By Rich Dibbins
rich@conscious.co.uk
linkedin.com/in/richdibbins
Having worked with hundreds of law firms over the last 15 years we’ve learned some things along the way. Here is a distillation of the top 10 tips we recommend law firms focus whether they are designing and building a new website, or trying to get the best out of the one they have.
- Think ‘mobile first’ or at the very least ‘mobile & desktop’ first. We are starting to see as much as 50-60% usage of law firm’s websites from mobile devices. In Table 1 we compare one firm’s Google Analytics ‘device usage’ data for the last three years. The conclusion? Mobile is still on the rise!
- A large phone number that is visible as soon as you land on a page (think about using bright/bold colours). Preferably a ‘sticky’ header, a term used to describe a fixed navigation bar on a webpage that remains visible at all times. Take a look at Boyes Turner to see how this works
- ‘Click to call’ phone numbers on mobile devices. If you follow best practice standards now, this should be fine by default
- A ‘sticky navigation’ that follows you wherever you are on page. This makes it simple for users to find the pages they want, and contact you if necessary. Want to see how this works? Take a look at Hyphen Law
- Call tracking on phone numbers – to give you a full picture of which pages/content are converting. This is in addition to ensuring that all ‘form fills’ are centrally recorded and that you have correctly set up Google Analytics to record form fills and email address clicks as ‘Goals’
- A visible, open form as soon as you land on a page. Ideally, this form would either follow you down the page, or there would be a separate enquiry form at the bottom of the page. Use a bright background colour to help draw eyes to the enquiry form
- The form should have as few fields as possible. The technique here is called ‘progressive disclosure. This means that you should only ask for the minimum information in order for you to progress the enquiry e.g. for B2C you do not need their home address most times for an initial enquiry. For B2B you do not need their company name as for most people it will be their business email address and you can infer the company name from that.
- As long as pop-up forms only partially cover a page, they can be effective at increasing form fills, but do need to be used carefully
- Building trust in Google’s eyes is key to the performance of your website in search results. You must actively seek links from other high quality websites. You can use tools such as https://moz.com/ to check the ‘domain authority’ of other websites before requesting a link
- Good quality content on your website is a must. A selection of relevant and interesting blogs will help gain trust by website visitors. It’s good for your SEO ranking too as Google wants to see “a big website that gets bigger slowly”
We are offering law firms a free Local SEO Audit or a free Website Healthcheck.
TABLE 1
Device | Jan-May 2017 | Jan-May 2018 | Jan-May 2019 |
Desktop | 49.48% | 50.26% | 42.84% |
Mobile | 40.10% | 42.44% | 49.94% |
Tablet | 10.42% | 7.29% | 7.22% |
Thank you to Rich Dibbins of Conscious Solutions for providing us with this guest blog.