Episode 108 – Converting Website Visitors Into Callers, Potential Clients And Clients. Top 4 Conversion Techniques For Law Firm Websites.

I’ve looked over close to a 1000 attorney websites in the past 6 years. So I know what converts website visitors into callers, potential clients and clients. In this audio below you’ll find the top 4 website conversion techniques that we use at Speakeasy Authority Marketing for our attorney clients.

Listen to the audio below for the detailed insight.

 

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This is Richard Jacobs from Speakeasy Authority Marketing. Today, I am going to talk about converting website visitors into callers or emailers and potential client or clients. Now, I’ve looked over past 6 years, I would say close to a thousand attorney websites, a lot of sites. So I know pretty much from looking at all of them the common elements and I know from seeing the back end of hundreds of attorney websites what makes them convert, i.e. what turns visitors into callers and clients versus not. First, some stats. The overall average for law firm websites is 1 in 200 visitors will call or email and become a lead, and then it’s from there that the attorneys will either the convert the person into a client or not but it’s 1 in 200 is the average.

I have seen sites as high as 1 in 50 but that’s pretty rare and even that is a huge jump from 1 in 200, that’s 4 times the rate of conversion. How do you get your website to go from the 1 in 200 or maybe even 1 in 400, maybe at higher up, up to 100 and 150, how do you do it? The good news is that there are some common elements akin to pretty much every website that help it convert better and I am going to go into them right now.

Number one is distraction. When someone is on your website, let’s say they have come there and they have a question about child custody and they have landed on a page about child custody. On that page, how much distraction is there? On the side, is there a list of your other practice areas?

That’s very common. Well, if I am on a page that talks about child custody, I don’t care about criminal defense. I don’t even care about may be alimony which is related to it. I care about child custody. I may care about child support but that’s about it, that’s about as wide as my circle will go. So having distractions like that on the side of the page or on a page from there to read an article and find out more about child custody distracts me. Having social media icons distracts me, having a contact form, you’ll be surprised can distract people. How do you improve this? So take away as much distraction as possible.

We have tested this with many, many lawyers’ websites and you’ll be shocked, it looks like there is not as much on the page as there was before but now, there is a lot more focus to the person, they can get what they want, they are not pulled in 10 different directions and they tend to convert better, meaning call or email and raise their hand for interest. Why does this happen? Well, I am sure you have noticed that many times you go on the internet, you all of a sudden find yourself on a different website or reading something you don’t anticipate reading and then you say, “Wait a minute! What was I trying to do, I forget?” It makes you feel like you have a problem, like something is wrong with your brain, you can’t focus.

A web is very distracting. Even worse, now 65% of people are on mobile devices. So on mobile, you have notifications from Facebook, from Yelp, text messages, emails etc., so people are in an environment that is so horrifically distracting and then if your website is cluttered with a lot of different stuff on it, it makes it even worse. That’s a big factor that drives down conversion. So what you want to do is on each page of your website, look at the intent of that page. If it’s a bio page for you at the firm, okay, what do you want people to do on that page? You want them to get to know you and your bio, that’s it. Maybe some testimonials or something in your credentials but nothing else.

If they are on an article page about DUI breath test, that’s all you should show them. At the end, maybe have a call to action to call you or related articles to breath testing very specifically what they are talking about but get rid of that distraction, it’ll really, really help you.

Number two, when people have looked through your website and they decide now to call or email, how hard is it for them to find it? You’ll be surprised, you think, “Well, we have our information on our Contact Us page, or if they want to call, the phone number is right there on this page. Well, again, people are lazy, you may only have two seconds of their attention.

What you want to do is have your phone number on the top right of every single page of your website. That way no matter where people are, they can always look up and touch the number to call or type in the number to call. Another minor thing that’s important here is make sure on mobile, on iPad, iPhone, Android etc., when you touch that number, it loads up in your phone’s dial screen. If it doesn’t, if that phone number is an image instead of text and the person can’t load it up in their dial screen, they’ll get frustrated and in that moment of frustration where they have to go back and forth and type in the number, they’ll say, “To hell with it, I am just going to go to another site”, click away and they are gone.

That’s a very simple thing you want to have there. Another thing is you want to have your address as well on the front page of your website and on the top right of every single page. Why? Because people want to know is this attorney truly local to me? They may not know then, and that will be a concern in their mind. If you have your address or if you have the cities you serve with the locations you serve in a very compact format, again the person knows immediately, “I am in ABC Ville and so is this attorney, or they’re only 2 miles away. Great, all right. I’ll probably go see them”, or, “I never realized this person was 50 miles away, I am not going to go see them”, all right.

Number three, another technique that’s going to help you is to have articles that are written in a layman’s perspective, with layman’s terms.

Don’t have legal gobbledygook. People don’t understand the law like you do. You may know the terms like Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus, Alimony, Structured Settlements, Contingency and all of these words, people don’t necessarily know that. So have everything very simple to understand layman’s terms because people come, they are afraid, they have got a problem, their head is swimming with all the things that are going in their mind, they may not grasp what you are saying in an article and they may say, “I don’t understand this, I am leaving”. It’s very important to have your articles in layman’s terms and make them interesting. Don’t just recite penalties, don’t just recite the law, make them interesting and specific and answer people’s questions. So that’s another tip right there.

Number four, I am going to give you one more that’s going to help the conversion. Mobile is now 65% of all website visitors and it’s growing. Last year, it topped about at about 30% and grows from 20%. This year, 2016, it’s probably going to go to 75% of all visitors. It used to be when you look at your website and think about why is it working and why is it not, you look at the desktop version. Now, you should look instead at the mobile version, look at it on an iPhone, in the vertical landscape, vertical and landscape positions. Look at it on an iPad, look at it on an Android, different screen sizes, that’s what most people will see first when they come to your site and you may be very surprised to see that your website doesn’t look at all what you thought it looked like. On desktop, it looked great but on mobile, it looks horrible or this one important thing is now pushed way down the page and you got to scroll down to see it.

That’s another thing that’s very important in converting people that come to your website into callers or emailers. There are more techniques and we’ll be sharing them with you in another podcast but this should be a very good start and again, this is simple stuff you can change. You can have your marketing guys do it but it’s within your power to change it, which is great. It’s not technical, it’s not some Google hack, this is like real simple stuff that can be done. Hope it helps you.

If you want this done for you, if you need help to optimize your website to get more calls, if you want to improve your marketing, contact Speakeasy Authority Marketing at 888-225-8594. Email me at Richard.Jacobs@speakeasymarketinginc.com. Also, if you have any friends, colleagues that you know need marketing and they want a free copy of Secrets of Attorney Marketing Law School Dares Not Teach, let them know. Forward them this podcast, we’ll be glad to send them a complementary book. Thank you.

 

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