Why Does Your Law Firm Have a Website?

“Why does your law firm have a website?” 

You might not have ever asked this question, because you have either made up your mind and have a website for your law firm, or don’t.

However, to truly understand what you are hoping to achieve with a website is the only way to make it work for you. Your website should have a mission statement. Only then can you build, change, adjust, add to and improve your site, with the key concept of driving leads and getting cases.

’Incomplete’ Answers

In our opinion, the following statements, by themselves, are not strategic reasons to have a website:

• “Every firm needs to have a website these days.”

• “We need something to point the rest of our marketing to.”

• “So people can get in touch with us.”

• “All of our competitors have websites, so we need one too.”

• “That’s how people find lawyers now, on the Web.”

• “We want a website to show people how great our firm is.”

These are important considerations, but if these reasons explain your law firm’s website, you are missing out on a lot of potential. The statements above don’t provide much guidance for strategy. They certainly aren’t mission statements.

Finding the ’Right’ Answer

There is not a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of why your firm has a website. A site’s purpose will vary depending on many factors, such as:

• Your practice areas
• Your geographic location
• What your firm’s goals are for growth, income and specialization
• The size of your market and potential audience
• The size of your firm
• Who your clients are
• What sources your cases currently come from
• Other elements of your firm’s brand and marketing

By focusing on the right pieces of information, and crystallizing some concepts in your mind, you can begin to analyze whether your site is fulfilling its mission, whether you had previously defined it or not.

The following questions are meant to help you achieve additional clarity about your firm’s goals, its website, its target audience, your site’s purpose and your desired outcomes for it.

Consider your firm and your clients…

What are your firm’s overall goals? By examining what your firm wants to accomplish on a larger scale, you can better develop a Web strategy to help achieve firm objectives. Think about how your website fits into the overall plan.

Who is your current clientele? What are the geographic, demographic, psychographic, and other characteristics of the people who your firm currently represents? What, if anything, do they have in common? What makes them different from any other group of people?

The more you know about who you serve, the better you can serve them with your website (if that is one of your goals). Also, you’ll understand more about how to find and cater to more prospects who are like your current clients (if that is one of your goals).

How did your current clients find you? Was it by reputation and word of mouth? Was it by referral? Did they find you on Google when searching for attorneys in your area, or did they go right to your site because of another marketing effort?

Do you want more prospects to find you through search engines? Knowing where your clients come from, and what parts of the funnel your website is involved in, is helpful in gaining insight and planning strategy.

What questions do your clients have? Are they concerned about cost, timeframes, and how the whole process works? Does your website provide helpful resources that can help existing clients and new prospects, addressing their needs and making them more comfortable with their situations? Can your website help in communicating with current clients, providing FAQs to answer their questions and minimize the volume of nonessential calls to your office?

Now let’s think specifically about your website…

What is your website really for? Serving and communicating with current clients? Impressing referred clients so they feel comfortable signing with you? Providing helpful information to the public? Sharing news about the firm and its results? Bringing attention to an important legal issue? All of these and others may be possible answers to that question.

Many firms would say their website’s purpose is to increase awareness about the firm, bring in new prospects with the right kind of cases, and sign them up as clients. Many firms are looking for a positive return on investment from their websites as marketing vehicles.

Only you can answer that question, specifically, for your firm’s website, but knowing what you hope to accomplish with your website is crucial. How can you design and develop a website, write content for it, drive traffic to it, and make additions and changes to it, if you don’t even know what it’s for?

Obviously there may be a lot of steps in improving your website to fulfill its mission statement, but you certainly need to know what you want your website to do before you can plan out and execute how to accomplish it.

And perhaps the most important question… 

Who is your website really for? In just about all cases, the answer should not be, “for the firm.” Unless your site is an intranet page for your attorneys and staff only, chances are your site should be designed and developed for clients, prospects, and/or the public as a whole.

Does your site speak mostly about your firm, your record of success and your attorneys’ impressive backgrounds, or is your content focused on informing and helping clients and prospective clients? Do you provide unique and informative resources that the public will find helpful?

Is your content written in a way that your clients and prospects will understand, or is it more in the language of your colleagues? Would a visitor need a JD just to understand what is being said? It’s often suggested that sites for the public be written between a 5th and 8th grade reading level. How does your site compare?

Be sure you know who your site is meant to speak to, and strategize accordingly.

Taking Action

Once you have successfully defined your website’s mission, you can begin to analyze its current performance in fulfilling that mission. For example, if you’ve decided that you want your website to drive six new case signups from Google searches each month, you can start to analyze all of the aspects of your website that would lead to achieving that goal.

• Is the site ranking for relevant terms to bring enough searchers to your site?
• What strategy can be used to get better rankings?
• After visitors hit the site, are they finding information they need and engaging with the site, or are they leaving?
• Can changes be made to pages to increase the percentage of visitors who will contact the firm?
• Can improvements or additions be made to the available contact options that would lead to more case sign-ups?

By determining where your site may be lacking, in terms of accomplishing its mission, you can lay out a plan to make adjustments and improvements to work towards achieving success.

To Sum It up

Just about every law firm has some kind of Web presence these days. Far fewer have a deep understanding of what they want from their website, how it fits in with their law firm’s goals, and who are the most important people to consider with regards to the site. By clearly defining your website’s mission statement, you can ensure that all of your decisions are governed by a unified purpose, which will lead to greater success.

 

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Of Lawyers, Leads, and Legal Marketing

Leads!

That’s what marketing a law firm is all about, right?

Calls and clicks that turn into cases ─ that’s all marketing is, right?

So signing up for a lead generation service is the smartest and most cost-effective way to get some marketing in the air and some business in the door, especially for a small or solo law firm, right?

Investing $10k with a large digital marketing agency is seen as a gamble. Whereas, a handful of annual injections, $1k here or there, to get some quick leads seems safer. Right?

Working for a law firm marketing agency myself, I may have some bias here. But after interviewing and speaking with marketers and lawyers alike, I’m discovering a more complicated and costly picture around lawyers, lead generation services, and marketing.

First, let’s explore the differences and definitions of marketing and lead generation. Then we’ll finish with advice for lawyers looking to increase leads, save money, and take their marketing beyond the campaign.

Leads: Not the Only Part of Marketing

“We sell, or else.”

This fantastic quote from famed advertising legend David Ogilvy has consistently helped center the marketing methodologies here at Consultwebs.

Our success as a law firm marketing partner is dependent on the success of our clients. That’s why we take a comprehensive look at marketing that’s not just exclusive to lead generation.

Leads are a massively important part of marketing, but they are only one end of the spectrum. Without a balanced marketing strategy, just “drumming up leads” can actually have a negative impact on your business and your online rankings.

Until recently, I had no opinion on lead generation services working with lawyers.

When I managed an intake call center at my old personal injury law firm, we had to go through leads generated by these services, knowing that the volume of leads always outweighed the quality.

For those prepared to sift through the noise to find the gold, lead gen services have their place in the marketing mix.

However, after a recent engagement with a solo on Twitter, my opinion has become more strongly flavored, tinged with bitterness and scorn.

NOLO and the solo

This lawyer first reached out to inquire if any other lawyers on Twitter were having trouble accessing their Martindale Hubbell/NOLO lead gen sites?

After she got in touch with an account rep, she messaged this –

I followed up with her to inquire whatever happened with the site, told her I was going to write a piece on it, and was shocked, but not surprised, at her awesome and frank response.

At this point, I started getting enraged in my head and then doing some math. Meanwhile, I got another message, which made my calculator burn even hotter.

MATH BREAK!

Say this lawyer charges around $350 an hour for her time. And she spends 7 to 8 hours setting up profiles and payment plans, choosing filters, filtering leads.

She’s lost the ability to make $2,800, right there!

Now, add on the $700 (or $35 a lead) she pays for NOLO = $3,500!

After the work and missed billables, the actual cost of these $35 leads, was $175.

I messaged this lawyer back and showed her my math and got an amazing response.

And so it got me thinking, if this solo is having to lose all her billable time to crap fixes for one piece of the marketing pie, which is lead generation, then there stands a chance to put a marketing partnership on the bargaining table that addresses this issue and also delivers higher quality leads, over time, at better value.

