5 Key Elements to Achieve Excellent Web Design for Law Firms
Your law firm’s website is your digital office. It’s the place people go to evaluate your firm once they are directed through a mixture of ads, search engine queries, and content articles.
75% of people admit to using website design as a way to measure a website’s credibility.
That means that your law firm’s website design needs to be up to date and fully functional, both on mobile devices and computers. It needs to load fast, look amazing, pump out relevant content, and have the best SEO tactics implemented off screen so that your website is communicating with Google’s search algorithms.
This is no easy feat for someone who hasn’t spent years of time and research on figuring out works best for law firm web design. You can be the best lawyer out there, but without the proper website design to convert clicks into cases, you aren’t going to gain any traffic to your website.
Similarly, without great content, no one will come to your site. Website design for law firms goes hand-in-hand with legal content writing. Luckily, at EverSpark we offer both of these options to make sure your law firm gets ranking to increase your conversion rate.
We’ve compiled a list of 5 key elements to make sure the website design for your law firm is top notch.
Keep It Simple
The best sites have a list of similarities that your law firm can emulate in its own design. Those similarities include a streamlined and color coordinated design, a large and well photographed image on the front page, a thoughtful tagline, and a straightforward and functional navigation.
Below that, you can add information on your law firm, what sets you apart from others, and other tidbits of information, but the first thing potential clients need to see and be impressed with is a beautiful and well executed website design that places your law firm in the perfect light.
Let’s examine these websites from Best Law Firm Websites of 2020, courtesy of Lawyerist.
LadyDUI is a well known lawyer from Connecticut. As a solo practitioner, she made the most out of her website by picking a color scheme and sticking to it throughout (even her suit matches). It starts with a promise of strategy, then as you scroll down, she walks you through the basic steps of a DUI charge. Potential clients are left with a feeling of expertise and trust due to have a website that communicates so clearly and thoughtfully.
Kraayeveld Divorce and Custody Attorneys use a simple design with gold and purples to pull people in. As divorce attorneys, they choose a soft approach and comment on custody, parent alienation, and family law. Their font is easy to read, easy to understand, and they make following through easy with side widgets and click to fill forms.
Notice that their design philosophies all have a few things in common:
- A high quality, yet simple, photograph as the focus
- A tagline that shows they put clients first
- Navigation options that are highly visible and easy to parse
- A color scheme that supports the graphic and font choices
Remember that when you are creating the idea for your website, that it should be made with the client in mind, easy to navigate and have a modern feel.
Keep It Clean
Contact forms, chatbots, and accessibility tools are very important to your law firm’s website as a way to ensure your potential clients have a way to quickly and easily contact your firm for a free consultation or conversation. As long as these methods are embedded seamlessly into your website, there’s no issue.
On the other hand, bombarding your potential clients with multiple layers of intrusive frames leads to people quickly leaving your site because they aren’t able to navigate it.
This is especially true on mobile, where precision tapping of the screen can be tough, and mistakes lead to frustrating visits to an unintended page.
Features for your law firm can be split into separate locations or practice pages, so there’s no reason to feel you need to fit everything on the landing page. For potential clients who are likely going through a lot right now, your job is to make their answers as easy to find as possible, not overload them with information.
“Focus on the content that is valuable for your users and remove unnecessary elements that do not support user tasks.”
Adobe
Research exactly what your potential clients need to know and hear, and leave it at that. Clean and simple wins out time over time.
Keep It Functional
Your law firm’s background website elements are just as important (if not more so) than the finished product your potential clients see. Keeping your website functional means keeping all of the interactive parts of your website responsive and working.
This can be broken down into a few parts.
> Mobile-friendly Website Design – 74% of users say they are more likely to revisit an mobile optimized website. Coupled with the fact that 56% of organic traffic comes from mobile devices, it’s vital that your website has a mobile friendly design
> Page Speed – Did you know that websites with low page speeds cost business owners $2.6 billion in losses each year. That’s a lot of monthly traffic bouncing due to loading screens.
> Easy Navigation – A clean site map and easy to use navigation are important to the user experience, so much so that 60% of the traffic that has trouble accessing the website will bounce, and 40% of that traffic will end up investing in a competitor.
These 3 things can be sure to make your functionality optimal and encourage client conversion instead of driving them away.
Keep It Reputable
Potential clients want to know that your previous clients recommend your services. A huge percentage of referrals for legal firms come from word-of-mouth through colleagues and former clients. On the internet, the method of the delivery changes but the essence of the referral process does not.
So, when dealing with web design for law firms, how can you best make sure your law firm maintains its reputation and credibility? Here’s how.
> Manage your Google My Business Page – Google My Business is a versatile and free online tool that helps you manage your business all from Google’s interface. It’s also a helpful place for clients to learn more about your firm, read client testimonials, and educate themselves about your specialty.
