We get asked all the time about what is a fair price for a law firm website. This is really the wrong question. The truth is, a quality law firm website can range from free to tens of thousands of dollars.
A better question, "What are your goals for your law firm website?"
This question is much better for identifying how much you should spend on your website, and law firm web marketing in general.
The Online Business Card
Some law firms just want what I describe as "an online business card". Their website goal is to have something to show people who ask them about their website. They don't care whether or not their site will get visitors, leads, or generate new clients. They just want see their law firm's name in lights.
If this is your goal, I wouldn't recommend a large investment. In fact, I recommend you spend about what you spend on your business cards. Since the only people that will see your site are those that you actually show (or to whom you give the exact address), you want it to be professional, but you really shouldn't make a large investment. The majority of your investment should be on design elements (i.e. color scheme, fonts, images, and theme). In other words, the look and feel of your site.
The Basic Blog
Some lawyers recognize that merely having an online business card isn't enough. They want to be able to discuss important news, add relevant information about their practice, and position themselves as experts in their particular field. They understand some basics about law firm internet marketing, but aren't really ready to completely commit to a full-scale online marketing campaign.
If this is your goal, you're in luck. You can implement a very professional website/blog solution for around $15 / month. Your monetary costs will primarily be for domain registration and hosting. If you want professional designs, installation, and some basic support, you could spend an additional fifty to a couple thousand dollars. Since you will be the one adding new content to the site, your focus should be on the ease of use of the content management system. If you hire someone for basic installation and design, you should make sure that you can keep the site and its content if you decide to change support companies.
The Practice Growth Machine
Many law firms are learning that the internet can be an excellent source of new clients and new sources of referrals. They need comprehensive web marketing services. These typically include a website and blog, contact form integration, link building, and other features designed not only to help the website get found online, but to turn more traffic into leads and clients.
If this is your goal, the bulk of your investment should be on the methods being employed to get your website exposed to more targeted traffic and turning that traffic into potential client leads.
These services can range from a couple hundred dollars per month to several thousand. When you are considering hiring a law firm web marketing consultant, there are many important questions to ask. In the end, I believe the single most important characteristics to look for in a web marketer is transparency.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]