Marketing: More Than Leads

As covered in our Legal Marketing Nutrition Guide, an effective marketing strategy balances lead generation activities with brand-building activities: Sales Activation vs. Brand Growth.

Besides the indisputable fact of diminishing returns from short-term investments, without a portion of your marketing budget focused on growth, you’ll never have the financial stamina to reach any goals.

As covered in our Marketing Marathon Mindset, an effective law firm marketing strategy understands the balanced and comprehensive nature of proper marketing in order to win the race.

By establishing strong foundations at the intake and return on investment (ROI) levels and building up toward activities solely designed to convert, the Legal Marketing Nutrition Guide is a good starting point for lawyers looking to go beyond the next campaign.

Another way to think about marketing is to break the activities down by objectives, like Attraction, Conversion, Branding, and Delight/Loyalty.

If you aren’t managing and maintaining client expectations at each point of this process, you are not properly engaged in marketing and should expect heavier workloads with patchy results.

So, marketing is not just about getting leads, it’s about improving the quality of leads you get, and that is the secret of effective marketing.

Law Firm Business Development Solutions from Consultwebs

You can do your own law firm website design, pay a couple thousand dollars for a lead gen service, do some marketing and social media when you get to it, and perhaps, for a while, things may work out.

But what about next year? Or the year after?

Who is in your corner?

Law Firm Marketing Beyond The Campaign isn’t just our tagline. It has been our vision for the last 20 years, and our clients’ success in marketing their practices online and generating leads, as well as cases, is what we hope to see with every law firm of every size.

I wanted to use this space to just lightly, but directly, pitch the services Consultwebs brings to lawyers and law firms, and outline and compare some of the differences and value we offer.

• Law Firm Website Design – $10k Total (Actual Client Results: 90 leads a month from site within 18 months – $33 to $90 lead potential)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – $5k+ Monthly (Actual Client Results: Site traffic increased by 900%, 4 to 6 page rank jumps within 18 months)
• Digital Advertising (PPC) – $3k+ Monthly (Actual Client Results: 50 to 100 quality leads within 90 days – $20 to $50 leads)
• Social Media – $500+ Monthly (Actual Client Results: Family law firm enjoys $23 leads) – View this Case Study

Along with these services, as well as dedicated marketing managers who work with you, Consultwebs offers law firm marketing strategy and original content written for your practice area, focused on driving qualified leads through your site.

In Conclusion

Lead generation services can work to generate calls and leads for your law firm. However, the benefit of these services must be balanced with proper expectations and scope.

Whether you choose to grow your law firm’s book of business with Consultwebs through marketing, or a lead generation service, or smoke signals, the most important concept to takeaway from this is balance.

A goal of marketing is to draw people to your business, but success in marketing is when you’ve given them a reason to stay.

With your law firm’s marketing activities balanced between the two pillars of Legal Marketing Nutrition ─ Brand Growth and Sales Activation ─ you can generate more qualified leads that turn into cases, over a longer and more reliable timeframe, at a greater value.

Interested in giving your clients a reason to choose your law firm online? Get in touch.

Want more advice on law firm marketing? Sign up for the Consultwebs newsletter, follow us on social media, and subscribe to the LAWsome Podcast.

 

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When Law Firm Marketing Seems Too Easy: Overcoming the Perils of Overconfidence Bias

The practice of law is a confidence game. Even if you may not know exactly what you’re doing, you have to appear as if you do. It’s how you get and keep clients, win your cases, and ultimately grow your practice.

But it can be dangerous when the line between confidence and false confidence is crossed. Overconfidence bias appears when someone believes in their expertise more than evidence suggests they should. Have you ever had a client tell you exactly how to handle their case? As if they have a law degree? There’s no evidence to suggest that they know what they say they know, yet they firmly believe they’re right.  They do this to their detriment – and yours.

