If you have a Web site for your law firm, it is very important that you have analytics software installed and that you pay attention to what it is telling you. With the right reports, you can make informed changes to your site, ensuring the best user experience for visitors to your site, and maximizing the chance that someone who needs your help will opt to make contact with you. Here are a few items that you should pay attention to when going through your Web site reports.

Time Per Page

How much time are people spending on your pages? Are there some pages where people linger for minutes and other pages where they spend an average of just a few seconds before they click away? Learn from the pages people are taking the time to read and see if there is anything about your less popular pages that you can change to make them like your “stickier” pages.

Top Exit Pages

The “exit page” is the last page someone views on your Web site before clicking out of it. If you have a page on your Web site that is a top exit page, what is it about the page that causes people to leave your site? If it’s the “thank you” page following your contact form, great. If your homepage is your top exit page, you may have problems.

Link Usage

Links people use on your site, and the links they don’t use, may be telling you something about the usefulness, popularity and visibility of certain content on your site. If there is a link on your homepage that has not been clicked on in a year, think about removing it. If the content is important, then consider moving the link to some other place on the page where people will see it and use it.

404 Not Founds

A “404 Not Found” is an error that people get when they attempt to view a page on your Web site that doesn’t exist. This can be from a typing error by the visitor or a broken link on somebody else’s Web site. If you’re getting a lot of 404 errors, you should have a special 404 page on your Web site to help people get to your homepage, and get other Web sites to fix those broken links into your site if you can.

Bounce Rate

“Bounce Rate” refers to how many visitors immediately exit your site without viewing more than one page. There is no definite measure about what is a reasonable bounce rate, but if your data shows a 100% bounce rate, that is very bad. Pay close attention to the percentage of people who leave your site immediately and, over time, you’ll get good data about whether changes you make to your site have had a positive or negative impact.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free analytics software available to anyone with a Web site. If you do not have analytics software installed on your Web site, it is recommended that you consider this full-featured Google utility.

In our last post, we presented reasons one through five of why search engine advertising is a great, cost-effective way to get more clients.

Now it’s time for part two: Reasons six through ten.

1. You pay only when someone clicks on your ad. It doesn’t matter how many “impressions” there are (that is, how many times your ad is viewed). The search engines only charge you for actual clicks – which means you’re paying to reach visitors who are actually interested in your services.
2. Highly targeted. Bid only on keywords that are relevant to your practice. You can have 10 or 10,000 keywords – as noted above, you pay only when someone clicks your ad!
3. You can test different messages in your ads. Research what messages are most effective in driving visitors to your Web site to make contact with you, and use that information in your future marketing materials.
4. Highly flexible medium. Depending on your practice needs and goals, you can advertise only in the search engines and only when someone searches for your keywords, or you can extend your reach to appear on mobile phones, Google Maps, online and print newspapers, television, and anywhere else that the search engines allow you to advertise.
5. Yellow Pages are dying. Search engine advertising is rapidly replacing Yellow Pages directories as a significant source of new clients. In conclusion, there’s no time like now to divert some of your marketing dollars from other channels to search engine advertising in an effort to reach the rapidly growing pool of prospects looking for legal services on the Internet.

Five tips on the benefits of search engine advertising

Are you thinking about marketing your law practice in a search engine like Google, but aren’t sure you should take the plunge?

Here’s part one of a two-part series about why search engine advertising is a great way to get more clients:

1. React immediately to events in the news, changes in the law, or even your own personal whims. Unlike more traditional forms of marketing like the Yellow Pages, you don’t have to worry about planning your ad copy months in advance.
2. Reach people outside of your geographic area – people in other cities, the entire state of California , or even other countries. This is especially helpful if you practice an esoteric area of law, or you are looking for plaintiffs for a class action lawsuit. If you’re a personal injury lawyer, you may find that injured tourists often return home before beginning their search for a San Francisco attorney.
3. Pay as much or as little as you want (and start & stop advertising at any time). No matter what your budget is, you have an unlimited amount of flexibility. Having cash flow issues or going on vacation? Pause your advertising until you’re ready to resume. Not enough work? Spend more this week to get a few extra inquiries.
4. Get real feedback about how well your Web site converts visitors into clients. Google allows you to track conversions and other important data about your Web site visitors. If your data is telling you that a page on your site is a top exit page (i.e., they often leave your site from that page), you can experiment with different looks for that page, creating more conspicuous calls to action, or trying different copy.
5. Easiest and most effective way to ensure that your web site is visible in the search engines. Even if your site ranks well for certain phrases, you cannot rank well for the thousands of words and phrases that are relevant to your practice areas. Also, for new or poorly optimized sites, search engine marketing may be the only way to ensure that people can find you on the internet.

