Practice area pages on your firm’s website help you communicate what services you offer, connect your website to potential clients on search engines, provide answers to your potential clients’ questions, and encourage them to reach out to your firm. With a few optimizations, your practice area pages can help to consistently drive business to your firm online. However, there are some common mistakes you may be making that are keeping your firm from maximizing your reach online.
Read on for the 5 mistakes you should avoid on your practice area pages to get the most out of your website content.
#1 Page organization shortfalls
Successful law firm websites are likely to use simple but deliberate page organization that works to help web visitors find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily. If your practice area pages lack organization and logical ordering, you may be losing business and creating disgruntled potential clients.
The pillar page and topic cluster method
The most common method of organizing web pages is the pillar page and topic cluster method. The practice area pages of your website are most likely going to act as your pillar pages. These are your overarching topics, for example: Criminal Defense, Business Law, and Family Law.
From there, your pages should be organized into subcategory pages, also known as cluster pages. Cluster pages cover subtopics related to pillar pages, for example: DUI/DWI, Real Estate Litigation, and Divorce. Topic clusters can grow to be increasingly specific and should be organized by moving from the most broad subtopic to more specific subtopics. Organizing your practice area pages using the pillar page and topic cluster method is helpful to both your web visitors and search engines because it helps connect pieces of information in a highly organized fashion.
Strategic ordering for your practice area pages
While the law may not change often, situations involving your area of law do. If you have not yet considered strategic ordering for your practice area pages, think of how you can order or reorder your pages to highlight services that are most relevant to your local market. For example, if your area was recently affected by the latest hurricane season and you offer insurance claims services, this would be great to highlight on your website by listing this up top on your navigation menu. A small change in placement on your website could make a big difference to a potential client who is conducting quick research on their local options.
Simple changes to your homepage like this one should be quick and accessible to you. For LawLytics members, this is easy to do with our drag-and-drop technology. Simply drag and drop to reorder your practice area pages, save the changes, and your firm’s website will be instantly updated.
#2 Forgetting your audience
When creating content for your practice area pages, it’s easy to get caught up in your desire to sound impressive and intelligent and you may forget who you are intending to target. However, the typical potential client isn’t going to respond to an overuse of legal jargon and might not have the patience to wade through dense pages of information.
To best communicate with your intended audience, it’s helpful to strike a balance between legal jargon that must be used for the sake of explaining a specific situation and conversational language that better matches the way that your potential clients typically speak. When a potential client finds your website through a search engine, they have likely entered a search query in plain language that ultimately matched them with your website. Make sure the content on your website matches the style and cadence of the typical search query you are expecting a potential client to make.
#3 Neglecting to provide value
Some attorneys can get caught up in the “game” of getting their website to the #1 spot on search results and may forget about the purpose of their practice area pages for a potential client: To provide educational value and encourage them to reach out. Search engine optimization (SEO) tricks that leave your pages littered with keywords and excessive hyperlinks not only won’t help you succeed with Google but it’s not going to help convince a potential client you’re the right attorney for their legal matter either. When you focus on providing tangible educational value to your web visitors, you are more likely to see a positive change in your website’s traffic and its ability to drive business to your firm.
#4 Creating pages for cases you don’t handle
It’s a common practice for attorneys to add practice area pages to their website for cases they don’t currently handle or haven’t yet handled. This is a perfectly fine thing to do for your website – with the right intention.
If you are looking to add a practice area to your website simply because you feel you should have it listed, this is not recommended. Advertising a PA that you don’t offer may result in a trending web page for a service that you dislike or are not knowledgeable about. Instead, it’s more worthwhile to dedicate your time to showing potential clients what you have done for past clients in services you do provide.
On the other hand, if you are interested in expanding the scope of your practice areas, adding a new service to your website is a great place to start attracting potential clients for that area. Get up and running with your new practice area in no time with our quick and easy page editing – create and rearrange new pages on your LawLytics website in an instant. Plus, you can create pages of new practice area content in just minutes using our built-in content generator.
#5 Insufficient information
If your practice area content is failing to provide information that a potential client was seeking when they conducted their search then it may have insufficient information. This can lead to an unhappy potential client or even lost business. Pages with insufficient information are also known as pages with “thin content” by Google’s standards and could harm your web presence in rankings and search results as well.
Having plenty of high-quality website content is going to help deliver a positive experience to your web visitors by addressing their queries in full and will also help your website’s presence on Google by signaling that your web pages have value. However, creating high-quality website content that works to attract and convert clients online can be overwhelming to tackle on your own. LawLytics offers a built-in content generator with over 200 practice area topics each packed with powerful search engine optimizations. Publish pages of new content to your practice area pages in just minutes – never stare down a blank page again. Plus, enjoy the flexibility of adding new practice areas to your website with on-demand access to page editing and quick content generation.
Don’t wait to get the website you need to succeed in 2023. In just minutes, our dedicated team of design and development experts can have everything they need to begin creating your new, high-performing website. Get started here or book a no-obligation demo of the platform with a product expert.