Overconfidence can be a problem for growing a practice, especially when it comes to making marketing decisions. Not all lawyers have experience in law firm marketing – but many believe they know enough. I mean… how hard can it be? Honestly, having worked in the legal and marketing professions, I can say they seem easier the less you know, and in both, mistakes show up in the details. For instance, not all marketing strategies are created equal.  For some practices in certain locations, a TV ad might make perfect sense. But change one aspect of your situation and television may be a waste of time and money. A novice may not be able to spot the details that make a specific marketing approach work.

Unfortunately, human beings aren’t great at gauging how hard something is. In fact, the harder a task is, the greater the risk of overconfidence bias.  Humans generally underestimate learning curves because they don’t know what they don’t know. Everyone does this, at least once, without knowing it. It’s being human.

To protect ourselves from overconfidence bias, we need to adjust the way we see and handle certain situations.  To ensure overconfidence bias doesn’t negatively affect your business or marketing decisions, consider doing the following as you decide on a marketing strategy or tactic:

1. Second-guess your decisions. It’s uncomfortable to do sometimes, but it can be necessary. Ask yourself how you know what it is that you think you know. Is there evidence? Do you have data? Do you have substantial experience? If you can’t come up with a good answer, stop there. If you do have an answer, make sure you’re not being affected by what I call a “decision pitfall.” In other words, were you swayed by social expectations or some other mental short-cut? Did you tell yourself “this is what a successful lawyer would do” (acting on identity) rather than “this is what’s good for my business” (acting on objectivity)? Re-examining our decision-making processes can keep us from becoming overconfident.
2. Set out to prove yourself wrong. We don’t generally do this, but if anyone is good at it, it’s a lawyer. To win a case, you have to see it from the other side, and then prepare for all contingencies. The same is true for the business side of your practice. You have to prove the counterargument to understand the strength of your own position. One way to do this is seek help from a marketing professional. Their greatest value isn’t always in executing a plan for you.  Sometimes they can assist you by telling you where you may be going wrong with your marketing strategy leading you to a more customized approach to building your practice.
3. Ask yourself what you fear and what you hope for, especially regarding your decision. And avoid acting on it. Many cases of overconfidence are really about emotional management. We “confidently” arrive at a decision because it’s what we want to have happen, or because it helps us avoid what we might be afraid of. If you really want a financially lucrative practice, you have to get understand the source of your decisions, even if it involves reaching out for help.

These days, self-awareness is praised as strong positive quality. It requires looking inward and being self-reflective. But we all have blind spots, to where all the introspection in the world won’t always give us true clarity. But if we look outside ourselves, specifically to what behavioral and social scientists have learned about human decision-making, we can be armed with knowledge to make better choices.  “Know thyself” is a popular mantra but knowing and learning more about human decision-making generally can really take you, and your practice, to the next level.

Nika Kabiri, JD PhD, is a consultant and market researcher who uses Decision Science to help businesses grow. Check out her services and reach out to her to learn more about making optimal decisions for your practice.  

 

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7 Tips for Law Firm Marketing Success

With almost a million different advertising platforms, apps, search engines, and digital marketing vendors/coaches/consultants entering the ring each day, marketing a law firm online can seem like a knock-out, losing battle before the first bell.

But the lawyer who is armed with the right knowledge and strategic insight on marketing can begin to fight on equal footing with competitors and make progress.

Here are seven tips for marketing success you can take back to your law firm:

Accept the fact that no one cares about you

I’m sorry. No one wants to hear this, but it’s true.

Legal marketers spend so much of their professional lives looking at their own slogans, logos, colors, and taglines, that they fail to realize the challenge their marketing is up against.

Being overly familiar with your marketing material can create the false impression that everyone knows you, people see your logos all the time.

This seems like a simple mental barrier to overcome, but the impact on marketing is huge.

Accepting that no one knows your tagline, no one thinks about your color schemes, no one recognizes or cares about your brand or your logo – this  is the only way to create distinct, memorable, effective, and properly distributed marketing campaigns.

Underestimate the prominence and familiarity of your marketing, and you’ll create more prominent, and more effective, campaigns.

Understand that everyone is distracted. No one notices anything.

Your marketing’s number one goal is to be noticeable.

Marketing and advertising are not a competition against your competitors. You are competing against life itself.

