The primary goal of any business is to answer the never-ending question of “How can I receive more clients”? This is especially true for companies in the legal field because in recent years studies have shown that in 2009, the legal field became officially over-saturated. This has led to stiff competition amongst law firms as each firm attempted to gain leverage over their competitors. In the struggle to achieve more clients, digital marketing is the answer. Specifically, focusing on the quality of your website (visuals and speed), making your site mobile friendly, and improving your SEO; these three things are critical to any law firm in today’s world. Through digital marketing, placing yourself in the forefront of the competition is recommended because new clients will naturally come to your door.
1. Website speed and visual appeal of a legal website
Forty-seven percent of people expect a website to load in 3 seconds or less. If it takes longer than average to load, people will give up and leave the site. Once on a site, people are quick to judge its appearance. People form an opinion on your website in about 0.5 seconds, and almost half of people determine the validity of a business on the website’s appearance. You can use Google website to check your website’s speed for free. This site will grade your site’s speed, and from there, you can work on making improvements. Improving a website’s speed and visual appeal is no easy task. Hiring a digital marketing firm is recommended as there are many different things that must be optimized in order to effectively solve the issues that are affecting the site’s performance. These issues range from optimizing keywords on your landing pages, to completely obscure things such as checking if your pages are being fetched and rendered properly for ranking by Google’s crawl bots. Other examples include optimizing your images, streamlining your CSS/HTML code, eliminating bloat and using resources from a cookieless domain. Not only can digital marketing firms do all of this for you, but they can also think ahead by analyzing trends and suggesting improvements accordingly.
2. Mobile Friendly Nature of a Law Firm Website
Fifty-seven percent of searches currently occur on smartphones or tablets. This means that your mobile site must be optimized and fully functional. Getting a mobile version of your website is more complicated than it seems. It requires you to create an almost entirely separate version of your website solely suited for mobile devices. Also, your mobile site must be optimized appropriately and convenient for the user, taking into account the smaller size of a mobile screen. This requires many different factors that must be taken into consideration. This seems like a daunting task, but this is where digital marketing firms are useful. Digital marketers provide the resources and knowledge to ensure the satisfaction of a client.
3. Google ranking/ local rankings → SEO
Before focusing on enticing clients to select your law firm through your website, always remember the most important thing; leading clients to your website. This is accomplished most successfully through increasing your organic traffic by utilizing SEO to improve your ranking on Google searches. This is critical for any business because it is a significant part of how people will arrive at a website. Having the top spot on Google search engine for a phrase such as “law firms near me,” you increase your chances of people visiting your site exponentially. The necessity for SEO cannot be understated, and handling this task alone is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. Luckily, digital marketing firms are there to save you as most of them offer SEO services. However, not every digital marketing firm has what it takes to get you to the top of the rankings, and it’s up to you to choose a digital marketing firm that can get you to the top. Before determining if they can help you increase your standing online in your industry, it helps to identify the digital marketing firm’s reputation in their industry through a simple online search for relevant search terms. Contact us for a No-Fee SEO audit of your law firm website today.