Law Firm Websites Must Convert Visitors to Clients

September 25, 2008 – 4:37 pm

Many law firms obsess over their website traffic levels. I know this for a fact, because they frequently email me about my SEO consultation services.

“We need to generate more traffic to our law firm website because it currently doesn’t generate enough leads. We need some search engine optimization to help us generate more leads.”

This is a common statement, but there are two potential problems with it…

First of all, this statement reveals a common misconception a lot of website owners have — that search engine optimization can be used to generate website leads. SEO is a traffic generator, but not a lead generator. SEO can increase the amount of traffic to a law firm website by improving the site’s ranking in major search engines (for relevant search phrases). But SEO is not a lead generation technique. In other words, it can increase the number of visitors to a law firm website but it cannot make those visitors do anything upon arriving.

Secondly, many legal websites get plenty of traffic on a regular basis, but do a poor job converting that traffic into leads and inquiries. In other words, these problem websites lack the fundamentals of lead generation.

I once spoke to a lawyer in my area who swore she wasn’t getting enough website traffic, based on the fact that she wasn’t getting any emails through the site. Fifteen minutes of research revealed something surprising (to her) but unsurprising to me. Her website was getting about 15 - 20 unique visitors per day. That’s plenty of traffic for a single lawyer. If she converted just one of those visitors into a client each week, she would have more business than she could handle.

But therein lies the problem, and it’s a common problem on many law firm websites. Her website had some web usability problems that made it hard to navigate. So we fixed those problems. It was also hard to find the contact information, a website marketing sin. So we fixed that too. We also created a free phone consultation service (for first-time inquiries) and promoted that service in highly visible places on the website.

Long story short, she is getting a steady stream of emails through her site these days.

This story illustrates the difference between website traffic and viable leads. It really doesn’t matter how much traffic your law firm website has if you’re not converting those casual visitors into viable leads and inquiries. In other words, you have to work hard to get those visitors to do something once they reach your website. Otherwise, your visitors are like cars passing by on a highway.

This story also illustrates the need to have some kind of analytics program in place on your law firm website — a stats tool that tells you how many visitors you get each day, what search phrases they use to find you, and other critical pieces of website “intelligence.” Without that, you don’t even know where you stand, or what needs to be improved.