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Legal Marketing: 4 tips for enhancing your law firm's website

Guest post by: Tom Matte

Article Overview: The following steps will help boost traffic to your law firm’s website, allow you to keep up with the latest trends and help you turn it into a true business development tool.

Legal Marketing: 4 tips for enhancing your law firm's website

The following steps will help boost traffic to your law firm’s website, allow you to keep up with the latest trends and help you turn it into a true business development tool.

SEO development, content management, mobile optimization, as well as website tracking tools are four great steps to take your law firm's website to the next level. In this post, we'll cover the first two, then later this week, we'll discuss the rest.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is an important part of the website process. With the right keywords, more people will be able to find information about your firm; so, make sure the content on your firm's website is search engine optimized.

There's a science to the art of volleying to an optimum place on search engines; it's a task that is best not left to chance. Even as the content is being developed, write with an eye toward the words a reader would likely type into a search engine to find a firm like yours.

The best keywords actually tend to be key phrases, 2-4 words that accurately reflect what a reader will find on your site. AVOID single-word keywords or phrases that are too general - like "legal" or "law." Also avoid terms that are too specific; they may get eliminated from a pertinent search. Think about what you type into Google when you are searching for a business or service provider. Think about your audience when determining and using these keywords.

Keep in mind, though, that search engines rank individual pages within sites too, so you may want to use more specific key terms on some inside pages. For law firms, that may give you more flexibility in the keywords you use for specific audiences. "Employment law" and "Atlanta law firm" may be pretty similar terms to you, but a potential client might use very different terminology, so you'll need to tailor your search to the audience.

Finally, a great way to improve your search engine rankings is to increase the number of other sites that link to yours. Basically, the more places where your site is referenced (linked) the "better" your site looks to Google. So make sure your site address is referenced on all your social media accounts, and all the accounts of everyone at your firm. Include it when you comment on various blogs or LinkedIn group posts. It's even better if your site address in included on other, non-related Websites. For example, if its listed on a local referral network or if one of your clients recommend you on their site. For more on this, read my previous blog on link juice.

2. Content Management System

The next step to enhance your website is to use a content management system. This tool will make it easier to manage collaborative work and content. There are many new content management systems that make putting professional-looking content online easy and user-friendly.

The one I use and highly recommend is, WordPress, the largest open source, self-hosted blogging tool in the world (it started as a blogging tool, but is now used for entire websites). It's free and offers thousands of great templates, themes, widgits and plugins. (Note: Even though WordPress is free, some themes may not be free.) You and your partners can easily use it to post new blogs, make site updates and produce other online marketing content. This post was produced using a WordPress template.

WordPress provides its own tracking system, which shows how many people are viewing your blogs, which ones are most popular, and which search terms are bringing people to your blog. If you comment on another legal services blog in WordPress, the application tracks that comment and any replies to it too.

Even though WordPress is the software I use and like, there are still a number of others with very similar features. Some of these include:

• Drupal also has a very large CMS user base. Drupal is not as blog-focused as WordPress, and it includes features such as forums, user blogs, OpenID, profiles and the best feature-taxonomy. Taxonomy is a popular feature that allows for different types of content categories.
• Joomla is also a fairly popular CMS, but it is much more advanced. This CMS is easy to install with Joomla's installer and also allows for plugins and themes like WordPress. Most all of Joomla's plugins and themes cost additional fees.
• Radiant CMS is the most different from the above mentioned. It uses a different template language, called Radius. Even though it's a little different, the developers have made it simple for companies to use.

Each of these has positives and negatives; so before you invest any time, make sure you do your research.

You're not done yet...Make sure you check out part 2!

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Article Tags: Atlanta law firm marketing, business development, legal marketing, website development



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