Your legal website needs to perform these 5 tasks in this order to be an effective marketing tool for your practice. Fail at any stage and you risk losing the prospective client.

1. Draw visitors. Content, inbound links, search engine optimization, age of your site, and strength of competition are the main variables influencing your page rank for the commonly-used search terms. The tougher your competition, the more important it is that your site contain lots of strong content, be well-linked, and be regularly optimized.

2. Grab attention. Visitors will quickly move onto the next website if yours does not in seconds attract their interest. The best way to hold onto visitors is to directly respond to the search terms which brought them there. Presenting five specialties on your home page will never satisfy visitors as well as a site or pages dedicated 100% to one specialty.

3. Answer questions. Once visitors start reading your text or watching your legal videos, you need to immediately fill their information needs. Beginning by talking about yourself delays answers and accelerates departures from your site.

4. Build credibility. Responding to visitor questions with detailed and sophisticated advice is the best way to demonstrate that you are the right lawyer to retain. Providing more and better information than your competitors is how to win the website beauty contest. Providing your suggestions in both text and videos will appeal to a wider variety of visitors than text only.

5. Generate leads. After you have answered your visitors’ questions, obtain contact information from the portion of visitors who are prospective clients. You should offer graduated levels of information requests: (a) e-mail address only, (b) address and phone number, and (c) case information and best time to call. Incentives and follow-up should vary with the amount of client information collected.