Why do people paying for marketing only focus on sales?

I get that if you don’t make money, then it’s over. But if your marketing strategy doesn’t account for the full spectrum of awareness that leads up to the purchase, then you’ll never get the sale.

Walk backward from the close …

People won’t buy your brand unless they’re convinced. They aren’t convinced because they have no brand preference. They don’t know if they like you or not because they don’t know about you and aren’t even aware you exist. So the first and most essential goal of marketing is awareness.

Creating affinity, preference, and mental salience, and then generating enough of this to finally get the sale.

Without building a proper runway for your marketing, nothing will ever take off.

Know the two main marketing functions. 

As outlined by the Legal Marketing Nutrition Guide, law firm marketing works in two ways:

• Brand Growth
• Sales Activation

Brand growth works its marketing magic over longer time periods.

Sales activation is focused on shorter timeframes.

One of the key aspects of the brilliant research underlying this graph and the studies in marketing effectiveness by Binet & Field is that while brand campaigns help to create sales opportunities, no amount of short-term results can ever amount to the lasting effects of long-term brand growth.

Without a strong brand foundation, the more a law firm employs short-term marketing campaigns, the less they are effective.

Understanding the two marketing functions of growth and sales is an essential component to creating marketing strategies that facilitate foundational, and lasting, changes in the business development efforts of your law firm. 

Establish and define your brand.

I bet you think you have your brand established for your law firm, or you have a pretty good idea of what makes you unique and differentiated in the marketplace, right?

Most lawyers either think their work product alone is what defines them, and they don’t need to market, or that they already are marketing in a definitive way.

Well then do this simple exercise:

1. Look at your content.
2. Take your logo off of it.
3. Compare it to a competitor.
4. What’s the difference? Is there one?

With a weak, indistinct brand, what’s to market?

Strongly branded and differentiated products manifest perceived value. Check out this brand awareness study from the excellent marketing book “Eat Your Greens”:

You say that’s marketing trickery?

You say your law firm is small and doesn’t need a brand?

With no brand to differentiate you from competitors, where would the perceived value of your business come from?

Discover and define your brand before you build a marketing strategy for your law firm. Once you have a distinct brand onboard, engineering effective marketing campaigns becomes more likely.

Build your strategy. 

Marketing is typically, and wrongly, used synonymously with promotion. Strategy and tactics are also confused and misused.

Marketing is not just about promotions or communications – it is the complete diagnosis, research, proposed execution, and solution for a business problem.

Part of solving the marketing problem is deciding on strategy, which is a set of tactics employed to achieve business goals.

This free Marketing Strategy Worksheet provides you a chance to answer a few questions to verbalize, understand, organize, and develop a law firm marketing plan that helps you achieve your business goals.

By defining goals, timelines, resources, and expectations, this worksheet is a great way to find the starting line for your law firm’s marketing marathon. Questions include:

• What is your brand? How do you differentiate within your practice area?
• Do you have strong, memorable, distinct brand assets?
• What is the desired outcome you expect from marketing? Case/leads/calls/clicks increase by 20%?
• How are you currently measuring your marketing efforts?
• What are you currently paying for marketing and advertising?
• Do you know your cost per lead/case?
• What is your target cost per case from an ad campaign?
• Are you using call tracking?
• Are you prepared to hire more people to pick up the phones once the leads come in?

Once you gather the intelligence from across your law firm necessary to answer these questions, you’ll begin to formulate strategic thinking around marketing and begin to see how it can impact your business, as well as how to measure these effects.

Select your tactics.

You have a strategy. You have strong brand assets. You know you are shooting for awareness. Now it’s time to select the tactics you will use to achieve your strategic goals.

Strategy is most important in guiding what you won’t do. Choosing what to ignore is an important aspect to focusing your marketing.

Remember to balance brand growth and sales activation initiatives. You will need both to achieve results in the short and long term. That’s why it pays to be selective with marketing tactics.

You don’t have to be everywhere and do everything. You have to be where it matters, delivering what matters to your intended audience.