> Testimonials and Reviews – Having testimonials and reviews on your website is a great way to accent your practice. They shouldn’t be front and center, but they should be easily found. As much as 88% of potential clients trust an only testimonial as much as they would trust friends or family.
> Video Testimonials – Video testimonials are the biggest converter you can implement for several reasons. Video testimonials evoke emotion and making a connection to your potential clients is paramount to conversion. Video also has a 95% retention rate when compared to only 12% of written words. Videos that evoke an emotional response also are more likely to be shared as well. If your law firm can invest in video testimonials, heavily consider it.
> Be Responsive – 78% of consumers say that seeing a review being responded to makes them feel like the business cares. As a law firm primarily concerned with dealing with people who are feeling vulnerable, scared, or unsure of the future, having potential clients consider you as someone who cares for their issues is a huge conversion factor.
Following those standards will get your law firm’s website a credible reputation that potential clients will view with trust. A law firm’s reputation is the most defining factor in client conversion; if your site doesn’t earn the trust of the potential client, they will go somewhere else.
Keep It Relevant
There’s a reason that so many types of websites have blogs that are regularly updated. Creative and research driven content that takes into account keyword trends and researched blog writing tactics can help your site grow in a variety of ways.
Why should I have a blog on my law firm site?
- Drives qualified traffic to your site
- Shows your expertise in any given specialty
- Humanizes your law firm by giving it a casual voice
- Highlights wins, cases, and case studies
- Displays awards, honors, or scholarships
- Gives you marketable content that can stretch over social media
Blogging connects your potential client’s queries for searchable content to your website offering those answers. But what should you have in your blog? Most law firm websites like to have a section on News, FAQs, or Resources, but several law firms are now taking up blogging on their own. Here are some suggestions of what you can include, and several samples EverSpark has ranking for its clients.
> FAQs
These are known as Frequently Asked Questions. They are informational articles asking specific questions about a client’s situation or important things they need to know.
These can be short form or long form and they normally involve answering a definite question without opinion.
- What is a boating accident? – Steinger, Green & Feiner
- Is A DUI A Felony in PA? – Kellis PA DUI Attorney
- How to File a Lawsuit – Ernst Law Group
> Blogs
These are essential to your law firm as it gives your firm a voice and stance. Highlighting listicles (blogs that include a specific numbered set of items), an information blog about a situation or incident, or topical ideas that relate to your specific firm (like types of parenting plans for family law firms or commonly overlooked injuries in construction for union based law firms).
The trick here is to not sound too official and to maintain a more casual or suggesting tone.
- 10 Worst Celebrity Car Accidents – Steinger, Green & Feiner
- How Much Alcohol Is In Your Favorite Drink? – Kellis PA DUI Attorney
- Where and When Car Accidents Happen Most Often – Ernst Law Group
- Penalties For 1st, 2nd And 3rd DUI In Pennsylvania – Kellis PA DUI Attorney
- Common Injuries and Ringing in the Ears – Ernst Law Group
- Family Law – Types of Cases and What to Look For – The Johnson Firm
> New Articles
These are local and pertinent to the area. This is normally called newsjacking, where a law firm will notice a report on a car accident, personal injury case, or big issue and choose to report on it from within their own site. This can drive people to your website who are looking for similar situations to their own, or people who just heard about the incident from a friend.
Being careful in the presentation of these articles is important as you want to be seen as a reporting source and not as a law firm hoping to capitalize on the tragedy of others. These articles are timely and, if researched, have tons of embedded links, leading to a great opportunity for backlinking on the news article.
- Child Drowns in Neighbor’s Pool – Steinger, Green & Feiner
- Fatal Big-Rig Crash in Orcutt – Ernst Law Group
- Are Private Hospitals Putting Profits Over Patient Safety? – The Johnson Firm
Having relevant content on your site is what is going to pull you to the first page (and then the first spot) in the search engines. Optimizing on the keywords that people are searching for in your local area will direct organic traffic to your site for free instead of paying significant amounts of money to place an ad. We focus on bringing you results organically, which saves you money in the long run.
And these are only a few options that EverSpark offers, here are some others.
- Videos
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Infographics
- Whitepapers
- Checklists
- Printables
- Guides
- Quizzes
Conclusion
We at EverSpark know what it takes to not only get you to the first page, but to get you to the #1 spot on Google. We know that it takes consistent auditing of your site, relevant content creation, optimized SEO strategies, and the best web design there is to offer.
Our full service digital marketing team knows how to use the most advanced tools in the industry along with over 12 years of experience getting our clients and law firms to the top spot in the Google rankings.
When you’re tired of wondering why you aren’t ranking, contact us for a full Website and Content Audit for your site and remember the 5 Key Elements to Having Excellent Web Design for Law Firms.