Next post: Reasons 6 through 10 of why search engine advertising is a great, cost-effective way to get more clients.

Turning a consultation into a client

There’s a lot of discussion in legal blogs and forums about “tire kickers” – a term used to connote prospective clients who go to a consultation with an attorney but fail to hire the attorney for any legal services. It’s frustrating to meet with prospective clients, not get paid for your time, and then have them never come back after the initial meeting.

It must be remembered that even tire kickers will eventually buy a car

In the Information Age, there are more opportunities for people to compare and shop around, so it is to your benefit, as a service provider in a crowded market, to stand above the rest through your qualifications and your superior customer service.

Customer Service Counts

Good customer service from the very first contact is vital. Listen to what the prospect wants, and respond quickly and thoughtfully. A good response from you will make it easier for them to decide to consult with you.

If you cannot help them, refer them to your local Lawyer Referral and Information Service (LRIS) and they will remember your considerate manner should they or a loved one need legal help in the future.

Get them into your office and close the deal

Through great customer service, you can get them into your office. Now it’s up to you to close the deal. Emphasize your unique selling points. Why are you a better value than the next lawyer? Even though prospects may appear cost-conscious, they will hire you if you can persuade them that you will handle their matter in an effective and efficient manner.

Even if you can’t close the deal and they don’t hire you right away, they may remember how you treated them, and when they finally make the decision to hire an attorney, or to refer a friend or family member to an attorney, they’ll remember your name.

As an attorney, you know that referrals from other attorneys or satisfied clients are one of the best sources of new clients for your law practice, not the least because the referring party has already said good things about you and the work you do. Most of your clients probably come to your practice in this manner. However, as effective as word-of-mouth marketing may be, it is often not enough to sustain or grow a successful law practice. You must seek out new prospects from other sources as well.

If you have a website, hopefully prospects will find you online through a search engine or directory and visit your site to learn more about you. Since you don’t know which page of the Web site the prospect will enter from, it is critical that every page be constructed in such a way as to encourage as many of these visitors as possible to make contact with you.

You don’t have much time to convince them either. Many believe that you have as little as 10 seconds to grab a Web site visitor’s interest before they back out and visit a different site. As a service professional, you don’t have a tangible product to sell, so how do you convince prospective clients to take the step of making contact with you?

Add Client Testimonials

Along with other elements of a successful site, you should consider adding client testimonials. If a satisfied client says something positive about you in a letter or email, or over the telephone, ask them directly if you can ascribe their feedback to a Web site testimonial. It will increase visitors’ comfort level with you if they see that other people, like them, hired you and were glad that they did.

Add Case Results

If you’re not comfortable with client testimonials (or you don’t have any), have a short case result on the page. For example, if the page is about your personal injury practice, boast about a particularly successful case result like “Case: Dog attack causing facial scarring. Result: $150,000 to plaintiff.” Then provide a “View More Results” link to a results page listing all of your good results.Providing such information helps prospective clients be confident that you can provide the legal services that will help them solve whatever problem they are facing.

Say It Loudly

When including the testimonial or case result on the Web page, make sure that you include it in such a way as the visitor cannot help but see it. Change the background of the client quote or case result somewhat so that the visitors’ eyes are drawn to it. Keep the call-out above the scroll bar so that it is in front of their eyes the moment the page loads into their browser.

Remember that you have only a few seconds to grab visitors, so make those seconds count.

If you practice two or more widely divergent areas of law, such as a law practice consisting of criminal law and estate planning, you may want to think about the benefits of marketing the two or more distinct practice areas in separate, stand alone Web sites. This article discusses the pros and cons of doing this.

Advantages

One of the greatest advantages of separate Web sites is it gives law firms an opportunity to present themselves as focusing on a particular area of law. Potential clients have more confidence in, and are more likely to hire specialists over generalists. And if one of your practice areas is highly competitive, for example personal injury law, positioning yourself in a separate Web site as a law firm that focuses on product liability will help with client conversions.

This approach will help focus your message and be less confusing to visitors who are searching for a very particular type of lawyer. Aesthetically, it also affords law firms an opportunity to choose a design appropriate for the practice area.

Finally, if a Web site is focused on only a certain practice area, search engines like Google are more likely to perceive that Web site as more relevant for important search phrases than a less focused site.

