The Contact Us page on your website is likely your number one lead generator. But it’s possible you never get some of those contacts because your website has been hacked.
It could be happening right now, and you don’t even know it.
This direct impact on your firm’s potential revenue can come in the form of missed contacts from clients. In addition to the hacker having access to any potential clients that go to your firm’s contact us page and submit their information, they may also have access to the information of previous prospects and clients who submitted information on that page.
The combination of this breach of information, along with the missed revenue from all the submitted forms that don’t get to you while the site is hacked, is a double impact to your firm’s bottom line and image in the community.
Maintaining, updating and monitoring your website is vital to its success, especially since we’re seeing more hacking attempts as software becomes more complex and the result of hacking sites is more lucrative.
What does a hacked website look like? Check out this local one we found recently in search results (below). This site stayed in a hacked state long enough that Google indexed it in that state. This is, obviously, a bad thing when people see this result after searching for your law firm online.
THE REAL RISK OF WEBSITE SECURITY BREACHES
When your law firm’s website is breached, it can go unnoticed for days, weeks, or months, and that’s what the hacker relies on. The longer that a site is compromised, the longer the hacker can make money from injected links on the site, and even from compromising potential client information.
More often than not, when your website is breached, it’s a potential client that informs you this has happened to your site. We don’t need to tell you that this is bad for your law firm’s reputation and can lose you significant amounts of money and image.
HOSTING ALONE ISN’T ENOUGH
Odds are, you’re purchasing web hosting from your web guy or a mass provider like Bluehost, GoDaddy or a ton of others. And maybe it’s even worked out so far for your firm.
The risk of these providers is they’re generally on (or reselling) a lower-end shared hosting platform, with limited backup and restore capability (if any), and no legitimate security and uptime monitoring/alerting for your site. This can hurt you when something actually does happen to your site without you finding out until it’s too late.
THE SOLUTION
The solution law firms have to fight this risk, and to generally manage their marketing, is a security-conscious marketing provider that specifically serves the legal market. For most firms, this is the best combination of price and performance.
A competent partner that can help with your digital marketing, as well as manage and maintain your site from a security perspective, will have established systems and processes to help you manage your site and marketing, including project management, a ticketing/alerting system to quickly take action and track their work, and will be dedicated to the legal market. These systems should all be available to you through a client portal, as well.
Legal marketing expertise is specific enough that you don’t want a general service marketing firm handling it and missing out on a lot of the nuances of a successful legal marketing campaign.
Monthly prices for this advanced security management, plus high end hosting, site backups, updates, and more is less than you might think at under $150/month….far less than the cost of missing out on a potential client through your Contact Us link.
Think of this protection like the kind of insurance no business dares to be to without. Brian Craig
