Presenting Helpful Legal Information Designed to Attract Clients
Many law firms spend enormous sums on the design of their website while treating the legal content like an insignificant afterthought. There is no dispute that a website should be intuitive to navigate and visually appealing, but the quality, information and relevance of your legal content provides the best tool for converting a web site visitor into a paying client. Our legal marketing professionals at Jumpem recognize that content must be well written and communicate useful information that will answer prospective clients’ basic questions. The content must also be written so that it can be effectively optimized and perform well in searches. In addition, the content should be written so it encourages clients to identify with your firm, so they are inclined to call and schedule a consultation.
The Benefits of Outsourcing
While attorneys are certainly capable of writing website pages containing legal content that is accessible to consumers of legal services, this is a time consuming task. The choice to outsource writing of your legal content will allow you more time to focus on practicing law. This decision to outsource makes even more sense because legal content on your website needs to be consistently updated to remain current and to improve performance in search results.
Once you have made the decision to outsource the drafting of your website and/or blog content, the range of options can be overwhelming. If you focus exclusively on cost, you can find writers from overseas who will provide content extremely cheap, but you will soon learn why the content is so inexpensive. The first impression that consumers get of your law firm should not be one based on typos, misspellings, poor grammar and content that provides no useful information.
What Constitutes Effective Attorney Website Content?
The information published on your website or blog will provide the first impression that a prospective client has of your law firm. Legal content published on your website or legal blog must be effective on several levels:
Quality of Writing: Most legal consumers recognize that the drafting of legal documents is one of the most common and important aspects of representing a client. Prospective clients are likely to cringe when they see writing that is riddled with spelling errors, bad grammar and poor overall writing. Consumers might assume they are seeing a preview of what they might expect in the work product submitted to the court or opposing counsel in their case. While web visitors might not assume that your firm’s web content was written by a lawyer at the firm, they will assume that a representative of the firm at least approved the content for publication on the firm’s website. Our legal writers have published thousands of pages on attorney websites and provide high quality well written legal copy. Generally, our writers have legal training, and the quality of the content reflects a background in legal writing.
Unsubstantiated Self-Promotion: While website pages routinely focus on lauding the attorneys at a law firm for being “knowledgeable”, “experienced” and “skilled”, this type of self-promotion. Our legal marketing experts have experience working with consumers in the process of screening attorneys before making a decision. We know that they expect to be “shown” rather than “told” the attorney has the proper skill and credentials to handle their case. This means using as many objective quantifiable indicators of competence and experience as possible. These might include:
- Attorney’s years or experience
- Successful case results
- Peer recognition
- Experience as a judge
- Publications
- Third party attorney rating services
- Past experience on the “other side of the aisle”
These are only a few examples of how an attorney can quantify his or her expertise and experience. Clients discount self-promotion, so our writers work to provide support for such claims. We also work closely with our clients on state bar attorney advertising compliance issues.
Helpful and Accurate Information: While every legal website should carry a disclaimer making it clear that the site is not intended to create an attorney-client relationship or to provide legal advice, attorney website content should provide useful information. Clients usually conduct initial web searches to find general information and basic answers rather than to locate an attorney. If your website comes up high in the search results and provides helpful information, the client is much more likely to submit an inquiry form or to call your firm to obtain more information. A law firm’s legal content should be designed to answer common questions relevant to the legal issues you wish to handle. Law firm blogs provide another opportunity to target potential consumers with current legal issues, such as a new drug that has just been recalled from the market.
Content Designed for Conversion: Our Jumpem legal marketing professionals understand that the call to action and description of the law firm must motivate potential clients to contact the law firm. The legal content must focus on the right types of clients and issues. Our legal marketing consultants recognize what clients look for when scheduling an initial consultation with a law firm.
Many web design and SEO companies like to focus on traffic to your website, but our clients understand the metric that matters is conversion. If you only convert .001 percent of the traffic to your website into telephone calls and email from qualified prospective clients, a staggering number of visitors to your site will not increase firm revenue. Our legal writers write content designed to target legal consumers with actual legal problems who are ready to retain an attorney.