So ask yourself some questions …

• Are your potential clients on Facebook or LinkedIn or social media at all?
• Do your clients watch TV and listen to the radio?
• Are potential clients accessing your site on desktop or mobile?
• Are there patterns in the signed cases coming from a specific zip code?
• Is there a type of case that brings in more revenue than others?

Once you understand a bit more about your caseload and how your clients engage with media and content, you can select tactical channels and ad campaigns designed to engender the same types of responses and results with potential clients.

Establish your measurements. 

Some lawyers do a poor job of tracking marketing performance metrics, like cost per case, at their law firms.

Most, however, don’t track anything at all. According to our informal survey, 80% of lawyers were not tracking how much money they spend to get a case in their door.

If you knew what campaigns gave you the best return on your marketing investments, wouldn’t that make some marketing decisions a little easier?

Luckily, our “Measuring Marketing ROI in Your Law Firm” webinar walks you through how to effectively track, measure, and optimize your law firm’s marketing return on investment (ROI).

Among the topics covered in this webinar are:

• How to track leads in your law firm
• How to calculate cost per lead
• How to boost your marketing ROI

Also, we have our ROI Calculator and a FREE Guide To Boosting Your Law Firm’s ROI to assist in establishing the proper marketing metrics in your firm.

Setting up marketing metrics like cost per case, cost per lead, and ROI is essential to telling the proper story of your marketing journey.

Only when the measurement of marketing tactics is in place does the strategy of the campaign (balanced between short-term results and long-term growth, cognizant of the indifferent marketplace, and based on a strong brand) begin to take shape and define itself in the analysis of the metrics.

Said another way: You don’t know how far you’ve come until you look back on the road you’ve traveled.

Want more advice on law firm marketing? Sign up for the Consultwebs newsletter, follow us on social media, and subscribe to the LAWsome Podcast.

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Web Design for Law Firms; Before & After

When digital marketing came into prominence about 10 or 15 years ago, every law firm looking for clients online was clamoring to design their website.

However, very few website owners maintain their original enthusiasm about their site post-launch and it’s potential to generate business, and so, they do little to maintain or update them. 

Whether they’ve been burned by careless vendors in the past, or because they simply don’t see web design as a marketing means toward a sales end, lawyers are particularly prone to ignoring the business development potential of their websites.

Maybe that’s because, in all of the blogs and articles on web design for law firms, there is rarely an opportunity to see the ‘before & after’ effects of website redesign project.

We’re here to address this.

First, let’s define how effective web design works, and then show you how a good web design can help law firms establish their brand and connect with leads online.  

Effective Web Design Defined 

We’ve been building websites for lawyers exclusively since 1999. During that time, we’ve written extensively on the elements of good law firm web design, how to audit your site, and how to determine if you need an overhaul.

Within the legal vertical, there are some strongly branded and distinct websites. But mostly, it’s just a ton of boring ones ─ which isn’t bad, maybe the design converts where it counts, but really … 

Guess which one this is? And then look at this custom legal website Consultwebs designed…

One of the reasons it’s so hard for lawyers to get their web design right is they aren’t designing it for the right reasons. 

Most lawyers think you design a website “to taste.” They ask themselves, “Do I like this?” But the question they should be asking is: “Do potential clients like this website?” or more pointedly, “Does it sell?”

On our legal marketing podcast, LAWsome, we interviewed the founder of Lawyers Marketing Association, Lauren Currin, and the most astonishing and insightful thing she revealed to us was when she asks her consulting clients if they like their law firm’s website. 

At Consultwebs, our success as digital marketers is directly linked to our clients’ online success. So when we design websites that are supposed to generate business, we design with conversion in mind.

If we’re talking effective web design for law firms, skip over “good” or “bad” and ask yourself the important questions ─ “Does it generate traffic/leads/calls/cases/business?”

Types of Web Design 

According to our Legal Marketing Nutrition guidelines, in order for digital marketing to be effective, there must be a balance between short-term Sales Activation tactics and long-term Brand Growth strategy. 

Web design can grow a brand online with a custom website or creative assets illustrating experience within a practice area. 

More importantly, effective web design can also be directly linked to sales through conversion elements found on homepages or landing pages/microsites/other destinations on the web engineered for direct response.   

