The main objective of a law firm’s website is to help generate new clients. To achieve this, the firm’s website must be developed with that mission in mind.
I’ll show you what content for a law firm website shouldn’t be missing and what content they need to ensure your website is as successful as possible in attracting new clients. Following these tips can make a difference in your firm’s client acquisition opportunities.
Your law firm’s website should be optimized for two types of visitors: those who are already familiar with your firm and visit the website for more information, and those who are new to your firm and arrive at your website searching for a lawyer’s services from any channel (SEO, AdWords, etc.).
To maximize your chances of converting both types of visitors into customers, there are several sections that your website cannot be without. And as someone who has been helping law firms, as a virtual assistant for attorneys, here are the important ones.
Home page
Every website must have a homepage; it’s obvious. This page is the most important part of your website because it’s the one that will receive the most visitors. Anyone familiar with your firm who visits your website will see this page first, and most users who aren’t familiar with your firm but arrive at your website via a link other than a service page will also land on the homepage.
The homepage must capture the attention of potential clients and provide key information about the firm. It’s important to develop this website based on the firm’s goal: to gain more clients.
Contact forms
Therefore, the first thing we should prioritize on the homepage is contacting the firm. We need to position various calls to action on the homepage in the form of buttons and/or links with text such as “Contact,” “Send a query,” “Make an appointment,” “Request information,” or similar. Ideally, there should be at least one call to action visible at all times, anywhere on the website. Calls to action should link to a contact form.
In addition to calls to action, it’s important to make sure your contact email and phone number are clearly visible both on your homepage and elsewhere on your firm’s website. Keep in mind that some clients prefer to call by phone, others find it more convenient to write an email directly, and others prefer to fill out a contact form.
Of course, it’s a good idea to add the physical address of your law firm’s office(s) for those clients who want to have an in-person visit at your office.
Main Services of the Law Firm
Another key goal of a law firm’s home page should be to showcase the firm’s primary practice areas. It’s not necessary to list every service and type of case the firm provides, just the most important and core ones.
Additionally, it’s good practice to add a link to “more services” to make it clear that the firm provides other services to any potential clients who don’t fit into any of the highlighted areas. This way, we’ll prevent potential clients from leaving if they don’t find what they’re looking for, thinking the firm doesn’t handle those types of cases.
Don’t go into detail explaining the services and types of cases your law firm provides legal assistance with; we’ll cover that on other pages, as we’ll see later.
Presentation of the office or the lawyer
Another positive piece of content to display on your law firm’s homepage is a brief presentation about the firm or the lawyer, including their key distinguishing features.
Some aspects that can be highlighted, depending on each case, are the years of experience, the number of lawyers working in the firm, or the number of cases won, to name a few examples.
There’s no need to go into too much detail, just a few brief outlines so the potential client can see who’s behind the website, which is very important to start building trust. As we’ll see later, there’s room to expand on this information on another page.
Highlight the main commercial strengths
This point is very important for increasing your conversion rate and the likelihood of closing a business. Once a potential client has reached your website, if they’ve seen that your firm more or less matches what they’re looking for, they should understand the main advantages of choosing your firm.
Obviously, if you don’t tell them explicitly, they won’t know. This is where you must showcase your salesmanship and sell the main reasons why they should choose your firm to handle their case.
Each firm must find its own advantages, but some competitive advantages may include: a reputable firm, personalized service, a free first appointment, installment payments, commission-based work, 24/7 availability, or the firm’s historical percentage of cases won, to name a few.
To find the competitive advantages that best fit your case, think about how you would respond to a client who asked: Why should they hire your services and not just any other lawyer?
These may be perceived by the user as economic advantages (price, payment facilities, etc.), quality of service (years of experience, specialization, etc.), or client-lawyer interaction (availability at any time, ability to travel to the client’s home, etc.).
Testimonials from satisfied customers
Another very useful element for the objective of generating confidence in potential clients who visit your website is to include on the Home page some testimonials from previous clients who are satisfied with your services.
Testimonials are important because they help demonstrate to your potential clients your previous experience solving other people’s problems . To do this, obtain three to five testimonials from previous clients, with permission to use their names (whether they’re individuals or companies), and post them on your website. Testimonials from satisfied customers help build trust with your potential customers.
Contact page
Another essential section on any law firm’s website is the contact page. This page should be linked from various points on the website (including the calls to action I mentioned earlier) and be easy for visitors to find.
This contact page must have four elements: a contact form, a contact phone number(s), a contact email address, and the mailing address of your office(s). Each client has their own preferences when it comes to contact methods, and you should make it easy for all of them.
Contact form
As for the contact form, my advice is to only ask for four types of information: name, phone number, email, and a field to write a message. At least the first three should be required, but the message (or subject) field doesn’t necessarily have to be.
You should know that the more fields you add to a form, the lower the percentage of users who complete it. This is a golden rule that always works and should be kept in mind when creating contact forms.
If you want more requests, you’ll need to ask for less information. Ultimately, you’ll need to contact each potential client who provided their information on the form, so you can ask for all the information you need directly over the phone.
If, on the other hand, instead of seeking more requests, what you want are more qualified leads, then adding more fields will help you better filter requests, at the cost of reducing the number you will receive.
Contact email
Some users don’t like using contact forms or feel insecure about sending information through a website, especially when sending potentially sensitive information to lawyers. For these users, it’s preferable to send an email directly from their inbox. For this reason, you should always include a contact email address on your contact page and on all other pages of your firm’s website.
Your contact email address shouldn’t be a personal email (@gmail.com, @hotmail.com, etc.); it should always be on your website’s domain. Having a corporate contact email helps generate a professional image, which will have a positive impact on your chances of converting customers.
Additionally, your contact email should be impersonal, using accounts like contact@yourdomain, info@yourdomain, or similar. Among other reasons, you can use these accounts with autoresponders.
When someone contacts you, either through the contact form or by sending an email directly to the contact address, they should receive an automatic response announcing that the email has been received and that a response will be provided as soon as possible.
This helps the client perceive that the process is underway and reduces the chance of continuing to contact other law firms while waiting for a response.
Contact telephone number
Just like with your contact email address, your phone number should be present on every page of your website, especially the contact page. Many of your potential customers will expect a much faster response and, instead of writing an email or filling out a contact form, will prefer to make a phone call.
In this case, keep in mind that answering as many calls as possible will help you increase your chances of closing deals. If a potential client calls and doesn’t receive a response, they may not try to contact the firm again and look elsewhere.
For this reason, it’s essential that you return missed calls as quickly as possible. This way, you can win back some of those lost leads if they haven’t closed deals yet with another firm.
It’s a good idea to add your office hours next to your phone number if you won’t be answering calls outside of business hours. This way, the user will know whether or not to expect a quick response to their call.
Mailing address of the office(s)
Finally, the fourth essential element of any contact page is the mailing address of your law firm’s office(s). If possible, also include a Google Maps map next to the address to make it easier for users to find the location and how to get there.
This way, potential customers can easily find out where your office is located and how to get there. Keep in mind that in large cities, location significantly impacts conversion rates. If users are close to one of your offices, their chances of contacting you will increase, while if the office is too far away, they will decrease.
Other ways of contact
I’m adding other contact options for law firms to consider here: WhatsApp and the firm’s Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook page. Depending on your target client, these channels can have a positive or negative effect on customer conversion.
If your potential client is a corporate, high-standing, or elderly client, perhaps displaying these contact channels could have a negative effect and make the firm appear less serious.
On the other hand, if your audience is younger or you sell accessibility as one of your firm’s core values, it can have a positive effect. For all those users who spend hours a day using WhatsApp and Facebook, knowing they can contact the firm through these channels can lead to an increase in contact requests, as the firm is perceived as more approachable and accessible.
In any case, I don’t dare make a universal recommendation for all law firms on this point. Each case must be analyzed individually.
About us / About me page
Another very important section on any law firm’s website is the “About Us” or “About Me” section, depending on whether the website is designed for a law firm or for an individual attorney working under their own name. It can also be styled as “About the Firm,” “About the Company,” or any other variant that provides information about the person behind the website.
