To use your website as an effective marketing tool for your law firm, you’ll need to get it in front of potential clients where they’re most likely to find it:
As they’re gathering information on the web about their legal problem.
People turn to web research before making many, if not most, buying decisions. Online, we have access to nearly everything there is to know. But what’s the purpose of all this research? To make us more confident decision-makers: We want to trust our decision making, and information gathering helps us trust our choices.
Potential clients gather information about the law, their legal problem, and your firm before they make a decision to hire an attorney. Here’s how to use that information to turn your site into a machine that predictably and reliably provides your firm with new clients.
How do potential clients find and research attorneys?
A lot of potential clients start their legal journey in the same way. Here’s what that journey looks like:
- Event: Usually, an event is the catalyst for research. The event could be a car accident, a DUI arrest, an impending bankruptcy, a divorce, a dog bite, or any other problem that could require the assistance of an attorney.
- Research: Once the event has occurred, a potential client begins doing legal research. However, the common assumption is that these potential clients begin researching attorneys immediately, rather than other legal topics. But that’s usually not what happens. Instead, these potential clients tend to ask a lot of who-what-where-when-why questions of Google. (ie: “What do I do after…” or “How do I…” “Can I…” “Who’s responsible when…”)
- Determining if there’s a legal action: As they begin asking questions of Google about their case or matter, they’ll start learning more about their problem. They’ll look for client-friendly information about their issue, spelled out in plain English. From here, they may determine that there’s a legal course of action for their issue.
- Deciding on legal counsel: Once they believe that they have a course of action that requires the involvement of an attorney, then the potential client is likely to research individual attorneys. (Your attorney bio, case results, reviews from happy clients, and other information can go a long way toward proving that you’re the right attorney for these potential clients.)
- Decision/Initiating Contact: It’s after all of this information gathering that a potential client makes a decision to reach out to a law firm.
How does your law firm’s website fit into this model?
The internet gives potential clients more access to information than ever before. As a result, they have more control over their final purchase decisions, whether that’s buying a consumer product or hiring a lawyer.
Potential clients control the final decision about which attorney they’ll hire. But you — the attorney — control the information that your potential clients have access to on your website. That information (or a lack of it) influences their final decision.
The more information you add to your website, the more “at-bats” you have to influence their decision making. Every page is an opportunity to influence those decisions: It can influence Google’s decision to bring your pages to the top of rankings when a potential client makes a relevant search, and it can influence their decision to select those pages from search results.
Law firm websites that reliably and predictably drive more business to their firms contain lots of legal information and display it in a way that’s easy for potential clients to understand.
Use your site to provide educational legal information and answers potential clients are looking for.
The easiest way to turn your website into a predictable lead generation tool is to use it as an educational information repository: fill it with easy-to-understand legal information that your potential clients are looking for.
Content marketing is the most effective form of client generation for small law firms because it directly speaks to the needs of potential clients who are busy conducting research. The content on your website serves as a free, helpful decision-making tool that creates a bond of trust between you and the web visitor who finds your site.
Using what you know about how most potential clients find attorneys, you can influence their decision making at key points:
- After an event occurs, but before they know that they need legal help. This is the value of creating website content that directly answers a potential clients’ legal queries. (Ie, “What should I do if I was just hit in an accident in Baltimore?”)
- When Google returns your pages during their search (Are your website page titles a good match for their search?).
- Once a potential client is on your website (The more information you provide, the more likely you are to keep that potential client as a captive audience).
With LawLytics’ software, support, and strategy you get a law firm website that predictably generates new clients.
The LawLytics platform and support makes it simple to build thriving, information-rich websites that drive the right potential clients to your firm.
If you already have a LawLytics website and you’d like guidance around creating content (or help taking it to the next level), we’re here to help.
If you don’t have a website (or if you’re using a platform or agency that makes your online marketing complicated), switching to LawLytics is easy and affordable.
See how easy it is to grow your practice through Google by doing a quick interactive demo of LawLytics.
