Online Marketing

In developing and enhancing your law practice’s website, it’s always important to keep your ideal visitor in mind. Depending on your marketing goals, that visitor may be a prospective client, current client or referral source. As you develop your site, make a list of your visitors concerns, needs and questions. Then compile a list of the benefits that your firm offers that helps to address some of these issues. This list should not only be a description of how you’re different from competitors but how you can specifically speak to the emotions of your site visitor.

Most firms develop a website to get found by prospective clients. It’s not enough, however, just to be found; you need to have the right tools in place to engage visitors. At Amicus Creative, we work to get your firm on the map and in front of new clients but that’s not all we do. We’re also experts at engagement and we’ve developed the most comprehensive attorney website system to foster interaction with prospects. The following tools are built right into our Site Manager and allow visitors to interact with your firm in a matter of seconds:

We often hear from attorneys who have hundreds of new visitors to their websites each month but only receive a handful of leads despite these strong traffic patterns. There may be many explanations for low conversion rates but a poorly executed call to action is almost always one of the culprits. Last week, we held a webinar for attorneys exploring the development and implementation of an effective call to action. 

If you are struggling to generate leads from your law firm’s website, we encourage you to watch the recorded session and learn more about this critical component of online marketing success. 

In developing websites for hundreds of law firms, we’re often asked what kinds of disclaimers should be included on a legal website. The answer to this question largely depends on the jurisdiction(s) of the firm and the local Rules of Professional Conduct. We recommend that all firms carefully comb through this information and all ethics opinions when developing a website to ensure compliance.  Some states require a label on all site pages indicating that the site is a form of “Attorney Advertising.” Others are less restrictive mandating that disclaimers may only be needed on certain pages where the information presented may confuse visitors.  

While we can’t get into each jurisdiction’s guidelines in a single post, generally speaking, there are several places on a legal website where your firm should consider adding a disclaimer: 

Every year, Google makes hundreds of algorithm updates, changing the method by which they evaluate and rank sites for any given search phrase. Most updates do not have an immediate effect on the large majority of sites but the last one, Penguin 2.0, announced two weeks ago, is expected to impact millions. Should you be worried about your law firm’s website?

In order to gauge whether or not your law firm’s website is truly effective, you must have insight into visitor behavior.  What are prospective clients doing when they come to your site? Does one page have a particularly high exit rate? Knowing this kind of valuable information can help you to identify problems within your site and make changes to improve your online marketing strategy.   Google Analytics is a free service which tracks activity on your site. We highly recommend that all law firms utilize this tool but as anyone who has ever used this service can attest, there is a lot of information to comprehend and for many, it can be overwhelming.

The law firms we work with often get notices from domain vendors offering to sell them highly coveted domain names for a small fortune. These attorneys generally call us to ask if the desirable domain name, which is supposed to be top-notch for SEO, is worth the investment. For many years, having a domain name that was an exact match to the search query essentially guaranteed top placement in the search engine result pages (SERPs). With this great SEO benefit, exact match domain for highly competitive searches like “Chicago Bankruptcy Lawyer” (chicagobankruptcylawyer.com) could easily be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

All attorneys are subject to strict rules when it comes to communication with prospective clients and advertising.  If you’re in the process of developing a new website for your law practice or outsourcing the project to a web designer, it’s absolutely essential that you take the 5 actions outlined below to make sure you’re in compliance with all state bar requirements.

It’s not at all uncommon to see law firms include a list of upcoming events on their websites. After all, it’s a great way to showcase your expertise, demonstrate an active presence in the community and inform clients and colleagues about these events so they can attend or spread the word. Unfortunately, far too many attorneys let this powerful resource fall to the wayside—allowing it to become outdated, stagnant or fail to implement tools which will make the listing of events a true resource for site visitors. If your law firm is considering future events and making these a part of your website, be sure to utilize an integrated event management system which features the following tools: