Legal Web Marketing Priorities

Gyi Tsakalakis
June 16, 2016

Here are a few website marketing ideas that I'd prioritize today:

Speed

If your pages don't fully load in around one second, you're losing visitors unnecessarily. If you're not sure whether your pages are too slow, you can find out with:

Again, you really want to get down to around one second. If you're under three seconds, that's pretty good. If over three seconds, make it a priority.

There can be a lot of different things slowing your pages down. Some of these things are relatively easy to fix. Others are much more difficult. If you're somewhat technically savvy, you might be able to fix some of these yourself. If not, you probably want to get some help.

If you pay someone to host / admin / manage your website, ask them about why your site is running slowly. If they can't fix it, find someone who can. This is one of the most common reasons that business websites fail to deliver.

Security

Security (or lack thereof) is a big deal online. First, if you accept user information through your site, you probably have an obligation to protect it. Second, insecure sites are bad for business. If your site gets hacked, it might not show up as prominently in search results (or at all). Plus, if your next client's browser warns them about visiting your site, they're likely to click back and head to your competitor's site.

Part of the security equation includes implementing TLS. If you're not currently using a cryptographic protocol, call your web vendor. Don't accept excuses as to why they're not implementing it.

If you use WordPress (and you should), you should take steps to harden it.

Some of the most common reasons sites get hacked include insecure WordPress installations, themes and plugins.

Don't use WordPress themes and plugins that aren't regularly supported and updated. In fact, use as few plugins as you possibly can.

I can't tell you how many major issues I run into from crappy themes and plugins. It's a huge problem that isn't understood by most lawyers.

Tracking

In competitive areas, some law firms spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on some form of web marketing. Many of these same lawyers don't track anything! That's just dumb.

Some will loosely track things like overall traffic and rankings (meh). Here are some better things to track:

  • Fee per Client by Source
  • Cost per Client by Source

If you're inclined to track additional proxy metrics, I suggest:

  • Traffic in your geographic region (i.e. city, state, etc) by Source (i.e. organic search traffic in Illinois).
  • Potential client inquiries (i.e. phone calls / form fills) a/k/a goal conversions by Source.
  • Directional ranking trends (i.e. for x number of keywords your pages are trending in the right direction).

There are a ton of tools you can use to track this stuff, here are a few I like:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools)
  • Stat (GetStat)
  • CallRail
  • Salesforce
  • Optimizely

If you don't track the performance of your web marketing, don't spend money on it.

Client Service

Huh? Client service? What's that have to do with web marketing? Answer: Everything.

Here's the simple version: If you suck at providing great service to clients, it's likely to show-up online. Furthermore, even if you don't suck, but you're just unremarkable, it's going to be very hard to stand-out online.

You can't SEO your way of providing crappy service to your clients.

That's one of the real game-changing aspects of the web.

Obviously, a big part of client service relates to competence, skill and experience. But remarkable client service also means things like:

  • Keeping clients informed.
  • Listening.
  • Respect.
  • Dignity.

After all, most of your clients probably don't have a very clear idea of how skilled a lawyer you actually are. But just about all of them will know whether you're a jerk or whether you actually care about them.

Put in places systems and processes for people to provide you feedback about what they think about you. Be proactive about feedback. Ask people for it. Create an environment in which people feel comfortable telling you how they really feel about you. You might be very surprised to see what kind of impact your real-world behavior has on your online presence, and more importantly, your bottom-line.

Obviously, there's a lot more to winning online, especially in competitive locations and practice areas. But if you don't make speed, security and service priorities, much of the rest of the stuff won't matter.

Gyi Tsakalakis
Co-Founder of AttorneySync
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Let's Discuss Your Growth

Helping law firms grow profitably with digital marketing and can prove it.

Barry Conybeare

We are so impressed with AttorneySync and their digital marketing services. We started with an audit of our digital presence and hired them thereafter. Fixes to the website and other platforms quickly followed and we have seen a substantial increase in online traffic, new client calls, and new client contracts. Strongly recommend AttorneySync!

Let's Talk

How can we help?

More From Our Blog

June 8, 2023
On Local Law Firm SEO Rank Tracking and Reporting

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 […]

Read More
June 7, 2023
On Attribution

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 […]

Read More
March 22, 2023
I asked ChatGPT to Recommend a Personal Injury Law Firm

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 […]

Read More
February 17, 2023
My Take on Google Search's Guidance on AI-Generated Content & Law Firm SEO

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 […]

Read More
February 16, 2023
Google Adds New SEO Best Practices for Links

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 […]

Read More
February 1, 2023
Authenticity & Engagement

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 […]

Read More
January 19, 2023
ChatGPT for Legal Marketing

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 […]

Read More
May 26, 2022
SEO Expectations for Law Firms

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 […]

Read More
May 6, 2022
Who Should Do Marketing?

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 […]

Read More

Let's Discuss

Questions or comments? Let's discuss on social!
envelope
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram