How The Best Law Firm Websites Win New Clients

In short, the answer to this question is ‘NO’.

If you want to win new clients most law firms still need to engage with a prospective client in the real world to turn them into a fee paying client.

What the best law firm websites can do, however, is work to generate more leads and new enquiries to follow up with and convert into clients.

The challenge therefore is how to change your lawyer website from a typical ‘brochure website’ into a ‘lead-generating machine’.

If this can be achieved the increased supply of new leads will allow new opportunities for you to convert more leads into new clients and ultimately grow your practice.

So ask yourself, how many leads does your firm currently receive from your website?

Are you inundated with enquiries from the firm’s website or is it just a trickle?

• At Enlighten IC we like to follow our tried and tested ‘TLC’ model to increase relevant Traffic, optimise a website to generate Leads and convert these high quality leads into Clients.

We will now look at each of these steps in turn:

1. Increase Traffic

The more relevant traffic you can attract to your website the better as this will increase the number of opportunities to generate leads. An important caveat, however, is that this isn’t just a numbers game as you will also need to make sure you know who your audience is so that you can attract the ‘right’ audience to your website. The more relevant the audience the higher your opportunity for conversion.

Take the time to understand your market and identify exactly who your target audience is. What appeals to them? What makes them tick? Where do they go for information? What do they type into Google are some of the questions you need to ask yourself (and your team).

Once you have answers to these questions and you have defined who your target audience is, what do you need to do to attract these prospects to your website?

There are several ways to do this although the main tools in your arsenal include:

• Social Media: Regular posting of relevant information on social media
• Search Engine Optimisation: all content optimised for search engines
• Paid Traffic: Are you going to speed up the process with Social Media Advertising or Google Adwords?
• Email:  regular emails with relevant and useful content to nurture the contacts you already have.
• Offline: Directing people to your website through all your offline, real-world marketing

2. Convert Visitors Into Leads

By improving traffic to your website you will now have a better chance of increasing the number of enquiries you receive although this all comes down to what they see when they arrive on your website.

Of course you will want your website to look good but don’t agonise about this too much - it is more important to have a website that appeals to the needs of your audience and can help them to understand their own situation and challenges a bit better.

If you develop your law firm website in the traditional manner with lots of content regarding your services, biographies, about us, etc. this is great, however, there won’t be much of a reason for people to come back once they read it. 

To counter this you should therefore consider posting regular content in the form of a Blog. You can call this your News section, Legal Updates or simply Blog, it doesn’t matter, however, what does matter is that your ‘blog’ is regular and includes relevant content that your audience wants to read.

With good quality, regular content on your website which appeals to the needs of your audience you will be in a much better position to convert these website visitors into leads, however, this is where a lot of law firms go wrong.

• A lot of people have heard about the power of blogging and the need for content marketing although very few take the next step and make it easy for visitors to actually become a lead.

Are you simply adding lots of great content to your website and then hoping the prospect will decide to click on your ‘Contact Us’ page and send you a message?

Instead, why not present them with several ‘Calls to Action’ throughout your website which will encourage them to step forward and get in touch with you?

Perhaps you could offer them even more content on the subject in the form of an eBook or Whitepaper and ask them to provide their contact details in order to receive it?

By doing this the stranger on your website is now known to you and you have a lead to follow up with.

3. Turn Leads Into Clients

With this new approach towards your law firm website and the increased traffic and leads from it, surely that’s enough and through the sheer volume of traffic the number of new clients will rise?

Whilst it may be true that if you invest in the steps outlined so far the number of new enquiries will increase, you will soon realise that you also need a solid process in order to deal properly with all those new enquiries.

Who is tasked with responding to an enquiry from your website or is it left to chance? Is someone dedicated to the task and do they have a set process to follow?

• Perhaps your website could send out a few automated emails to your leads to help nurture them with useful content and encourage them to come forward and get in touch?

At what point in your process will someone in your firm reach out and talk to your leads?

These are all very important questions that if you take the time to define a clear process to convert your leads into clients you will maximise the potential to convert them into fee paying clients.

If you can do these things and do them well, your website will begin to receive more (relevant) visitors, to convert into more leads and enquiries which you can close as more and more fee-paying Clients for your firm.

So, as we have seen, whilst a law firm website can’t do everything to help you grow your practice, if you take a strategic approach, know your audience well and set up proper processes as outlined above you will be well on your way.

• Go on, why not start today and give your law firm website the TLC it deserves!

To find out more about how your website can begin to attract new business opportunities for your firm, check out our Free Guide On How To Design The Best Lawyer Website for lots of useful hints and tips.