Online marketing for law firms requires investment in landing pages that can help convert visitors to clients. As much marketing for law firms occurs online and by virtual word-of-mouth, it's more important than ever for smaller and mid-size law firms to build websites allowing them to take advantage of inbound marketing.
So, how should you create landing pages for your law firm? You'll want to learn more about landing pages before you get started.
Learning About Landing Pages and How They Work
Landing pages aren't just used for law firm online marketing. To be sure, many businesses engaged in online marketing, including law firms, use landing pages. Generally speaking, a landing page is exactly what it sounds like a page visitors land on to learn more about a business (or, in the case of a law firm, to learn more about the law firm's offerings). A landing page is usually distinct from a homepage. It's the page, or one of several pages, designed to bring visitors to a particular service you offer or to encourage the visitor to provide information for follow-up contact.
For example, a law firm specializing in one legal area, such as a family law firm, might have a single landing page directing visitors to divorce, child custody, and modification pages and asking a visitor to supply contact information to set up a consultation. For a law firm that does work in more than one area of the law—and especially if those areas of legal expertise are distinct from one another, such as a firm that has business formation attorneys, family lawyers, and criminal defense lawyers—more than one landing page for each legal field might be appropriate for your firm. Depending upon your law firm's needs, your landing pages may be your practice area pages.
If you've heard about the differences between inbound and outbound marketing, you should know that landing pages are used as a form of inbound marketing. These pages aren't like television or billboard advertisements; they're not even like online advertisements you might place for your firm. They are carefully crafted, engaging pieces of content designed to bring potential clients to the page and to turn those visitors into clients of your firm.
Learn more about other finely crafted online marketing pieces in our Guide to Law Firm Marketing.
Thinking About Your Buyer Personas
Like any other online content part of your inbound marketing plan, landing pages should be developed with your buyer personas in mind.
What is a buyer persona?
It's the "identity" of your ideal client. Any content you create for inbound marketing, including landing pages or practice area pages, should be done with your ideal client in mind. To ensure that your content targets that ideal client, you'll want to do a lot of work upfront to develop buyer personas. When you imagine your ideal reader or website visitor, you'll want to consider many characteristics beyond the legal topic—the visitor's geographic residence, socioeconomic status, cultural background, and other factors.
Many law firms have more than one buyer persona depending upon who they're hoping to draw into their online content and what they want those visitors to do (i.e., get in touch about hiring a lawyer, or apply for a legal position).
By creating buyer personas upfront, you can ensure that all the content on your landing pages is designed with your buyer personas in mind. Inbound marketing only works if you're willing to put in the effort to think carefully about framing your content to draw in particular visitors.
Considering Law Firm Landing Page Optimization
Like any other online content you create, you'll want to consider search engine optimization (SEO) and your landing pages. Some SEO work may require a website designer who can help ensure search engines crawl your landing pages, but you can do a lot of SEO work independently. In thinking about your buyer personas, you'll want to consider keywords and key phrases a particular buyer persona might use and be sure to include them in your landing page. You'll also want to consider link building and increasing your search engine rankings by providing external links.
The quality of a landing page can also play a major role in search engine rankings, and the length of your landing page is extremely important.
Client Testimonials and Law Firm Results
Including certain visual elements and information on your landing page can be helpful, such as client testimonials or law firm results. Many law firms use short videos on their landing pages, which can help to engage visitors. However, not all videos are the same for purposes of conversions. If your video takes too long to load or makes it difficult for your visitor to navigate the page in any way, the visitor simply might run another search and click on a different law firm's landing page link. Yet some videos certainly can benefit your firm. Typically, if you have a single video, it's short (and loads quickly) and provides helpful information that complements what's already on your landing page, it can help. Yet, if the video won't load or is distracting to your visitor, it could ultimately end up hurting your inbound marketing efforts.
Emphasizing Your Call to Action
You want to keep your landing pages simple and visually pleasing so your visitors can easily navigate them. This strategy emphasizes a single call-to-action (CTA) on the page. Rather than having multiple forms your visitor can fill out or various options for providing contact information, it's usually best to have a single CTA, such as a free consultation form. You'll want to ensure it's visible amidst the other information on your landing page and that it's quick and easy to use. A CTA will only be effective if visitors can engage.
Revising Your Landing Page After Testing
Like other online content you'll create for your law firm, such as blog posts, one of the great things about online marketing is that you can revise it as you test it out to see what works (and what doesn't). You should remember that not all law firms have the same elements on their landing pages, and various landing page elements can work well to attract clients for different firms. Accordingly, you'll want to create a landing page and go live with it, with plans to make revisions as you go along if necessary. Even if most of the elements work for your firm from the start, you'll also want to remember that SEO practices and optimization methods can change over time, and you'll want to make sure you update your content to reflect the current trends.
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