EffectiveLaw FirmWebsites

EffectiveLaw FirmWebsites

Gyi Tsakalakis

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Successful lawyers have long-known the following client development formula:

Doing Great Legal Work + People Telling Others = New Clients

In the digital age, this formula hasn’t changed much. However, today’s legal landscape is probably more competitive than it has ever been and communications technologies are evolving at an astonishing pace.

Doing great work is necessary, but usually not sufficient. The ways people talk about their experiences with lawyers have undergone dramatic change.

Today, no matter how people hear about you, at some point, it’s likely that they will look you up online. In fact, people expect to be able to find information about you online.

If you desire to have any influence in communicating the value of your legal services, you ought to understand how to shape your professional presence on the web.

Website Marketing Mantras1.

INDEX Website Marketing Mantras 1

Initial Considerations 2

Building Your Site 5

Building Your Audience 9

Impressyour clients.

Earnmeaningfulattention.

Earn newclients.

Motivateaction.

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Initial Considerations2.

Websites + Legal Ethics

Hopefully you know that lawyers have unique ethical responsibilities defined by the applicable rules of professional conduct. These rules are defined on a state-by-state basis.

However, many states have adopted rules similar to the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct. While every lawyer is accountable for complying with the rules of their state, for our purposes, we’ll focus on some of the most common ethical issues that arise when lawyers launch websites.

Here are a few of the rules that should be considered when launching a legal website:

‣ Rule 1.6: Confidentiality of Information

‣ Rule 7.1: Communication Concerning a Lawyer’s Services

‣ Rule 7.2: Advertising

‣ Rule 7.3: Direct Contact With Prospective Clients

‣ Rule 7.4: Communication of Fields of Practice & Specialization

While we are focusing on legal ethics in the context of websites, you should also consider your professional obligations as they relate to other places online (i.e. social media, responding to online testimonials, etc.).

Confidentiality of Information

With limited exceptions, lawyers must not reveal information regarding representation of a client without the client’s informed consent; this includes publishing information relating to representing a client. And, in most cases, it’s probably a good idea to get this consent in writing.

Further, lawyers should take reasonable measures to protect against the transmission of confidential information through websites under their control. This obligation can be boiled-down to two words: secure and disclaim.

If your website allows users to submit electronic communications, you ought to secure your site. Part of securing your site involves implementing HTTPS protocol.

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However, even secure sites can be hacked. Therefore, you should also communicate to users that they should not submit confidential information through your website. I recommend adding disclaimer language to:

‣ Pages dedicated to terms of use and privacy

‣ The footer of every page of your website

‣ Pop-up chat windows

‣ Pages that include web forms.

Communications Concerning a Lawyer’s Services

Lawyers must not make false or misleading communications about their services. This rule applies to all communications, including electronic communications, like web pages.

The best way to avoid running afoul of this rule is to stick to the facts.

Unfortunately, even sticking to the facts can be problematic. Keep in mind that, under the Model Rules, truthful statements may be considered misleading if they lack the necessary facts needed to avoid causing the statement to be materially misleading. Further, truthful statements that might cause a reasonable person to draw an unreasonable conclusion that is not factually supported may also be considered misleading.

They don’t make it easy…

The good news is that many states have ethics hotlines and other resources available to lawyers which provide information about what is and what is not allowed. The bad news is that many of these resources basically regurgitate the rules.

Generally speaking, so long as you avoid nebulous marketing puffery, you’re probably safe. Fortunately, sticking to the facts also tends to be the most effective way to communicate the value of your services to prospective clients.

Advertising

For better and worse, lawyers are allowed to advertise. However, lawyer advertisements are not without limitation.

Generally, lawyers can’t pay people to recommend them. In the context of websites, this means lawyers can’t pay people to say nice things about them. In fact, lawyers ought not to engage in any form of quid pro quo online endorsing.

Many state rules also require that communications about a lawyer’s services include an Attorney Advertising disclaimer as well as the name and address of the lawyer responsible for the advertising. Therefore, it makes sense to include this information in the footer of each page of your site and on all terms and privacy pages.

If you publish a blog that does not contain any communications about your services, you probably don’t need to include this disclaimer. But be careful. If your blog exists within your website, which does contain advertising, you’re probably better off including this disclaimer.

