If you’re just starting a law firm website, or starting over after struggling with your online legal marketing, you might be wondering what to write on your law firm website.
Your law firm website is a marketing tool for your firm, but it’s one that doesn’t work in the same way as a print ad or a radio spot.
The purpose of your law firm website should be to educate your potential clients about their case, problem, or matter through content, and build their trust and confidence in you through the content you provide.
Here are several tips for creating and structuring your law firm’s website content as you start and grow your law firm’s web presence.
Think about your target audience before you write
Before you begin writing, it’s important to know who you’re writing for. What kind of person are you attempting to target? It’s important to be specific about the answer to this question.
A DUI attorney should be able to provide an answer much more specific and detailed than, “someone who has been arrested for a DUI.”
For example, if you’re a DUI attorney who works in a college town, then the people you’re attempting to target might be college students with underage DUI arrests. (You might be targeting their parents, as well.)
If you’re a business attorney, you might be focusing on corporate formation. Maybe you’re targeting entrepreneurs who want to start a business.
Immigration attorneys might want to target people who want to relocate to the United States for employment.
Before you start writing, it can be useful to create a client persona to help you narrow your focus.
Creating a client persona will help you write highly tailored content that meets potential clients’ needs and attracts them to your law firm’s website when they conduct searches related to the content you’ve written.
The type of law that you practice as well as the type of individuals that you’re trying to target will inform your voice and your tone online, as well as the kind of content you’ll create.
Know what’s necessary to launch your law firm website
Whether you’re just starting out or starting over with your site, there are some basic pages in a good law firm website that we recommend:
- A homepage
- An attorney bio (or bios)
- An “About The Firm” page
- Substantive practice area pages
- A FAQ Page
When you’re just beginning, the substantive 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 substantive practice area pages provide sufficient information so that a potential client with no knowledge of that service can read what you’ve written and get a basic understanding of the topic.
When you’re creating these pages, we recommend that each page should be around 500 words on the shorter side.
Don’t forget to add a call to action at the end of the page, where your potential client can find the information they need to reach you.
Craft the structure of your law firm website for the long term
A good, basic structure of your law firm website serves a few different purposes.
The basic structure, including the pages you see in the bullet points above, should be sufficient to launch your website initially without requiring a huge volume of content.
(The volume of your content is something you can — and should — build over time. However, worrying about the amount of content that you have when you’re just beginning can get in the way of launching your site and moving forward with your content marketing strategy.)
The basic structure should also be organized in such a way that it considers the long-term additions you’ll make to the site.
Even if your law firm website is very new, or you’re a very new attorney, it’s critical to think about the long-term structure of your site. As you add the initial pages to your site and develop the basic structure, think about the ways in which those pages will grow, and how they’ll be featured on your site. How will you develop them? What additional topics will you add? How will web visitors navigate to those topics?
(LawLytics makes it easy to re-order the pages on your site by simply dragging and dropping them where you’d like. Our platform is designed to be flexible to give attorneys a high level of control over their law firm websites. However, if you’re using another platform or provider, the long-term structure of your site is something you may need to discuss well in advance.)
When our content department begins working on structural content for a law firm website, we start with broad overviews of practice area pages.
As the website grows, it’s easy to add more subpages that go into greater detail.
An example of a basic law firm practice area page structure
Let’s look at an example of a law firm website that uses the practice area page cluster technique which allows for growth in the future. We’ll use an immigration attorney website as an example. The initial practice area page content might look like this:
Here, we have a drop-down menu which might feature pages with basic coverage of topics such as “Citizenship,” “Family Immigration,” “Visas,” and “Immigration FAQ.”
When this site is launched, the “Visas” page might cover various circumstances related to visas, or why someone would need one:
Maybe a potential client is someone who wants to come to the United States to study in a particular field, or they want to come to the US to work permanently, or they’re visiting for a short amount of time.
Then the page might discuss the various requirements to obtain a visa.
The page might end with a call to action where the attorney encourages the web visitor to contact their firm because they can provide the right services related to this particular need.
As the volume of content increases over time, the “Visas” page might develop to look more like this:
This “Visas” page now includes a drop-down menu that features more pages that drill down into specific subjects related to the main topic. While the original “Visas” page was a stand-alone page, this page is now a “parent” page, with “child” pages nested within it (“B-1 Visa,” “B-2 Visa,” “J Visa,” and “F Visa”).
While at launch, there was only a “Immigration FAQ” page, we might now also add visa-specific FAQ page, and build up that resource.
Avoid inadvertent mistakes
Attorneys sometimes make mistakes on their law firm websites that can keep them from reaching more potential clients. To learn more about those mistakes (and how to avoid them), you can read the following blog posts:
- Common Mistakes On Law Firm Website Practice Area Pages
- 3 Content Mistakes That Can Endanger Your Law Firm’s Website
- Your Attorney Bio: 5 Common Mistakes We See On Law Firm Websites
- 4 Law Firm Blogging Mistakes You Need To Stop
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If you’re ready to improve your law firm’s marketing, we’re ready to help. Contact LawLytics to schedule our call.
