importance of video content, consider this: consumers who watch a video about a product are 144% more likely to make a purchase than those who do not watch a video.

Videos help engage your visitors and make them feel more comfortable about interacting with you. Not only that, but it’s also good for SEO. And with YouTube being the second largest search engine behind only Google itself, producing YouTube videos is another a good way to create awareness for your firm online.

It’s clear that the shift toward video content is here to stay. So if you want to increase conversions on your law firm website, you should find ways to leverage video content.

Keep It Up to Date

Finally, it’s crucial to keep your website updated with modern web design trends. Technology moves rapidly so if you haven’t updated your website for 2–3 years, it’s likely out of date already.

As you know, professionalism is one of the most important attributes for a law firm in order to attract and win clients. Having an outdated looking website gives people the impression that you are less professional and it can really hurt your conversion rate. Also, make sure you have the 5 things on your website which every visitor wants to see.

The frequent need for updates is one of the reasons why using a do it yourself website platform can be a good idea. It allows you to manage the themes and content without having to be a web developer, so keeping your website up to date is a lot easier and less expensive.

If you’d like help with your law firm website, whether you need a design upgrade or you want to optimize it for more conversions, let us know! We work closely with a number of reputable law firm web development and marketing companies who we’d be happy to refer you to.