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Direct Contact With Prospective Clients

With limited exceptions, lawyers can’t use real-time electronic communications to solicit clients. However, it’s important to understand how a solicitation is defined. According to the Comment to Rule 7.3 of the Model Rules:

“A solicitation is a targeted communication initiated by the lawyer that is directed to a specific person and that offers to provide, or can reasonably be understood as offering to provide, legal services. In contrast, a lawyer’s communication typically does not constitute a solicitation if it is directed to the general public, such as through a billboard, an Internet banner advertisement, a website or a television commercial, or if it is in response to a request for information or is automatically generated in response to Internet searches.”

While your web pages may not constitute a solicitation, certain features of website might. The most common of these is the live chat feature.

If you initiate contact with a visitor via live chat, this communication may be subject to solicitation rule. However, if the live chat request is initiated by the visitor, it probably does not constitute a solicitation. For that reason it’s worth including attorney advertising disclaimers when live chat features are implemented on your pages.

Communications of Fields of Practice & Specialization

Lawyers are allowed to communicate their fields of practice. However, a lawyer may not state or imply that they are certified as a specialist unless they are in fact certified by an approved organization.

If you want to use the specialist designation, you should check with your state bar to see which organizations have been approved in your state and the manner in which it is permissible to use this designation.

As previously noted, these are only a few of the most common legal ethics issues that arise when publishing a legal website. As you might imagine, there are others. When in doubt, contact your state bar.

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Building Your Site3.

Tactical

There are a gazillion ways to plan, design, develop and launch a legal website--way too many to list here. Fortunately, we can distill down what you need to know to affordably create a legal website that you can be proud of.

The web is an increasingly flexible, dynamic and social communications tool. Therefore, it’s best to avoid limiting our concept of law firm websites to rigid, static one-way brochures.

Effective legal websites can take many forms. However, most them share a common characteristic: They are designed to achieve specific goals and objectives.

At first, this question may strike you as silly. Many of you will respond:

‣ To get more clients

‣ To market my practice

‣ Because someone told me I needed one.

However, the answer to this question should have a tremendous impact on the design, development and marketing of your website.

“What is the purpose ofyour website?”

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Planning

Failing to develop a website plan is among the most pervasive mistakes made by lawyers and legal marketers.

If the purpose of your website is to earn meaningful attention, motivate people to take an intended action, and earn new clients, you must make a plan.

Effective website planning begins with understanding your target audience.

Who are the people you want to attract to your website? What demographic information do you know about them (age, sex, income, education, etc)? What about psychographic information (attitudes, values, behavior, etc)?

Branding & Web Marketing Collateral

The term branding tends to be tossed about cavalierly without much consideration of the substance of the term. For our purposes:

Branding is how people perceive you and your firm. In other words, it’s what people think about you, a/k/a your reputation.

Hopefully it’s obvious to you that your reputation is your most valuable asset. Further, your ability to consistently marshal the evidence of your reputation is what branding is all about.

Web marketing collateral includes the media on your website used to remind people what makes you different from your competitors and reinforces your brand messaging. Here are a few of the most common examples:

‣ Logos ‣ Images

‣ Videos ‣ Case Studies

In developing branded web marketing collateral, there are two perspectives that matter. First, you have to understand your audience’s perception of you and your practice. The best way to do this is to ask. Ask people:

‣ Why they hired you ‣ Why they refer you ‣ How they describe what you do ‣ How you are different from other

lawyers they know

Second, think about how you want to be perceived. How you are perceived and how you wish to be perceived don’t always line up. What you think is important is likely to differ from your client’s perception. Ask yourself:

‣ What do you do better than anyone else? ‣ What are you regularly complimented

about? ‣ What are your obvious advantages over

your direct competitors?

Be honest with yourself. Avoid differentiation like, “I’m the best personal injury lawyer in Chicago.” Instead, focus on things like, “I handle every case that comes into my office myself.”

These themes should be consistently communicated throughout your marketing materials. And, while you should be proud of all communications that you control, remember that branded marketing collateral isn’t intended for you.

Finally, remember that production quality matters. You can have a logo designed for as little as $5 (www.fiverr.com). The question is whether you ought to have your logo designed for $5. The same can be said for website photography and video.

If your target audience is sophisticated and expects a certain level of polish, cheap-looking marketing collateral can become a liability.

