Three Mistakes to Avoid on Your Law Firm’s Website

Originally published by Stacey E Burke Blog.

A law firm’s website is its most important digital asset, and now more than ever serves as the initial point of contact for many potential new clients and referral sources. With the ever-evolving landscape of digital trends, search engine algorithm changes, and mobile vs. desktop metrics, ensuring your website stays up-to-date can be a time-consuming process.

Below are three of the most common website mistakes, which are often overlooked but essential to digital marketing success.

Social Media Icons

We’ve discussed the importance of social media for law firm marketing extensively, including how to find your law firm’s social media voice and tips for perfecting your law firm’s social media designs. With all of the time and energy your firm is (hopefully) investing in social media, make sure your website has visible and easily accessible social media icons. Whether in the header, footer, or both, social icons should allow visitors to quickly click to visit your social media channels.

Mistake To Avoid

When visitors click on one of your social icons, make sure it opens in a new window. If they click on the icon, and your LinkedIn Company Page opens in the same window, the visitor is no longer on your website and you’ve potentially lost a conversion – whether it be a call, contact form submission, or email.

Phone Numbers

With mobile devices now generating 57% of all website traffic, mobile responsive design is more important than ever. With Google algorithms shifting to show more and more local results (the results for businesses closest in proximity to the searcher’s physical location), contact information can be one of the most important elements of your website. Users need to easily find your firm’s phone number when they need it, and it needs to be coded correctly for them to simply click on the number on a mobile device and call your firm.

Mistake To Avoid

ALL of the phone numbers embedded in your firm’s website should be click-to-call. This means if a visitor views your website on a mobile device and touches a phone number, it should automatically open in their phone’s dialer, allowing them to call your firm with a single click. Without this functionality, the user would have to copy and paste the phone number into their dialer or write it down and then call – either leading to a frustrated user or someone who will simply abandon the attempt.

Contact Forms

Providing your website visitors with multiple methods of conversion is important. Different people interact with a website in different ways; some people may prefer to call the firm, while others choose to email or fill out a contact form. Contact forms are essential elements of any website, and particularly important if your firm is using its website as a lead generation mechanism.

Mistakes to avoid

First and foremost, make sure your website has a Contact Page and the Contact Page has a contact form. For law firms running marketing campaigns to drive inbound traffic, we also recommend including a contact form on individual practice area pages as well as attorney biography pages. Second, ensure your website provides confirmation of user submission, which lets the user submitting a form know the attempt was successfully sent to the firm. This could be a message that appears in the same screen or a redirect to a Thank You page on the website with information about who will contact them and in what timeframe. Finally, make it a point to check your website contact forms are working correctly by sending test form submissions on a monthly basis. Make sure the confirmation is showing appropriately, the intended recipient is in fact receiving the submission, and that someone is following up in the allotted timeframe.

Ensuring your law firm’s website is both visually appealing AND technically correct are equally important elements of website design and development. We build websites for law firms across the country in a variety of practice areas, making sure they are built with the next generation of design in mind. Find out how your digital properties perform with a Digital Assets Audit, or learn more about building a new website for your firm today.

Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.

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