"Website, website on my screen, who is the best lawyer you've seen?"
If you look at enough law firm websites, you start to realize that many lawyers are having their sites designed and developed for themselves. Which is fine, if the site is to serve as an online shrine of narcissism.
They include laundry lists of awards and memberships. Some contain practice area pages that read like legal treatises.
These sites reek of self-love.
You can easily picture these lawyers commandeering the design and development process from their web design team.
Then there are the law firm sites that reflect what lawyers believe their prospective clients want.
Hey, at least they're trying.
Unfortunately, they've never bothered to ask their prospective clients what they actually want. They haven't done any research. They don't provide a means for visitors to provide feedback, ask questions or complain.
They simply don't supply the information that their potential clients are looking for.
These lawyers "just know" what their audience of potential clients wants.
Of course, the problem is that the intended purpose of many law firm websites is to help the lawyers earn new business.
Which means your law firm website should be designed and developed for the people who will send you new business and those who will become new clients.
These people include:
Just to name a few.
Depending on the nature of your practice, these might also be people you don't yet know.
These might be people who are:
Just to name a few.
How does your website resonate with these people? Have you asked? Have you provided a means through which they can provide you with feedback?
Are they subscribing?
Are they liking?
Are they sharing?
Are they commenting?
Are they downloading?
Are they signing-up?
Are they emailing?
Are they calling?
If not, it might be that your law firm website, blog or other online communication device isn't working effectively.
And one of the reasons it might not be working is because it wasn't built for them. It was built for you.
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 […]
I deleted all social sharing from our website just to go against the flow of social hype. People really don't "like" " 1" or "tweet" nonsense content pages. Blog posts, that's another topic.
If you're talking about static page content that doesn't motivate visitors to share, then I completely agree. However, you might ask yourself what the purpose of those static pages is. Perhaps the solution isn't necessarily removing social engagement features, but updating content to make those pages more social. Just a thought. Obviously that's not appropriate for all page types.