Above is an example of a mobile friendly test using the testing tool. That’s the message you want to see as Google says your site is mobile friendly.

This is the message that tells you your site is not mobile friendly. You can see the reasons in the above image. Text is too small to read, mobile viewport  not set and links too close together. All this makes for a bad user experience which is why Google is  implementing mobile friendliness as a ranking factor.

Also check your “mobile usability” inside webmaster tools. You can see where to find this here:

The message you want to see here is what you see in the screenshot above: “No mobile usability errors detected.”

Google is giving you a two month notice here which they often do so take advantage of it. If you care about your rankings on mobile (and you should considering how high mobile usage is) it’s time to consider getting a responsive website design.

The post Google Announces Mobile Friendliness as a Ranking Factor appeared first on Internet Marketing for Lawyers.

Considering the importance of a decision like choosing a lawyer, it’s not surprising that people look at multiple websites before choosing to hire a law firm. Nearly 30% of survey participants said they looked at 6 or more websites which tells us one very important thing: Your potential clients are comparing you and your website to your online competitors. One of the user testing studies we perform is analyzing the behavior of consumers looking at different law firm websites and the information we collect is incredibly valuable and insightful. We know for example that many consumers rank the order in which they would call different law firms. The majority of the time for the site they say they would contact first, one of the biggest factors is because the design of the website made them feel the law firm was “successful” or “prestigious”.

Today it’s a fiercely competitive market for lawyers so if you want your online marketing, your website plays a huge factor in the success of your law firm. Look at your competitors online and ask yourself  “Are my competitor’s websites more impressive than mine?”. If the answer is no, you may be losing cases to other firms that you compete with.

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We take a lot of pride in trying to produce the most beautiful websites in the legal industry, but beauty isn’t the only thing we care about. The “brains” behind the sites we build are may be even more important than the aesthetics. By brains I mean the way a site is created in order to increase your conversion rate. Our goal with every site we create is to try and convert as many of your site visitors as possible. In the end, this means your website generates more leads and cases for your law firm. While we see a lot of firms aggressively market their practice and spend heavily on SEO and PPC, one of the biggest mistakes law firms make is to not to invest in a great website. Your website is the foundation of your marketing success and it is often the difference between landing a large case or losing it to a competitor.

What do consumers say?

Watch the video above to see some commentary from study group participants, they provide some great insight. Without question, consumers care about what your law firm website looks like. This is not just our opinion. It’s the feedback we’ve collected over the years after conducting number consumer focus groups, user testing and conducting surveys. We’ve studied those who have no experience hiring a lawyer and those who have hired a lawyer in the past. What we’ve found out is that consumers feel there is a direct correlation between the way your website looks and the immediate impression your visitors have about your law firm. If your website looks outdated, the feedback we get from study participants is that your law firm may be “behind the times” when it comes to keeping up with current laws or the use of technology. If you have video on your website that you produced yourself and it doesn’t look or sound like it was professionally done, you have a very high chance of losing that visitor because as one consumer said “If you are really a successful lawyer, you wouldn’t be spending time trying to do make your own videos. You’d be able to afford having professional videos made.” On the other hand, law firm websites with a strong design are more likely to encourage more serious cases and have the appearance of being more successful to the consumer. In our research, the more visually impressive websites consistently are the ones selected as the first call the participant would make. That doesn’t mean poorly designed websites won’t get calls (some of the test results have shocked me) because design is a subjective thing. One mans trash website is another mans treasure.  However the great majority of the time, a great website with both beauty and brains is going to end up the winner.

The post Does Your Website Design Matter to Consumers When Choosing a Lawyer? appeared first on Internet Marketing for Lawyers.

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As of January 2014, according to Pew Research, 87% of the U.S. population uses the Internet. These numbers will only continue to grow.

What these numbers should tell you is that pretty much everyone is on the Internet. All races, all ages, they are online. If it wasn’t clear before it should be clear that it is time to get serious about your law firm marketing if you want to grow your business.

Ask yourself this question (and be honest about it): Is your law firm website better than your online competitors? If the answer is no, you are most likely losing potential cases to other attorneys. On average, most consumers will look at 4-5 different law firm websites before they choose one to call. If you are searching for a company to create a new website for your firm, are you focused on the lowest cost or in finding a company that will help you convert more visitors into leads? Focusing on website development costs can cost you much more in lost revenue than just the cost to develop a website.

Five reasons why it’s important to have a great web design

1. Your website’s design is a direct representation of your brand 

Whether you realize it or not, you have a brand. Every business has one. The question is do you dictate it or does the market? What kind of image are you giving to your prospective clients? If your website design is old and outdated or the design is bad, that’s a direct reflection of your business and it can make you look like a second-rate law firm. That’s not the impression you want consumers to have about you and make no mistake about it, they will judge you based on your website.  A 2011 study in the UK found that 70% of web users would not buy from a business with a bad website design.  Most consumers don’t know who you are when they visit your site so it’s important to make sure they have a great first impression of your law firm. A visually appealing and modern website helps to accomplish just that.

2. Helps you stand out from the crowd

With nearly 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S., online competition for consumers is tougher than it has ever been. Considering that consumers are comparing your website to other law firms online, a beautiful website can help you stand out from the crowd. Most people who are looking to find a lawyer online have never hired one before so if you don’t stand out it’s going to be pretty hard for them to differentiate you from other attorneys they find.

3. Maximize your conversions

While getting traffic to your site is important, getting those visitors to pick up the phone and call you or submit a contact form online is even more important to your bottom line. Thinking about conversion rate should be an important part of any site design and it’s why we’ve invested a lot of time and money into focus groups and user testing over the years. A great design is not just about aesthetics but about strategically laying out the information on a site. Are you giving your site visitors a compelling reason to call your firm? Are you using a call to action in a place where your site visitors will see it? Is your site structured in a way that easily enables your most important content to be easily found by your visitors? Is the text on your site easy to read on mobile and tablet devices? There are many reasons why people leave a website and your site should avoid these if possible.  A site created with conversion in mind helps in generating leads and ultimately cases.

4. Good for your site rankings on Google

Google is monitoring the behavior of your site visitors. Often looking at your analytics can help you identify if there are problems with your bounce rate (where a visitor leaves after seeing only one page on your site). A high bounce rate means in most cases that the design is bad, the content is poor or the content is not relevant to the info the consumer really wanted to find. A great website design can keep people on your site longer, giving them more time to find out about your firm instead of your competitors. If most people come to your site and then click that back button and leave your site within the first 30 seconds, what kind of message does that send to Google? It tells Google that visitors don’t want to be on your site…and that kind of user behavior can lower your rankings. Google is all about providing the very best user experience possible. That’s what keeps people using Google and it’s what makes them lots of money.

5. Great design helps with SEO

One of the most important factors in SEO is link building, the process of acquiring links from other websites that point to your website. Link building for law firms in 2015 is tough…harder than ever before (which can be said for link building for any business). These days people are afraid to link out to other websites and rightfully so. Google’s Penguin algorithm has penalized many websites that engaged in link behavior that was against Google guidelines. For this reason, other websites are very careful about what they link to. You have a much greater likelihood of acquiring links if your site is modern, cutting edge and makes you look like a trustworthy law firm. Especially if you are creating “link-worthy” content. For example, criminal attorney George Ramos exoneration map on his website that we created was featured in multiple online publications, including the Huffington Post.

Why do so many firms invest thousands of dollars each month on SEO, PPC, retargeting and other forms of marketing without first making sure they have a great website that can maximize the conversion of those site visitors? At times it seems firms don’t care about wasting their money! Even if you don’t advertise and you generate all your business through referrals,  you still need to have a website that will convince that person to contact your law firm.  Your website is the foundation of your online marketing so take it serious.  You need to do whatever you can to build the trust of your site visitors and a great website design is the first step in that process.

The post The Importance of Having a Great Design in Law Firm Marketing appeared first on Internet Marketing for Lawyers.

What are the most common reasons people leave a law firm’s website?

• Poor or outdated design – Your website design is a direct reflection of your law firm’s brand. If your design is bad or outdated, it can make you look like a second-rate law firm. Whether you are or not, that’s the impression you are giving your site visitors. If you want potential clients to think you’re a trustworthy and reliable law firm, your sites design needs to reflect that.
• Poorly written content  – Content that is stuffed with keywords can be incredibly annoying to read for site visitors. Many attorney websites try to do this for SEO reasons but today keyword stuffing your content can cause your site to be penalized. Don’t do it.
• Lack of information – Consumers are looking for information on you and your law firm. If you don’t provide them with enough information, in most cases you will lose them.
• Hard to read on their mobile or tablet device – If your site is not built responsive or mobile friendly, it’s time you make that investment. Over 50% of all digital media is consumed on mobile devices. If your site is difficult to read on mobile or tablet devices you increase your chances of losing that prospect.
• Annoying pop-ups – Users hate pop-ups, don’t annoy your visitors. If you are going to use them, allow your visitors to easily close them out. I’ve seen law firm sites where chat windows pop up on the page with no way to close them and that’s simply a bad idea.
• Information is difficult to find – If the content on your site is burried or difficult to find, most likely your visitors are not going to find it. Important information shouldn’t be more than 2 clicks away at any time.
• Low budget video – Blurry video, poor audio, bad editing….what a terrible message this can give visitors. If your videos look cheap and unprofessional, you look the exact same way to your potential visitors. In most cases it’s better not to have these on your site at all.
• Slow load times – If your site takes a long time to load, you risk losing visitors. Especially on mobile devices.