A distinct web presence offering valuable content through an easy-to-find destination, engineered to grow your law firm’s brand, increase visibility online, and generate leads and cases. That’s how we think of web design for law firms, but maybe it’s better if we show you …

Legal Marketing Success Through Web Design

Rather than fill this page with technical jargon describing why web design works and why it matters, we wanted to show some examples of legal marketing success through web design. And what better case studies than our own clients? 

Our goal is not to decry the previous agencies or design teams, but to point out a few enhancements we’ve made to actual websites by comparing them to their previous iterations.

One important point to note: Mobile-responsive web design is no longer an option and is now essential to every design we release. However, for educational purposes, I’m only comparing desktop designs.

Cain Law – A fantastic Oklahoma personal injury law firm with a site that launched in September 2017. Visiting the old site here, you can see how, design-wise, the cropping of this header image might impact site performance. And in our estimation, the lack of conversion assets (clear contact info, calls-to-action, trust icons) must have affected conversion and sales potential. 

Here is a snapshot of traffic to the updated Cain website, since the site launch. Although it’s hard to directly correlate the dramatic improvement in traffic reported here solely to web design, and not associated technical or structural work, it’s hard to imagine the law firm would have seen this increase (and the extra 100 leads per month) without this updated website.

Parnall Law – One of the most experienced car accident attorneys working in New Mexico, Bert Parnall has a strong brand. We incorporated design elements and taglines from the previous site and updated them, also adding in proven conversion elements when we launched his site in the summer of 2017.

The design team worked to improve the previous site in a few notable ways. First, with a focus on design for conversion, we added a chat service, form fill, and included the already fantastic slogan and branded phone number.

In addition to the conversion opportunities, the Consultwebs design team incorporated strongly branded video work from Crisp Video Group into the homepage design, which warms up potential clients and familiarizes them with the firm before they make contact.  

One great stat pulled from our dashboards: Since launch, the site has facilitated, on average, 200+ leads (calls, chats, form fills) per month! Once again, as part of a balanced marketing strategy, an updated website destination doesn’t only look fantastic, it generates traffic and increases online leads.

McKinney, Tucker & Lemel – This firm is a bedrock of the personal injury legal community in South Carolina, and we worked hard to update this website from its previous iteration, which you can find here. The previous site design, which was perhaps from 2004, was full of clunky HTML code, there was no distinct branding, and there was plenty of room for improvement with design.

Besides facilitating an average of 90 leads a month for the law firm, the website has seen traffic increase by almost 3,000%, as depicted below. Again, the spike you may notice towards the end of the chart indicates the launching of a PPC campaign with Consultwebs.  

The Berry Law Firm – This is by far the most dramatic Before/After web design story here. You can see that the previous design was basically a contact form, heavy on text, with very little room for design and distinct branding. 

The previous site was so obviously a template, the design-only client wanted to go bold, and we did! Our design team and content staff worked with the law firm to create the new site, slogan, and structure, which all add up to create a completely different user experience as to compared to the old site. But, the question remains for the law firm to answer, does the new site deliver new business?

Since launching the site in 2017, we see a 20,000-visitor-a-month increase to the site. This site redesign really is a testament to the quality of work Consultwebs puts into these overhauls, and what transformative results can look like for a law firm website. 

Want to learn more about web design and digital marketing for lawyers? Sign up for the Consultwebs newsletter, follow us on social media, and subscribe to the LAWsome Podcast. 

 

The post Web Design for Law Firms; Before & After appeared first on Consultwebs.

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Eight Tips on Facebook Advertising for Lawyers

With the sands of technology shifting under our feet, it’s hard to anticipate where the lawyer looking for leads can reliably go to find potential clients online.

Thankfully, the answer isn’t in a crystal ball, but in your client files. 

My advice for lawyers wanting to advertise for new clients online particularly through Facebook, is to; 1) better understand their existing clients social media habits and target accordingly, 2) ensure proper scope, budget, & expectations for campaigns, and intake capacity, 3) measure and track progress with advertising, connect it to case sign-ups, and 4) balance engagement on social between selling and sharing.

