The legal industry is highly competitive, and standing out from the crowd can be really challenging. Whether you’re a veteran lawyer or just started your practice, it is important to have the best website design for attorneys to stand out from the crowd. An appealing, easy-to-navigate, and well-structured attorney website will descriptively showcase your skills and knowledge to potential clients. It boosts the confidence of the potential clients in you and answers why you’re the right fit to represent their case.
Thanks to WordPress and its alternatives in the market, making a website isn’t difficult these days. People can use a pre-designed theme for their website, publish the content and go live. However, while it is an easy solution, it doesn’t get the results or make the huge impact you may want if the approach is wrong.
But, this is where our article comes in. Here, we will be discussing some of the top tips and must-haves for the best website design for an attorney.
Branding Tips
First things first, great branding is not just about colors or brand logos. It is much more than that. Your brand is how your clients perceive and remember you. To make the best website design for attorneys, the first thing you need to focus on is to ensure that your website reflects your brand.
Use Brand Logo & Name of The Law Firm
Using your law firm’s logo or brand logo in your website design is the key to creating brand awareness and boosting brand recognition. An attractive and impactful logo helps the brand stand out from the competition and ensures that clients recognize your posts and content easily. Both online or offline.
Also, it is highly recommended that you use your law firm’s name or legal practice name in the website’s URL. Avoid using exact match domains such as bestpersonalinjurybostonlawfirm.us to avoid having duplicates. The SEO game has changed, and so should your online marketing techniques, but more on that later!
Use Colors Specific To Your Brand
Even if you use a premade theme for your attorney website, make sure you use your brand colors explicitly. Use your brand colors on buttons, tabs, background, links, and call-to-action. It helps add a personal touch to your brand. Regardless of whether you’re getting your attorney website designed from scratch or using WordPress, rest assured customization is possible.
Also, as you use your brand colors don’t compromise readability for the sake of it. There should be sufficient contrast between the text and the background. Bright colors in your brand colors’ palette, such as red, blue, or orange, should be used primarily in call-to-action buttons. It makes them easier to spot, boosts lead generation and conversion.
Focus on Your USP
The best website designs for attorneys are the ones that showcase the strength of the legal practice. Your website should highlight your strengths and showcase your advantage to potential clients. The website design should integrate your Unique Selling Point (USP) creatively. It helps potential clients decide if you’re the right attorney for their specific case.
There are various strategic places across the website where the USP can be highlighted like tagline, page title, About page, call-to-action buttons, etc. It should be clearly visible and strategically located.
Marketing Tips
Now, let us discuss a few marketing tips that would not only get your website into the good books of search engines but also help you drive more organic traffic through the power of content marketing and social media.
Get Listed On GMB (Google My Business)
As soon as you build your business website, you need to get it listed on Google My Business. It is free, and you just need to provide basic information about your law firm/legal practice. This includes your business name, website name, industry, location, phone number, etc. Once you’ve entered the basic information, the next step is to enter the code that Google mails you.
Once your Google My Business listing is verified, you can enjoy more features and enter more information about your business. That is your business hours, business descriptions, images, and more. A comprehensive GMB listing has a better chance of showing up in the search results. So, whenever someone searches for a lawyer in your city/area/nearby location, your listing is more likely to show up.
When your GMB listing shows up in search results for local searches, it increases organic traffic to your website. It also helps with getting more clients, resulting in a successful and more established legal practice.
Create Content That Resonates With Your Target Audience
Value-oriented and authoritative content on various law topics published on your website helps showcase your expertise, skills, and legal knowledge. One of the ways to do so is by sharing case studies. It is a great way to demonstrate your experience and how you can maneuver through complex legal situations to win a case.
Social listening is another method of creating content that resonates with your target audience. Social listening is the practice of following certain hashtags (on Twitter/Instagram) and keywords (set Google Alerts) to keep a close watch on what your target audience is talking about.
You will identify the problems people are facing and the solutions they are looking for. Their challenges would help you curate content around those issues/topics. It will help you create in-demand content that your audience is looking for. Not only will such content answer your audience’s questions, but also establish you as a recognized brand in the legal landscape.
You can create articles and blog posts around the trending topics in the law industry and share them on social media. After, you can direct the audience looking for answers on various legal forums to your blog. This is a great way to build market reputation, create awareness about your legal practice, and attract more clients. It helps to boost your website to the top ranks on the search engine results page.
SEO Optimization
One of the crucial elements when developing the best website design for attorneys is not only visual elements and graphics but also search engine optimization. Irrespective of whether the website is law-related or any other industry, it has to be search engine optimized. It is quintessential to rank higher on search engines for specific keywords/keyphrases and drive higher organic traffic.
Sites built on WordPress have tons of features that help with SEO optimization. Besides, there are many WordPress themes specially built for attorneys and law firms. Website owners can further optimize the site and content using various SEO plugins available for these themes. It’s also similar if you prefer using HTML templates for your attorney website. However, there are a few tips you must keep in mind when it comes to SEO –
- Don’t stuff content on your website (blog posts, articles, web content) with keywords related to your legal practice. It is an outdated SEO practice that is irrelevant today and would do more harm than good.
- Ensure the images on your websites are well-optimized. Ensure that you have the relevant titles for your images. Add context-based alt text to help search engines decipher better what the image is about.
- The content on your website should be well-formatted and properly structured. It helps enhance the readability and allows the search engines to gauge the relevance and importance of your content.
- The links integrated into content on your website should be contextual. Instead of adding links to texts like ‘Click here or ‘Click this,’ the links should be embedded to relevant keywords/keyphrases. It helps the users and the search engines understand the relevancy of the link.
Share/Display Testimonials
Testimonials help with adding credibility to your legal practice and enhance overall market reputation. It further helps boost the confidence of potential clients as they learn from the positive experience of your previous clients. When the potential clients see that you have successfully represented and won cases similar to theirs, it helps you gain their trust and offer you the task.
Customer testimonials are an important component of content marketing. Showcase testimonials on the homepage, or you can also dedicate a separate page for reviews and testimonials. For law firms, the testimonials can be displayed on the lawyers’ profiles. The reason for having testimonials is to show potential clients what you bring to the table and their experience with you. It helps big time!
Display Achievements, Awards, Certifications, and Practice Areas
Whether several lawyers are working in your firm or it’s just you, your website visitor doesn’t have to struggle to find awards you’ve won, achievements, certifications, and your practice areas. These metrics play an integral role in winning the trust of potential clients and building credibility.
The practice areas should also be clearly mentioned so that the prospects know you can handle their case. The contact information should be mentioned along with the practice areas/legal services offered. It helps the clients to know where to call when they decide to hire you or book for a consultation.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
When it comes to legal matters, people have tons of questions they want answers to. For people outside the law community, everything about law seems complicated, including the most generic queries. Consider adding an FAQ page to your website to answer some of the common questions people have, like your attorney services, fee structure, various practice areas, etc.
Simple and easy-to-understand answers would help prospective clients with no legal knowledge get the answers they’re looking for and showcase you in a positive light. The FAQs shouldn’t be jumbled and must be categorized properly as per various services/practice areas/general queries. It would help the prospect find what they’re looking for swiftly.
Attorney Website Design Tips
Having covered other elements of the best website design for attorneys, let us get to the design tips. We will discuss how to display information on the website to get maximum traction and enhance the overall user experience.
List Your Services
The legal services you offer should be listed on the website. As the legal field has many sub-categories, the clients need to know if you’re the right fit or not. If you’re a civil attorney and the client is looking for a personal injury lawyer, it only makes sense for the visitor to get to know it immediately.
The services should be ideally mentioned on the homepage and linked to the separate web pages dedicated to each of the services. So, if you’re offering estate planning, business law, and real estate legal services, the clients can simply click on the service they’re looking for.
Multiple Call-To-Actions
This is a very important element when strategizing the best website design for attorneys. Why? The primary goal of the attorney website is to help prospective clients check out information about you and your practice and get in touch with you. The website plays the role of a virtual office and serves as the gateway to encourage potential clients to request or schedule a consultation with you.
Call-to-action makes it happen for you. The call-to-action buttons should be strategically located (without overdoing it). You can place them across your website to lead potential clients to schedule an appointment with you online, book a consultation, request a callback, or call you.
The call-to-action can also be embedded in the homepage, About page, sidebar, blog posts, and other pages for ease of accessibility. However, make sure they look subtle and not too intrusive to look intimidating.
Responsive & Fast Website
More than half of the internet traffic comes from mobile phones and tablets. So, your attorney website must be responsive and mobile-friendly without taking away the experience you’re planning to offer PC visitors.
Also, your website should load fast. Internet users don’t like to wait for the page to load. The website loading time is also a Google ranking factor. So, if your website is not mobile-friendly and fast, it will not only lose potential clients and revenue but also not rank higher on search engines.
Having a fast and responsively designed (mobile-friendly) website is not optional. The site should automatically resize based on where the site is being accessed from without depleting the user experience.
Contact Forms
Mostly, the call-to-action is ‘Contact Form’ or ‘Request a Consultation’ for attorney websites. The consultation form/contact form should be simple. Ask the users only the necessary information. The idea is to ensure the prospect does not get intimidated or frustrated while filling the form. More details about the client and their case can be obtained during the in-person or phone consultation.
Most of the best website designs for attorneys make use of booking forms, which allow the prospects to schedule a consultation with you directly as per your calendar/availability.
Final Thoughts
Following these tips should help you build the best attorney website. These tips are oriented towards ranking you higher in search engines and converting visitors into clients Remember, these two are the primary goals of building a dedicated attorney website. Do remember these tips are interlinked and interdependent.
These functions should work well with each other to develop an appealing and coherent website that achieves its set objectives. So, follow these tips and create a unique, engaging, and result-oriented website that delivers!
Bring your idea and we will actualize it with an appealing, SEO optimized website. Reach out to us on call or send a proposal with your details.