For businesses today, including law firms, your only reputation can be your most significant asset or your biggest liability. Clients, colleges, and others are using Google more and more as a “sidekick” to help them make important decisions. What shows up could be the difference between a new client and the client choosing your competition.
To prove this point, it is estimated that almost half of all adults in the U.S. have Googled a business before doing business with them. What shows up for you matters.
If your website isn’t helping you acquire the desired results, it may be time to consider a website redesign. However, if you are like most people, you want to ensure you get it right. Some tips to ensure a successful legal website redesign can be found here.
1. Take a Look at Your “Old” Website
The first step is to look critically at your current design on your “old” website. What is working? What’s not?
Chances are, you have already identified a few specific issues. For example, do you have potential clients bounce away before filling out your contact form? Or, does the website load slowly, causing people to go elsewhere?
If you aren’t sure, you can use Google Analytics to get to know specific traffic patterns. Are you experiencing high bounce rates? What pages receive the fastest and most frequent bounces?
Making use of visual reports, such as scroll maps or heat maps to analyze the behavior of website visitors can help you find problem areas. For example, you could have your CTAs placed too closely together or limited activity on important parts of your site, like your email contact forms.
By getting to know what is going on now, you can make a plan for your new site and what you want it to do or accomplish.
2. Choose a New Design That is Unique, Fresh, and Simple
Your website reflects your brand. It is the first impression any visitor to your site will form when they land on it for the first time. If you are using a cookie-cutter design template, and you have a website that looks like the million other law firms available online, you are going to miss the perfect opportunity to make a unique impression.
Why is a possible client going to remember your website when they have seen dozens of other sites that look just like yours? Find something that’s different, and that will help your corporate law firm or personal injury law firm stand out.
Consider the impression you want to make and the message you wish to communicate to your potential clients and current clients. Keep in mind that this will be different for each specialty, such as an accident lawyer and a family law attorney.
You can simplify your message further by using a large Hero area for your homepage design. Even if you aren’t familiar with what this is, you have seen the “hero areas” before. They are large blocks on a website’s page that are just an image or text. Its prominence and size help to draw the visitor’s attention immediately, and it can set the visual tone for the rest of the page and the overall site.
3. Use Your Law Firm’s Name and Your Logo
It’s important to use your logo on your attorney website design. It helps to build brand recognition. This allows possible clients to recognize your posts from any source – both offline and online.
You also need to use your legal practice’s or law firm’s name in your URL for your website. Do this rather than using an exact-match domain, such as “atlantaaccidentattorney[dot]com.” While this was considered standard practice in the internet’s early days, today it doesn’t help your SEO rank.
4. Showcase Attorney Profiles and Your Services
As a law firm, you are selling a service. You need to ensure that service is showcased on your homepage.
In the long run, prospective clients are searching for two important pieces of information when they visit the law firm’s website – the services you offer and profile pages for the attorneys.
There are far too many law firm web designs that have completely failed to showcase the services they offer, while others tried to showcase too many services on a single page. All this does is create confusion.
Remember, you have just a few seconds to make a first impression. You need to ensure the impression you make is a professional one.
5. Implement Your Brand Colors
One of the best ways to make your attorney website design stand out from others – even if you choose a pre-made theme – is to use your brand colors. You can use these for the background, the calls-to-action, for buttons, links, and to add visual separation to various sections of your design.
Today, WordPress themes come with many customization options, allowing you to change the colors by clicking a mouse. You can incorporate your brand colors in all different areas of your website but remember to put enough contrast between your text and background.
Another helpful tip is to save the brightest colors in your palette, such as the oranges and reds, for your calls-to-action. This helps to make them easier to spot.
Make Your Website Redesign as Successful as Possible with These Tips
As you can see, there are several things you can do to ensure that your law firm website redesign is as successful as possible. You can also reach out to get some help from the pros if needed.
Check out some of our other helpful tips by visiting our blog often. We offer information, resources, and more for everyone in the legal field.
