Optimize Your Law Firm Website for Lead Generation

A website is a law firm’s most important marketing tool – but many firms don’t treat it that way. It’s essential to treat your website as a lead generation tool. How would you go about doing that? 

10 Tips On How To Optimize Your Website For Lead Generation 

1. Ensure you have the basics down. Before you dig deeper into optimization techniques, you need to make sure your website covers a few bases. Without these fundamentals, your optimization efforts won’t take you very far. In order for your website to generate leads, it first must be: 
   • Mobile-friendly – More than half of the web searches completed globally are done on a mobile device. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly then people are not going to interact with it, including taking actions like filling out forms. Remember that your website is often the first impression someone has of your firm, so you want it to be as effective as possible. 
   • Fast and user-friendly – Website visitors will not tolerate a slow website. Research has shown that visitors are likely to bounce if things take too long to load. Make sure to use a page speed tool to understand how your website performs. 
   • Designed well – Your website should be clean and aesthetically pleasing. If you go to a website and it looks like it hasn’t been updated in ten years, you probably won’t come away with a great impression and won’t take them seriously. Your visitors are the same.  
2. Determine which pages get the most traffic, and add forms to them. You might have some pages on your website that would be excellent lead generators, and not even know it. For this reason, it’s important to pull reporting from Google Analytics or other platforms on traffic KPIs. Track your success and determine where there might be areas to improve, and which pages would be best to add a lead generation form to. Look beyond your website and review email, social media, live posts, blogs, and more. Once you figure out which channels are bringing in leads, you can take things a step further and nurture a visitor’s interest. Start by adding forms leading to longer-form content on your most popular web pages.  
3. Measure the impact of lead generators. How are your existing lead generators working? You can find more detail on their performance by using a tool like Website Grader. You can use a platform like this to get specific tips on ways to improve your existing content. Once you know how many leads each web page is responsible for, you can compare your best-performing pages with your worst. What learnings can you apply to other pages to improve their performance? 
4. Understand each step of the lead generation process (and how they relate to each other). One of the best ways to optimize digital assets for lead generation is to make sure offers are related to the page people clicked on. For example, if a PPC ad has verbiage around “personal injury attorney”, then you would want your offer to speak to that topic, not a general intro to your firm. You can better align content and offers across the lead generation funnel by learning more about the comprehensive conversion path your clients take. If you see that people are dropping off somewhere in the process, try A/B testing various assets like landing pages to try to improve that specific step. 
5. Have a basic call-to-action on your homepage. Your homepage is at the very top of your marketing funnel. It won’t be very effective to ask visitors to invest in longer-form content or download specific items. Instead, keep things simpler and try something like the following: 
   • “Subscribe to updates” 
   • “Sign up for our newsletter/blog”
   • “Visit our resource page”
   • “Live chat with our experts”
6. Create blog material around longer-form content. You can generate more interest in your firm and what it offers by writing blogs that relate to ebooks or white papers. If your website visitors take the time to read a newsletter article or blog post, they might want to obtain more in-depth information. This is where SEO comes into play with your lead generation efforts. SEO will help you to develop the page authority needed to rank for a certain topic. Organic visitors who find your blog posts through search are probably looking for solutions and will want as much information as you can provide. This makes blogs that link to longer-form content a valuable resource for lead generation. Start by conducting keyword research on key topics in your industry and then creating several blog posts that lead to longer-form content. 
7. Consider a live chat service for your website. Live chat is becoming more popular. Not only have they become more sophisticated, but people have come to expect them when they visit websites. If you’re not leveraging a live chat feature, you could be missing out on the opportunity to capture new leads. You can even narrow down the chat feature to appear on pages that get the most attention, or where visitors spend most of their time. Then you can collect and use the insights you obtain from the chat to answer questions as well as optimize lead generation in the future. 
8. Personalize CTAs when possible. Dynamic content is important for tailoring the web experience to each user. In these instances, people who land on your web pages will see unique images, buttons, and options that are geared toward their specific interests. According to HubSpot, personalized calls-to-action result in 42% more visitors than basic CTAs. Dynamic content is available through specialized tools like CMS Hub. 
9. Test and test again. A/B testing is a critical component of optimizing for lead generation and can make a huge impact on your click-through rates. Even testing out the wording of a CTA can make a difference. Try tweaking the layout of your landing pages, the images you’re using, the text being used, and the color and placement of buttons. As you see incremental differences, make the changes permanent to optimize going forward. 
10. Don’t forget to nurture the leads you get. The leads you get will only be as good as your follow-up efforts. Leads should be placed into a workflow as soon as you’re aware of them. For example, as soon as someone fills out a form to obtain a white paper, you should deliver valuable content matching their interest. From there, make sure they are in a database where you will intentionally contact them at regular intervals. A key piece of lead nurturing is an email program that includes helpful content. While you are contacting leads, try to gain as much information as possible so that you can tailor future emails to them. 

Takeaway: 

If one of your goals is to produce more qualified leads using your website, then optimization is key. Use these tips to maximize the effectiveness of your website in order to turn more visitors into clients. If you need some help implementing an impactful lead generation strategy, reach out to our conversion rate optimization experts.