This blog post is part of a series on beginning content creation tips for law firms. To see all the posts in this series, visit our series introduction page.
One of the best ways to build a strong foundation for your web presence is to create practice area pages. By using the right tools and strategies, creating compelling practice area pages is easy and helps you market your law firm more effectively.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to create practice area pages that serve as the foundation for your law firm’s website and encourage potential clients to decide to contact your law firm.
Why should attorneys create practice area pages on their law firm’s website?
Educational practice area pages are a great way to drive more potential clients to your law firm’s website and encourage them to reach out to your law firm. Practice area pages can help web visitors quickly determine whether your firm is capable of helping them. Practice area pages can help potential clients understand that their issue is complex and that your firm is capable of helping them. When you craft practice area pages strategically, they can make it more likely that a potential client will choose your law firm over competitors.
When should attorneys start creating practice area pages?
Practice area pages are a foundational element of law firm websites that convert at a high rate. Developing your practice area pages is a great place to start if you’re launching a brand new website. If your site is older and partially developed, you may want to do a quick site audit to see where your practice area pages can be improved (we’ll discuss the elements of a good practice area page below).
At first, your practice area pages can be a broad overview of a particular topic. We recommend that you cover each type of case that you handle or legal service that you offer on your website.
When you’re launching a new site, we recommend that these practice area pages provide enough information so that a potential client can read what you’ve written and leave the page with a sufficient understanding of the topic and how your law firm can help them.
Over time, your practice area pages should develop to include more educational detail, including subpages that provide information about increasingly nuanced topics.
Below, we discuss an example of how a practice area page can develop and how LawLytics makes it easy to create and build practice area pages over time.
An example of developing practice area pages over time
Let’s say that a criminal defense attorney is launching a brand new website. When she begins her new site, it has a few basic practice area pages covering the types of issues that she handles. She has basic practice area pages for DUI, Violent Crimes, Theft Crimes, and Drug Crimes.
As she begins her site, the practice area page covering DUI might include a basic overview that briefly covers:
- What a potential client needs to know about DUI law in the geographic location where this attorney practices
- What to do after being arrested for a DUI
- How a potential client can benefit by contacting the law firm
How to develop practice area pages to include more detail for your potential clients
Over time, this page is likely to develop to include more nuance and detail. For example, the original DUI page may now have subpages that cover related topics: Information about DUI tests, information about DUI penalties, and information about potential defenses against a DUI charge.
Her other pages will benefit from a similar treatment: Her basic page covering violent crimes may start with an overview of what a potential client needs to know about violent crimes and how her law firm can help a potential client in this situation. Over time, the violent crimes main page will become a hub for related subtopics: specific pages for topics such as assault, assault with a deadly weapon, battery, battery on a police officer. These pages should contain detailed information about the definition of the crime, elements of the crime, penalties, and potential defenses.
Each of these pages should be nested underneath the main “Violent Crimes” page. (This is something that attorneys can easily do with LawLytics, which allows you to move and nest pages by simply dragging and dropping.)
The most important thing to keep in mind as you develop your practice area pages is your potential clients and what they’re thinking about.
The goal of your practice area pages is to inform, inspire, and drive the potential client to act: They need to know that the issue they’re facing is complex, that they’ll benefit by reaching out to an attorney, and the best choice they can make is to contact your law firm.
As a result, it’s important to develop your practice area pages over time to provide as much detail as is needed to show potential clients that their case or matter is complicated and needs to be handled by an attorney with their best interests in mind.
How LawLytics makes creating practice area pages easy
LawLytics makes creating a highly profitable and sustainable law firm website using free search engine traffic easy and accessible for all lawyers regardless of budget, and without having any prior technology, marketing, or search engine experience.
The formula is simple: As a LawLytics customer, you’ll use our platform to write about your practice by discussing things that you already talk about daily. When you do that, your marketing becomes efficient and predictable, and your practice becomes more rewarding and enjoyable. Our technology hosts your website and puts you in control. You can easily add and remove content at any time, and easily make changes to your site’s content in just a few clicks.
When you join LawLytics, you get access to our software, support, and strategy. We’ll show you how to use our software, and show you what you need to write and how to write it. The result is a law firm website that drives more — and better aligned — potential clients to your law firm.
To learn more about using LawLytics for your law firm, schedule a free, interactive demo.