Understanding your audience is probably the single most important factor

impacting your website’s effectiveness.

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Design

At one end of the design spectrum (the expensive end) you can choose to hire a professional web designer. The advantages of working with a professional designer are numerous. From appropriate application of color theory to having a completely unique design that differentiates your firm from all others, hiring a designer is usually well-worth the added cost.

For our purposes, I’m going to assume you’re on a very tight budget. I’m also going to assume that you’re using WordPress (more on this later). This leaves us with two main design options:

Choosing a free WordPress theme

The WordPress Theme Directory (wordpress.org/themes) has a truly amazing number of completely free WordPress themes.

Choosing a premium WordPress theme

If you thought there were a lot options in the WordPress Theme Directory, try searching for “premium wordpress theme” in Google. There are a seemingly infinite number of premium WP themes out there.

When you’re on an uber tight budget and aren’t concerned that other sites will look like yours, a free theme might be right for you. However, it’s an exceptionally rare case that I recommend a free theme. The overwhelming majority of the time, a premium theme is a better choice.

For most of the lawyers reading this, a premium theme will be the best choice. Premium WordPress themes can range from a few dollars to a couple hundred dollars. If you have (or plan on having) multiple websites you may want to become a member of a premium theme developer site like Themify (themify.me).

FREE

PROS

+ They’re FREE! + If they’re in the official WP repository,

they’ve undergone a review process + They tend to support a wide variety of

plugins and configurations

CONS

– Your site will likely look like someone else’s

– Typically less support than premium themes

– No assurance of upgrades, future compatibility, etc.

– Higher risk of spam, scams and hacks

PREMIUM

PROS

+ It’s less likely that your site will look like others

+ Support for most well-respected premium theme vendors is superior to free themes

+ Better reliability and less risk of spam, scams and hacks

+ Better designs

CONS

– They cost money – Excessive unnecessary features – Potential licensing issues

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You might also want to check out Envato Market (market.envato.com), particularly themeforest.com, which provides a vast library of digital products.

Before selecting a theme, be sure to spend some time playing with the demo. Most premium theme sites will allow you to explore a live demo before buying.

You should also read the documentation and reviews. This is the best way to avoid the frustration of finding out your new theme doesn’t work the way you had planned.

DevelopmentAssuming you’re using WordPress and have selected a theme, “developing” your site should be relatively painless.

Domain RegistrationOne of the first steps in developing your new website will be choosing and registering a domain. A domain identifies where your site lives; for example, mycase.com.

Above all else, you should choose a domain that is short, easy to type and easy to remember.

Secondarily, your domain should:

‣ Include keywords that describe your practice and location

‣ Exclude numbers and hyphens ‣ Use an appropriate top-level domain

(TLD) extension

For law firm websites, you probably want to use the .com domain extension. However, you might also choose a .pro or .attorney extension.

Since the introduction of more generic top-level domains, people who sell these domains have been suggesting that there is an advantage to buying such an extension. In my opinion, these claims are overly exaggerated.

While you may be able to get a more favorable domain with a less-used generic TLD, there is little evidence that these extensions provide advantages in search--at least not yet.

In researching your domain, it’s useful to see whether or not it’s available. Domize (domize.com) is a useful tool for searching domain availability.

If you discover that your favorite domain is already taken, you might be able to buy it from the current owner. However, most of the time, you’re better off simply buying a variation.

Once you’ve selected a domain that is available, it’s time to register it. You can register through sites like Godaddy.com. Google also recently launched its domain registration service (domains.google.com).

HostingIf your domain is your website’s address, think of hosting as the plot of land on which your site will be built. Choosing the right host is actually a really important decision. Many people think of web hosting as a commodity in which lowest price wins. This is a mistake.

Cheap, economy class hosting can lead to slow page load times and lost visitors. Page load speed is also one of Google’s ranking factors. The bottom-line is that people don’t have patience for slow loading websites.

Over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of different hosting companies and packages. Let me save you some headaches: use managed WordPress hosting.

Personally, I prefer WPEngine (http://wpengine.com). While a little more expensive (~ $29/month) they offer some of the fastest and most secure WordPress hosting.

If you research managed hosts, you’ll learn that many managed hosting providers limit your options in terms of plugins and themes. You don’t realize it yet, but they’re doing you a favor. So, make sure to conduct some research and figure out which hosting option makes the most sense for you.

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Page ContentThe content of your web pages can be the major difference between motivating a visitor to contact you or bouncing back to Google to perform another search.

Write pages for your audience.

Have I already mentioned this?

Too many law firm web pages read like they’re intended to impress the very lawyers that the pages are about. Your web pages are not your trophy case!

This is particularly problematic on attorney biography pages. These are among the most important pages on a lawyer’s website and also the least effective. With some exceptions, most people who come to your site don’t care about the 115th seminar you’ve presented about litigation strategy. Instead, they want to know why you’re particularly qualified to handle their specific situation and they want to know what it will feel like to work with you.

Remember that people have very short attention spans and even shorter attention spans online. You have seconds to earn their interest. Make sure your pages are designed to be scanned, not read like one reads a novel.

Building Your Audience4.

Marketing: Earning Meaningful Attention

Once you’ve launched your website, the real work begins. You see, merely having a website isn’t enough. In order for it to be a client development tool, people have to visit your pages.

Before we discuss how to earn meaningful attention online, we need to briefly discuss how we’ll measure, track, and report on visitors to our pages. While there are several web analytics

platforms worth considering, we’re going to focus on Google Analytics (GA) (google.com/analytics).

Getting started with GA is relatively straightforward. Google provides extensive support documentation (https://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en#topic=3544906). In a nutshell, you need to:

‣ Create an account. ‣ Create a property. ‣ Add GA code to every page of your

website

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If you’re using WordPress, you should consider Yoast’s Google Analytics plugin (https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/google-analytics/).

Once you’ve successfully installed and configured GA, you will have a window into how people are finding and using your web pages. We’re going to focus on the different ways people can find your pages.

By default, GA defines eight channel definitions:

‣ Direct Traffic

‣ Organic Search

‣ Referral

‣ Email

‣ Paid Search

‣ Other Advertising

‣ Social

‣ Display

Put simply, these are some of the most common sources of online traffic.

Direct traffic is most commonly used to identify visitors who find your pages by directly typing your URLs into their browser or clicking on a browser bookmark. However, the direct traffic bucket also serves as a “catch-all” for traffic that otherwise lacks attribution.

Organic Search is used to identify visitors who click-through to your pages from organic search results. Growing organic search traffic is one of the main goals of search engine optimization (SEO).

Referral traffic identifies visitors who clicked-through to your pages from a link on another website. For example, if your site is listed in a legal directory and a visitor clicks that link, that session information should appear in GA as referral traffic.

Email is just what you’d suspect: people clicking-through to your site from a link in their email.

Paid Search describes visitors who click on a paid search ad (i.e. Google AdWords, etc). If you’re an AdWords advertiser, you should also consider linking your AdWords account with GA.

Other Advertising is used for traffic generated from other forms of online advertising like cost per thousand or cost per acquisition.

Social is used to capture visitors from social media websites (i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook).

Finally, Display traffic is used for display advertising (i.e. Google Display Network, banner ads, etc).

While each of these sources of traffic can play an important role in your web marketing concert, we’re going to focus on Direct, Organic Search, and Referral/Social.

Driving Direct TrafficI often describe direct traffic as your most important traffic. The reason for this is that people who type your website’s address into their browsers are people who “know” you. They are friends, family, colleagues, and clients. Hopefully, these are among your most valuable relationships.

Direct traffic also usually includes people you’ve met in-person and to whom you’ve handed a business card. In other words, offline relationship-building activities can result in direct traffic.

These visitors also include people who have bookmarked your posts/pages to read later.

Therefore, direct traffic can serve as a very general barometer of what people think of you, including whether you’re regularly creating new relationships and publishing stuff that’s bookmark-worthy.

Growing Organic Search TrafficThe process of improving organic search traffic can be divided between two main buckets of factors:

‣ On-Page Factors - Things you can do to your web pages

‣ Off-Page Factors - Things you can do everywhere else

With respect to on-page factors, here are some of the most important things to do:

‣ Make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking search engines

‣ Make sure all of your pages are reachable from a link that is not too far from your homepage

‣ Make sure all of your pages contain unique titles that accurately reflect the page’s content

‣ Make sure your pages contain appropriate structured data markup (see schema.org)

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There are a host of other on-page factors to consider, but getting these right will avoid most of the major problems.

