A law firm’s website is one of its most important digital assets, and can operate as a great lead generation vehicle for the firm. Many law firms, however, fail to see leads develop over the lifespan of their website. If your law firm’s website isn’t converting visitors into leads, it’s time to investigate why. Below are seven things that could be impacting your law firm website’s conversion rates, and how you should address them.
Lack of Easy to Find CTAs
In the marketing world, we strongly encourage prominent CTAs. A CTA is a “call to action,” and consists of design elements like a bold phone number showcased in the top right corner of the website, a bright “Click here for a FREE consultation” button, or a contact form. Any website element designed to motivate visitors to contact your firm is considered a CTA. Take a look at your firm’s website and evaluate how it encourages visitors to reach out. If your website is lacking CTAs, then visitors may not be appropriately motivated to contact you.
Poor Design
Your website should include easy navigation, imagery or iconography to break up the copy, and an overall welcoming and very user-friendly design. Easy navigation allows for even the most basic user to find the information they are seeking, while appropriate imagery related to your practice areas helps communicate with users more quickly than text can. Try adding or updating images to your website to see what resonates with your visitors.
Content Issues
If you have high levels of website traffic but no one is converting, one major issue could be your content. Keep in mind that while your practice area pages should show off your firm and what you can do, they should also provide answers to the questions visitors are typing into their search bars. Website content should give clear and easy-to-digest answers, explain what you do, and show how you can help a potential client.
Lack of Reviews and /or Case Results
Everything else being equal, consumers tend select options that come with a highly rated review, case study, or testimonial. Maybe a visitor is this close to completing a contact form or dialing your phone number – and all they need to push them over the hump toward conversion is to read about how you were able to help someone else like them. Reviews offer an independent, third party perspective to potential clients, while case results showcase tangible successes you achieved for clients. Both are powerful motivating factors for consumers and can potentially help increase conversion rates. Try adding three to five reviews from satisfied clients near the contact forms and/or create a dedicated page of case results.
Slow Website Load Time
Website load time is becoming more and more important to both search engines like Google as well as to users. Google indicated in 2018 it would start considering page load time as one of the more significant factors for ranking websites in organic search results. From the user’s perspective, research indicates 53% of people will leave a website on a mobile device if it takes longer than three seconds to load. So even if potential leads click on the website, if it takes forever to load, they will likely “bounce” off of your website.
Find out how quickly your website loads at Web Page Test.
No Click-to-Call Phone Numbers
Over the past two years, mobile traffic for websites has accounted for over 50% of all traffic – meaning there is a good chance at least half of the people visiting your firm’s website are doing so on a mobile device. Make sure all of the phone numbers listed anywhere on your website are coded correctly for click-to-call. This enables a user to simply click on the phone number on a mobile device and have it dial your law firm automatically, with no need to copy & paste or jot down the number.
One easy way to check if your website’s phone numbers are correctly coded is to open your website on a desktop or laptop browser (we suggest Chrome), hover over them, and see if a link appears in the bottom left corner of the screen with “tel:<phone number>.” That indicates the number is coded for click-to-call.
Contact Forms
Any number of issues can arise with contact forms. Here are the top three things to consider and/or check with regard to your contact forms:
- Are they working properly? Make sure to test your forms internally at least once a month, ensuring the correct people at the firm receive the form submissions and the user receives a confirmation message letting them know their form submission was successful.
- Consider how much information you’re asking from someone. For instance, if your contact form requires 10 different fields to be completed in order to submit, visitors are less likely to convert. Research shows reducing the number of required fields in a contact form from four to three brings a 50% improvement in conversion rates.
- Make sure the design is user friendly. Your contact forms’ submit buttons should be bright contrasting colors and easy to find. The forms themselves should be prominent and noticeable and easily visible without having to scroll too far down the page. And make sure users know what happens after they submit form: will someone email them? Call them? In what time frame? Your successful submission reply message should let them know.
There are always additional ways to encourage conversions on a website, like offering a downloadable v-Card or including links or buttons allowing visitors to click-to-email individual attorneys. Completing an audit of your law firm’s website to see if there are any issues or ways to improve the user experience is always a good idea, particularly if your firm has seen a decline in leads or has not gotten many leads at all. We offer Digital Asset Audits for law firms, and can help identify and address potential issues with your website. Contact us to find out how we can help transform your firm’s digital marketing.
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