Prospective clients can compare a half-dozen attorney websites in minutes. Worse, search engines frequently direct prospects to major national specialty sites containing lots of optimized content and tempting “free case-evaluation forms.”
Unless you have been regularly devoting time or money to your website, it is unlikely to compare favorably with the national and better local sites. If you have not recently Googled your specialty both locally (e.g., Los Angeles DUI) and nationally (e.g., drunk driving), you should review what prospective clients are finding.
You will quickly find evidence of coming changes like these:
Expanded and more-focused content
1. Legal websites promising expertise in multiple specialties will steadily yield ground to websites devoted to one specialty. Lawyers focusing on two or more specialties will have a website devoted to each specialty.
2. Optimized national legal sites rich in content and having user-friendly case-submission forms will take more and more business from weaker local websites, fueling the rise of national practices.
3. Lawyers’ billboard sites (“I practice in these areas”) will be replaced by educational websites which answer questions and teach. The volume of informative content on the successful sites will continue to expand.
Multi-step selling
4. Lead-generation techniques and devices will grow increasingly soft and varied, and will add more steps. Auto-responders will be used more frequently.
5. Lawyers will adopt the lead-generation and cultivation techniques already employed successfully by sophisticated web marketers.
Better, more-informative videos
6. Video will become more prevalent on all types of legal websites, and even the more conservative lawyers will start using them. Production standards will rise.
7. Educational videos (“these are the important legal considerations”) will quickly grow to outnumber promotional videos (“I have been handling these cases for 15 years”).
8. Instead of the small number of videos common now, the best legal websites will contain large libraries of videos.
Lower pricing?
9. Hopefully, prices for websites with these attributes will come down from their current high levels, but that movement has not caught on yet. Maybe our low prices will trigger some reductions.