Disadvantages

The main disadvantage is that two or more Web sites are harder and more expensive to maintain than one. The initial cost will be more, and thought must be given to whether the expense will be worth the long-term benefits.

When both of your Web sites have been indexed by the search engines, people looking for you by name may end up on the wrong site. This problem can be minimized with careful planning, in particular, making sure that your Web sites’ pages are clearly and distinctively titled.

If you or someone in your law office speaks Spanish, you probably already serve a number of clients who need to, or prefer to, communicate with you in Spanish. Through your involvement in these cases, you’re probably aware that the growing Spanish-speaking community can be a valuable source of clients for your law practice.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 14% of the San Francisco population is Latino. Other statistics show that about 78% of the Latino population, regardless of their English-speaking proficiency, choose to speak Spanish in their homes.

How do you reach these clients?

Spanish-language Google can be a powerful and economical way to reach highly targeted Spanish-speaking San Franciscans who are actively searching for legal services. Because very few attorneys are taking advantage of advertising to this community in their preferred language, these potential clients can be reached very inexpensively.

As an example, in the above screenshot, if you search for the generic and widely used search term “Abogados” in Spanish Local Google, you’ll find only four advertisers. The same search in English Local Google yields more results, but most of the ads are written in English and would not show if the potential client limited his or her search results to the Spanish language.

Spanish Google is widely used

One California advertiser, targeting clients in both English and Spanish, has found his cost per click for his Spanish language Google ads to be less than half of that of his English ads. Furthermore, he finds that consistently, eight of his top ten performing ads are in Spanish language Google.

Translate your Web site

Of course, if you are advertising for Spanish-speaking clients, as a critical first step, you need to translate the most important pages of your Web site to Spanish so you have a place to which to link your Google ads. Bringing potential clients from a Spanish language ad to an English language Web site is unlikely to lead to many conversions.

An increasing number of attorneys are shifting advertising dollars from the Yellow Pages print directories to the Internet in an effort to bring the growing number of clients seeking legal services online into the advertiser’s law practice. There are lots of places on the Internet for a law firm to spend its limited advertising dollars making it hard to determine in advance what is going to result in the firm’s best return on investment (ROI).

Attorney Directories

There are countless online attorney directories. Some directories are practice area specific, others are geographically limited and others are nationwide, covering all practice areas.

The advantages of attorney directories are that several of them are well funded and well marketed, making it easy for consumers to find them. Some of the older and more established directories rank well in the “natural” listings of the search engines as well, which further increases their visibility.

The main disadvantage of the attorney directory is that you seldom have very much control over the placement of your listing. For example, you may be listed under “Family Law” in a directory, but your ad disappears within a long list of other local family law attorneys. Premium listings are sometimes available, but your monthly fee to the directory then increases significantly.

Attorney “Matching” Services

Attorney matching services operate somewhat like lawyer referral services. You pay an annual fee to the service for a specific geographic region for your practice area. When someone goes to the matching service’s Web site and requests a referral, the service sends an email to the subscribing attorneys for that geographic area, who then compete with each other for the client’s case.

The advantage of the matching service is that it is a fast and easy way to get online. You don’t even need a Web site to get started.

The disadvantages are that, depending on your practice areas and geographic location, it can be very expensive to participate in one of these services. In addition, the online law practice forums contain a lot of mixed commentary about the value of these services and whether, ultimately, very many attorneys enjoy a positive ROI from the matching services.

Search Engine Advertising

Search engine advertising refers to the “Sponsored Listings” you see at the top and in the right hand margins of the search engine results pages in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The way it works is you select search phrases, write ads about yourself, connect them to your Web site, and bid how much you are willing to pay for each click on one of your ads. For example, if one of your search phrases is “San Francisco Bankruptcy Lawyer,” you’d write an ad to display when someone types that in and tell the search engine how much you’d be willing to pay for a click, say $2.00.

The advantages of search engine advertising is that you have complete control over your search phrases, ad copy, placement on the search engine results pages, and budget. People entering phrases such as “Car Accident Lawyer” into a search engine are most likely actively searching for legal services and many attorneys find search engine advertising to be a very economical way to get new clients into their law practices.

The disadvantages are that the learning curve for a well-managed campaign is fairly steep and daily monitoring of your account can be time consuming. A lot of money can be wasted in an under-managed campaign, so if you’re serious about search engine advertising, you may want to consider outsourcing it to one of several companies that provide this type of service.