All of these things can contribute to you losing a visitor or more importantly a potential case.

The post Reasons Why Visitors are Leaving Your Law Firm’s Website appeared first on Internet Marketing for Lawyers.

Law firms are not exactly known for having incredible, visually stunning websites are they? Ask any ordinary person what they picture in their head for a law firm website and they will most likely tell you they picture a website that involves gavels, pillars, scales of justice or just something that looks old, crusty and outdated. And often times that’s exactly the case for law firm websites. Many attorneys fail to understand how important the design of a website is to their business. Your law firm’s website is quite often the very first impression you make on a potential client. If you are not making a great first impression on consumers who find your website online, I can promise you that you are losing cases to your competitors who are making the right impression with their website.

Pay Attention to the Data

Website analytics can tell us a significant amount of information about the way visitors respond to your website. Analytics data can tell us a lot more than just how many website visitors your site is getting. It can tell us how long people are staying on your site, what they are clicking (or not clicking), where they are scrolling, what pages are most visited, which pages are rarely ever visited, which pages people are leaving your site after visitor, length of time spent on pages, etc.

The image below is a heat map of the mouse movement of site visitors to our site and is also tracking what parts of our site are being clicked (you can click it to see a larger version).

If you have video on your site, you want to know if people are even watching your video. If they are watching, you want to know how visitors are engaging with that video. For example, are they playing the video and then leaving after 8 seconds? Are most visitors watching the video the whole way through? Are your videos too long? Are they even finding the videos? The answers to all these questions are right there in the data.

How a Great Website Can Help You Get More Cases

Having a great website is a key part of growing your law practice. After all, it is the foundation of your marketing success. If you are relying on the web to help you generate new clients like most law firms today, it’s important that you understand that even an average looking website can cost you new clients. After a decade of experience in this industry, I’m still surprised to see how many law practices who going after high value cases fail to recognize the importance of having a website that is superior to competitors (at at least as good). They want big cases…but they fail to properly invest in the very thing that can help them convert more website visitors into actual potential cases. Studying website analytics over the past 10 years has made one thing crystal clear: You will never maximize the potential return on your marketing dollars without having a website that is better than your competitors. For some this is obvious and logical to assume but that would be strictly an opinion (it was always mine) but the data does not lie. It’s important to understand that the average website consumer is comparing 5 sites on average when trying to find a lawyer. Many people research much more just 5 but the point is your website is being compared to your competitors. When your website does not give your site visitors a reason to call you first, you often end up with leads for cases that other attorneys have already rejected.

Put yourself in the consumers eyes here. You want the biggest result for your injury case. What firm are you going to call first from the sites below? 

No doubt the Gomez Iagmin website is the most impressive just from the image here and it’s even more impressive if you were to browse through the site. The great majority of the time, that firm would get the first phone call from someone comparing these sites because of the powerful first impression that the site makes on users. Consumers directly correlate the way a site looks with the quality of that law firm (although in reality that is often not the case).

How do visitors see your site on mobile devices?

Another important aspect of your website is how visitors view your site on mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones, etc. Data shows the use of mobile traffic to websites continues to grow every year and that trend will continue.  Google recommends the use of responsive design for your site as usually that provides the best user experience for users. The “best user experience” is what Google wants to provide users so they give preference to sites that are optimized for mobile devices. Additionally, website load time is an increasing ranking factor in search results (again, related to user experience) so it’s important  to have a mobile friendly site.

Sites that take too long to load lose visitors and what if that visitor ended up being a big case you missed out on? Invest the money on a responsive web design so this doesn’t happen to you.

Maximizing Website Conversion Rates

There is a lot more to designing a website then just throwing a design together and making it look good. There is a careful thought process that goes into every site we design and it begins with understand what consumers want to see when they are visiting a law firm website. In order to maximize conversion rates you need to direct visitors to certain parts of your site. From focus group testing and analyzing web analytics, we have been able to develop an in-depth understanding of website visitors and we use this information on every site we develop.

The important thing to remember is trying to save money on a website design can end up costing you big revenue down the road. While we understand the importance in any business to keep costs down, you will never maximize the revenue you can generate for your law firm unless you have a killer website that helps you convert visitors into actual clients. 

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