If you use WordPress, consider installing Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin (yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/). This plugin, and the supporting documentation, are exceptionally useful for optimizing a website built on WordPress.

You should also verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools (google.com/webmasters). This is the best way to communicate with Google about SEO problems with your site. Pay particular attention to information on:

‣ Structured Data

‣ HTML Improvements

‣ Manual Actions

‣ Mobile Usability

‣ Index Status

‣ Crawl Errors

The ongoing process of fixing technical on-page SEO issues is the foundation for how search engines crawl, index, and deliver your pages in their results.

Next, we turn our attention to off-page SEO factors. Most major search engines use a multitude of off-page factors to rank web pages. Some of the most important of these include:

‣ Links - In this case external links from other sites that link to your pages

‣ Mentions - Other pages mentioning you, your firm, and your site

‣ NAP - The consistency, quality, and quantity of your firm’s Name, Address, and Phone information across the web

This is a gross oversimplification of off-page factors. Here are my highest-priority recommendations for lawyers:

‣ Fix NAP - If your firm has a local brick and mortar office and serves clients locally, local SEO is probably your top priority. This includes fixing your firm’s citations around the web. Look into tools like Moz Local (moz.com/local), Yext (yext.com), and Whitespark (whitespark.ca).

‣ Build Local Links - First, focus on major legal directories. Second, focus on local community, education, and government.

‣ Content Marketing - Ultimately, you have to create pages that people want to talk about, share, and link to

Finally, there are a few SEO myths I’d like to dispel here. First, some folks would like you to believe that, “if you write it, they will come.” There are a variety of reasons why merely putting words on a page isn’t enough. Let’s just say that what’s on your pages matters for search. If your pages aren’t getting linked to, you’re going to have an uphill battle in ranking for competitive queries.

Second, everyone thinks that ranking #1 for head terms (like personal injury lawyer) is what SEO is all about. Some of the most successful legal websites I’ve analyzed don’t rank for head terms at all. Instead, they generate tons of targeted long-tail traffic. Further, they convert that traffic (i.e. motivated visitors to call and hire). Don’t become obsessed over rankings. Focus on growing and converting organic search traffic over time.

Third is the idea that some lawyers have, which is that “their clients don’t use the Internet.” While I have no idea whether your specific target audience uses the Internet or not, Internet usage statistics are on my side. Plus, have you even asked your clients whether they use the Internet?

Earning Social & Referral TrafficIn case you missed it, the web has gone social. Creating, nurturing, and solidifying professional relationships with social networking tools can be effective. Part of this process includes motivating people to click-through from your social posts to your web pages.

Here’s the thing: People generally don’t want

to be advertised to.

This is particularly true in the context of social media. Think about it, do you walk up to people at cocktail parties and offer a free consultation? Don’t do it on social media either.

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Instead, try socializing. If you have something worth saying, some people will want to learn more about you. Part of that process will include clicking-through to your website.

Finally, focus on referral traffic. This is probably one of the most effective and underused ways to earn meaningful attention. Here are a couple examples:

‣ Directories / Forums - Online forums were the original social media.

‣ Comments - Commenting on highly-visible articles and posts is a tremendous way to earn visitors back to your pages.

‣ Contribute - Contributing articles/posts to other highly-visited sites will inevitably drive visitors back to your site. It’s also a great way to develop new professional relationships.

If this all seems like it takes a lot of time, good. Just as in real life, earning meaningful attention online takes time. However, usually it’s not the time, but the approach, that sinks most lawyers online.

If you take absolutely nothing else away from this guide, I hope you leave knowing these three pieces of information:

‣ People will look for information about you online

‣ What the find will play some role in whether they contact you

‣ You don’t have to spend a lot of money to build a web presence you can be proud of.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gyi TsakalakisAs an attorney (licensed in MI, not practicing), Gyi Tsakalakis is familiar with the unique considerations of marketing

a law practice both effectively and ethically. In 2008, he founded AttorneySync, an online legal marketing agency, to

help lawyers earn meaningful attention online because that’s where clients are looking. He tends to write about legal

marketing technology. You can see some of what Gyi has been up to at GyiTsakalakis.com, Avvo’s Lawyernomics

Blog, Lawyerist and Attorney At Work.

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