The goal of this page is to humanize the firm and provide information about who is behind the website . Ultimately, it’s important to understand that clients are going to place their trust in people to resolve their legal case, and it’s these people who ultimately need to build trust with the client.
On this page, you should provide corporate information about the firm, such as its values, founding date, locations, and the firm’s history.
But above all, and most importantly, you must introduce the firm’s lawyers.
Highlight the firm’s team, including a profile for each lawyer showing their name, photograph, role in the firm, practice areas, and, if possible, a brief biography detailing their education and work experience. The “about us” page helps build customer trust by showing that there are real people behind the firm.
These profiles of the firm’s lawyers will create a strong impression of professionalism and experience among clients, while helping to build trust and empathy within the firm. A significant part of your chances of convincing a potential client who visits your website lies in humanizing your team. They know that behind the website are experienced, professional people who will safeguard their rights in the best possible way.
This section should be present on every law firm’s website, regardless of the firm’s size . If you’re a solo practitioner, then you should use this page to market yourself, placing even greater emphasis on your academic and professional background, and on what you consider your greatest strengths as a lawyer.
Service pages
We’ve reached the section that, in general, is the most poorly executed on law firm websites. This section is also key to generating SEO traffic for your law firm. Let’s take it step by step.
Services index page
First, you need a “Services” page (or practice areas, or specialties, whatever you want to call them). This page should contain a summary of the practice areas or specialties covered by the firm and should help any potential client easily determine whether their legal needs can be addressed by your firm.
For each practice area, you should list all the types of cases your firm handles, paying special attention to those that are most interesting to you, whether due to their level of specialization, client volume, or fees generated.
For example, if your firm specializes in family law, your listed services could include separations, divorces, annulments, settlement of joint property, alimony claims, or modification of settlement agreements. And here comes an important point. Each of these services should have its own page on your firm’s website.
Service pages
These pages, in addition to providing information to your website visitors who visit your services page, are essential from an SEO positioning perspective.
When a potential client searches Google for queries like “lawyers” or “lawyers in [city],” your homepage is the most likely to appear and the one you want to rank for. However, a large portion of lawyer search traffic is generated by queries that explicitly include the type of case the user needs legal assistance with.
I’m referring to queries such as “divorce lawyers,” “inheritance lawyers,” “regulatory agreement lawyers,” or “medical malpractice lawyers,” including all those that also have the name of a city or province at the end.
These queries generate a large portion of the traffic you’re interested in capturing and attracting to your website. Furthermore, they’re likely the most interesting of all for you, given that the potential client’s search itself implies, to a greater degree, a willingness to hire a lawyer.
Therefore, each of the services or types of cases you’re interested in attracting clients should have its own page. This page should revolve around three key pillars: providing relevant information about the type of case, selling your firm’s services as a specialist in that case, and providing calls to action aimed at attracting clients.
Regarding information, each service page should include a text of between 250 and 500 words about the service. This text, which must be completely unique (not copied from anywhere else, so as not to penalize SEO), must have an informative purpose about the procedure to be carried out.
For example, listing the steps of the legal process to follow. In addition to helping potential clients get a better idea of what to expect from the case and reinforcing the firm’s image as a specialist, this text is very important for SEO positioning.
Secondly, each service page should have some type of content aimed at selling the law firm’s services to the client. For example, you can use some of the sales strengths I mentioned at the beginning of the homepage article.
The user has reached that page because they are looking for a lawyer who handles that type of case. They have then seen that the information you provide fits their problem and positions you as a specialist. Now it’s time for you to introduce a sales pitch so that the potential client , who has already expressed a desire to hire a lawyer, chooses your firm.
Finally, all that’s left is to add the call to action so that potential client can contact the firm . The firm’s phone number, contact email address, a contact form, and finally, at least one button that directs to the contact page should be within easy reach.
Keep in mind that it’s very likely that the user who landed on that page came directly from Google (if you’ve done your SEO right) and therefore hasn’t visited any other page on your website. That’s why it’s so important to put a lot of emphasis on calls to action on these service pages . You have to make it easy for the user to get in touch. Having a link to the contact page in the menu alone isn’t enough.