Law Firm Marketing: A Successful Attorney Website

A great website is one of the essential tools for law firm growth. A great website will have a direct impact on your bottom line. It's not as simple as just building a website, however. The design of your site plays an integral part in getting new leads and clients.

Site Design

Your website is your digital business card. It is the first impression that a visitor or potential client will have for your firm. I often will look at my client's website as my first step to understanding the practice area and how invested the attorney(s) are in their business. I have seen various websites, from beautifully created ones prepared by a professional to a one-page website that looks like something from the early 2000s.

Top Tips for a Great Website

• The site should be fast, responsive, and professional.
• You should have an "about us" page that tells the story of the firm.
• Multi attorney firms should have a listing of the attorneys with attorney names and short bio's.
• The website should have a practice area page.
• Client testimonials should be on the home page.
• With some practice areas (think family law, criminal law), a chatbot is vital to have interaction with the client immediately.
• Blog pages are crucial as fresh content will keep your page new for Google SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Find the right keywords or long-tail keywords for the practice area(s) and location.
• Find the right keywords or long-tail keywords for the practice area(s) and location of your law firm.
• Quality backlinks are important for SEO. These should be reviewed often. I use ahrefs, which is a free service that will show you the                backlinks. 
•  The last page should have a way to contact the firm including emails and a telephone number.  Additionally, the phone number should be a clickable link and shown on all pages of the website on the footer.

One last note on SEO

You have to feed the beast that is Google. It is the #1 search engine.

Google reviews of your business will make your firm list above others in your local area. Having a google my business website with hours that you are open. As you can see below, here is my Google My Business page:

Google announced that star ratings, quality backlinks, keywords, your business logo, and contact information are the major ways google uses to list your business on their search pages.

So, you may be wondering why is an accountant giving me this information about my website?  Part of my job as your partner in your business is to provide advisory services. At our firm, we consider tracking the marketing KPI as an important service to help our client grow their firm.

With our accounting platform, QuickBooks Online Advanced,  we often recommend our attorney-clients implement SalesForce or Hubspot to integrate with this accounting software. SalesForce is embedded into QuickBooks and can be used to track your leads from initial contact through the lifecycle of the sale. With Hubspot, which has a robust free option, you have to navigate to an external site. We use the custom fields to track this important KPI (Key performance indicator).  Using this data, we will follow the profitability of the client and the practice area or legal package sold. These are the items you need to run a successful law firm.

But it all starts with your website—that initial contact point with the potential client. A great website is an essential component of your law firm's marketing efforts. An SEO strategy for lawyers is one of the best investments you can make in the growth of your law firm, along with partnering with the right accounting team that will track those metrics so that your firm has smart growth.