Online marketing for law firms requires investment in landing pages that can help to 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 that will allow them to take advantage of inbound marketing. Depending upon the size of your law firm, your landing pages may take the form of practice area pages, allowing visitors to “land” on a particular practice area page that provides links to more specific resources and encourages your visitor to schedule a consultation. How should you create landing pages for your law firm? You’ll want to learn more about landing pages before you get started, and then you’ll want to consider buyer personas, SEO optimization, specific content like client testimonials or videos, and crafting a straightforward call to action.
Learning About Landing Pages and How They Work
Landing pages aren’t just used for law firm online marketing. To be sure, landing pages are used by a wide variety of businesses engaged in online marketing, including law firms. Generally speaking, a landing page is exactly what it sounds like: a page that 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, that are 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 that specializes in one legal area, such as a family law firm, might have a single landing page that directs visitors to divorce, child custody, and modification pages, in addition to 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 individual 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, and they’re not even like online advertisements you might be placing for your firm. Rather, they’re carefully crafted pieces of online 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 pieces of online marketing in our Guide to Law Firm Marketing.
Thinking About Your Buyer Personas
Landing pages, like any other online content that’s part of your inbound marketing plan, 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 idea client in mind. To ensure that your content targets that ideal client, you’ll want to do a significant amount of work up front to develop buyer personas. When you’re imagining your ideal reader or website visitor, you’ll want to think about a wide range of characteristics well beyond the legal topic—the visitor’s geographic residence, socioeconomic status, cultural background, and other related factors. Many law firms have more than one buyer persona depending upon who they’re hoping to draw into the firm’s online content and what they want those visitors to do (i.e., get in touch about hiring a lawyer, apply for a legal position).
By spending the time to create buyer personas up front, you can ensure that all of 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
Just like any other online content you create, you’ll want to think about search engine optimization (SEO) and your landing pages. Some SEO work may require a website designer who can help to ensure that your landing pages are crawled by search engines, but there’s a lot of SEO work you can do on your own. 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 think about 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 simply and straightforward, and you want to keep them visually pleasing so that your visitor can easily navigate them. Part of this strategy is emphasizing a single call-to-action (CTA) on the page. Rather than having multiple forms that 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 make sure 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 are able to 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 work). 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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