How your law firm website performs is often about who can tell a better story.

Let’s face it, if there’s one lawyer specializing in an area of law, there are likely dozens or hundreds of others too.

The odds are great that you know many other qualified lawyers who also practice in a similar area of the law or at least have had prior experience they can talk about to prospective clients when competing for your business.

So how do you set your firm apart from the websites of other hungry lawyers anxious to take business away from you?

What you need is a good story like a Hollywood movie. It doesn’t need to be a hero story where you get abandoned like Tarzan and have to find your way back to Civilization and resolve some internal conflicts along the way.

So what do you need to do to have a winning website?

In short, you need a website that

• Attracts attention,
• Keep attention, and
• Gets visitors to give you their phone number or email address so you can start nurturing them into becoming a client or making a referral.

We have spent years building and promoting websites for lawyers and learned many efficient and compelling ways to tell a law firm’s story visually and textually.

If you are interested in growing your reputation and your practice, then read on to see how we have done it before and will do it again and again for lawyers just like you that want to go to the next level with their law firm.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Let’s review the goals every lawyer wants to achieve with a law firm website:

• First and foremost, you want people who land on your site to think of you as being really good at what you do. We call this being credible, responsive (and if my wife is reading this, a good listener too).
• You want people to be impressed that your firm looks like you are in-step with the times and notout-dated. We aren’t talking fancy here. Just fresh and modern looking.
• You want potential clients and other attorneys (especially the referring kind) to perceive your firm as having some form of brand dominance in your local market (if not nationally).
• You want to showcase the firm’s expertise in at least one practice area (or more) by highlighting a history of experience and name dropping where appropriate.
• You want a website that connects with potential clients and gives them the feeling that “you know what it’s like to be in their shoes” and you are going to take care of them.
• If you publish articles, you want a website that gives you a forum to brag politely about your success in getting printed (because this shows you are in demand for your opinion).
• You want to produce more client leads.
• You want to produce more referrals.
• You want to have a website that Goldilocks would have said “just feels right” so that ultimately visitors would easily navigate from page to page as they journey through your site.
• Get referrals from existing clients who learn more about thefullscope of your legal services.
• If you have more than one attorney, you want to feature each attorney’s profile with as much about their C.V. as manageable.
• Your website should work on mobile devices just as well as large screens.

In laymen’s terms we can encapsulate the entire list above into three core goals.

Visitors to your site should easily figure out:

1. What legal services you provide.
2. Who are the types of clients you attract.
3. Why you are better to work with than other relevant attorneys.

If you fully accept that your website should address these 3 challenges, then you should keep reading to see how we can do this for you.

Your website must reflect your firm’s well-deserved offline reputation as being a leader in its field.

To perpetuate the transformative path of digitally branding your law firm, you need a professionally designed website that provides visitors with a user-friendly, engaging and compelling site experience.

In today’s marketplace, your site should provide people with a successful browsing experience that guides them through the website, whether they are using a desktop PC, tablet and/or mobile device.

Addressing site usability, reputation and credibility factors should be a core part of your strategy to inspire current and prospective clients to choose you over other similar law firms.

Strong messaging about your core values and a clear and compelling way for visitors to connect with your firm will help people decide they need to reach out and request more information for their legal concerns.

If you are sensitive about dealings with clients,then consider that you want to bridge the gap of publicizing your accomplishments without giving up too much information that might affect relationships with clients.

When we approach a new lawyer website project, we start with a discussion to see what your marketplace looks like in regards to four very different sets of people (and companies):

• Your current clients
• The types of potential clients you want to target.
• The different types of referral sources (usually other lawyers and service providers)
• Your local (and sometimes national) competitors.

Each of these audiences needs to be analyzed to discover and understand their online browsing habits. We then need to have landing pages with content that addresses the needs of each audience member.

Certainly you would agree that your message to another lawyer is going to be very different than the message to a potential client.

Once we have filled in the boxes of what we call the“Marketplace Matrix”, we then do some analytical research to answer the following questions:

• What kind of online user experience do competing firms provide on their websites?
• Do other relevant law firms invest much in their site experiences to attract clients?
• What kind of messaging are relevant firms targeting in their body copy?
• Do competitor firms look to attract clients via online channels (e.g. search engines)?
• Do potential clients search the internet to find service providers like you?

We take this Matrix review above and combine it with a deeper understanding of your current website goals in order to identify the ideal “personas” who we want to attract to your site.

By learning who they are and how they browse the Web, we can help you find the best ways to present your brand messaging and connect and communicate with them in a language they will be more prone to respond to.

We don’t just want to drive visitors to your site – we want to drive visitors that convert into more business for your firm.

Reviewing other similarly situated service providers(even from in and outside California)gives us perspective on the way they present their real estate and receivership services to the audiences they are targeting.

By understanding your marketplace, we will be able to better see what your website will need and use this to fuel our design and presentation strategy.