Starting a New Law Firm? First Steps to Launch Your Digital Marketing Program

Whether you are launching a new firm or breaking off to promote your brand, your legal website is the heart and the hub of your marketing strategy. As such, it is critically important that certain criteria be met when developing your website and firm brand, to ensure you stand out from the competition, literally for the search engines and for prospective clients as they search for the right firm for their needs.

Did you know? 96% of people seeking legal advice use a search engine

Considering most of your clients will find you on the web, your website needs to be locatable and tell your “Why” story within a short window, 15-30 seconds, after they find you online. It also needs to build trust with site visitors to bring them closer to connecting with your firm for help.

Let’s review the basics of a law firm website, its compliance requirements, and optimization needs.

Necessary Pages:

• Home Page

• Service or Practice Area Pages

• Attorney Profiles

• A Blog

• Location Page(s)

• An About Page

• A Contact Page

Technical Criteria:

• Secure Hosting Service

• ADA Compliant Build

• Responsive Design

• Swift Mobile Load Time

• Well Organized And Easy To Follow Site Map

• Optimized For Search

Home Page:

• Your law firm website home page needs to engage your visitors quickly, differentiating your firm from the competition in a unique way, allowing them to find the information they need easily, while also being optimized for search with targeted keywords.
• Keep your design clean, and text focused on how your firm is best suited to handle their case.
• Keep your calls to action like “contact us” buttons, click-to-call, or web forms visible to ensure your home page converts visitors to prospects easily.

Services/Practice Area Pages

• Be sure all the practice areas your firm supports are listed on your website, easily found in the main navigation. (the menu at the top of your website)

Examples of Practice Area Pages on a Personal Injury Website would be:

• Personal Injury

• Car Accidents

• Motorcycle Accidents

• Dog Bites

• Slip and Fall Accidents

These pages can be correlated with your office locations or target geographies to drive more local traffic. We’ll touch on more about that when we discuss Location pages.

Attorney Profiles

It’s no secret that individual attorneys and their accomplishments are part of the attraction potential clients have with any firm. With that in mind, build out your attorney profile pages to represent their successful case closes, community service, honors, and awards so that when a visitor sees the page, they are offered a trust value to engage your firm.

A Blog

The best way to keep content fresh on your site and to tell relative stories about your firm, your target geographic, or practice areas that resonate with potential clients is to regularly post to your blog. This space can be used for news, articles, and posts that relate to your target areas and to offer insight into how your firm approaches cases, and your local communities.

Consistency in this case, along with quality content, is key.

Location Pages

As a baseline criterion for local optimization, these pages are your tether to your physical office locations and anyone searching around them. Be sure to have a location page for each of your manned, physical office locations and offer relevant maps, contact, and office information on each.

If you have practice areas that are related specifically to any of your office locations, be sure to include that detail in your site map to further support local search and drive case leads.

About Us Page

This is where your firm gets to wave its flag, tell your origin story, define your mission, and tout your accomplishments to further build trust with your target audience. Feel free to build a robust page, that highlights your firm’s “Why” that will drive people to reach out to connect.

Contact Page

The purpose of getting visitors to your website is to have them contact your firm for their case. This page is the crux of your marketing efforts, so needs to be easily locatable in the main navigation, offering click-to-call and form options, as well as be linked to your intake system to ensure all leads are captured and followed up accordingly.

When it comes to the content on your website, it is only as good as the technical elements of the site itself. A non-compliant, poorly functioning, or hard-to-navigate website will do no good service to your firm’s lead generation potential

Time to Build Your Website

Secure Hosting Service

Your website needs to “live” in a secure and reliable environment. Most cloud hosts offer 99,9% uptime guarantees, so do your homework and have it built where you know it can always be found.

ADA Compliant Build

Clarity in the intent of your website is a necessary element for law firm sites. To ensure ADA compliance, be sure that your site has:

• Alt Text on Images
• Captions on Videos
• Sufficient Color Contrast
• Keyboard Navigation
• Clear Headings
• Consistent Menus

Easy to Manage CMS

Before you build your website in your hosting space, choose the Content Management System you will use to manage your website. WordPress is the most widely used CMS and offers a lot of benefits to users who may be less technically savvy but want a well-performing site.

Responsive Design

When building your website, it is important to remember that it is responsive to all mobile platforms, and desktops. Code elements ensure that your site will “fit” and function easily anywhere a potential site visitor finds it.

Well Organized Sitemap

Your website site map is the GPS users use to navigate to the information they seek when they land on your page. Be sure to keep it easy to find and that it follows a natural progression that leads your site visitors through the content that defines your firm’s benefits and leads them to contact you.

Optimized for Search                                  

A three-year ROI on SEO of 526% for the average law firm

With all the effort taken to build your law firm’s website, it serves no purpose at all to get cases in the door unless it’s optimized for search. This criterion is the crux of all digital marketing efforts, on the site and off, ensuring compliance with Google’s ever-changing algorithms, ensuring engagement with consistent content updates, and aligning with local search tools to be the right answer for the right client at the right time.

Your legal website is the hub of all your marketing efforts and needs to represent your firm in a way that uniquely defines your skills, and it needs to do so within a few short seconds. How and where you build it, how you optimize it, and build content within it all go a long way to driving new cases.