Want more advice? Here’s some more Facebook Advertising Do’s and Don’ts….

DO – Some research on your most valuable clients, how old are they, where do they live, ask them where they spend their time online. A large portion of FB users are over 45 – so lawyers working with family law or estates may find potential clients easier than IP lawyers. Use an online survey tool, like SurveyMonkey, to ask all of your clients where they consume content online – if it’s Facebook, go forth with your advertising campaign.

DO – Have a strong brand – Headers, images, marketing content needs to match your site. Remember the goal is to stand out, so make sure your ads get attention first, establish the brand, and then go for the ask. 

DO – Have a few options for Calls-To-Action to test in different ads – content to download, free consultations, a link to FAQ, resources on your site; test a few options to see which performs better, the results can be eye-opening and money-saving.  

DO – Ensure leads go to dedicated staff able to sift through them. Are you tracking leads as they come in from your marketing? Are you then connecting the activity in a case management system? Set up digital analytics on your advertising before you hit the Spend button on Facebook and you’ll be able to measure your efforts.

Ok, so now the don’ts…..

DON’T – FB wants your money and they will keep asking for it so before you Boost something or Promote something – you have to be strategic with your ad spend. Put your money behind brand campaigns with specific actions that you can track on your website. Likes and Shares aren’t Cases or Calls.

DON’T – Targeting is essential to keeping a ceiling on your budget, so don’t forget targeting. How far will a client drive to see you? How long would you drive to see a client? Make sure you target geographic areas within 25+ miles of your office with your ads. Same with demographics and interests; based on your client survey, match your targeting on Facebook to mirror the groups you know are most likely to convert. 

DON’T – Facebook advertising tactics are so intense and change so rapidly, don’t forget that it’s ok to outsource your digital advertising to a vendor with a successful track record. (cough – Consultwebs!)

DON’T – Don’t expect miracles from social media without your constant input. You can’t just advertise on Facebook and expect results; you have to engage, post, react, share. Be a helpful part of the social media ecosystem, not just a selling pariah.

DON’T – If you are running a branding campaign, results can take time so don’t give up. Be sure you have your expectations, and budget limitations, in order. 

If you want to learn more about digital advertising and marketing for law firms, listen to the LAWsome Podcast, or subscribe to the Consultwebs Newsletter.

The post Eight Tips on Facebook Advertising for Lawyers appeared first on Consultwebs.

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Consultwebs Ranked Top SEO Provider for Law Firms by Clutch

Building a robust and far-reaching online presence is becoming increasingly important for law firms.

Legal professionals are taking note of the ways that SEO has positively impacted other industries, and many practices are investing heavily to reap the benefits. Finding the right provider for this service is no easy task, which is why we’re thankful for the amazing work that Clutch does!

Clutch, a B2B market research organization based in Washington, D.C., recently published an annual report that lists top providers in a variety of industries and segments.

In this report, Consultwebs was listed as one of the top five legal SEO companies in the world. We were also ranked by Clutch as an industry-leading provider of e-commerce SEO. We’re beyond thankful for this recognition and the many partners who have helped us reach this milestone.

Clutch organizes and ranks companies using a comprehensive research methodology. Analysts compile data regarding market presence, industry experience, and feedback from current and former clients to identify firms that deliver. To collect useful feedback, the team conducts in-depth interviews with customers to produce case study-like reviews. Feel free to check out our reviews on our Clutch profile!

Want to learn more? You can find us on The Manifest, a blog-style resource that publishes lists of the top B2B companies. We’re currently ranked among the top SEO providers in the world!

 

Thank you to all of our incredible clients who have supported us. We’re excited about our feature on Clutch and look forward to the many ways that it will help our business grow! If you’re considering a partnership with us, get in touch with our team. We’d love to discuss your business goals.

“Being a ‘data-driven’ business is essential, but essentially no business truly understands this saying. That’s because most businesses aren’t gathering the right data, which to us is client feedback. We’re thankful for review platforms like Clutch because it’s the easiest type of marketing we engage with; let the experience and our clients speak for themselves!” – Dale Tincher, CEO, Consultwebs

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