Consumers discuss how design impacts their decision on choosing a lawyer
We take a lot of pride in trying to produce the most beautiful websites in the legal industry, but beauty isn’t the only thing we care about. The “brains” behind the sites we build are may be even more important than the aesthetics. By brains I mean the way a site is created in order to increase your conversion rate. Our goal with every site we create is to try and convert as many of your site visitors as possible. In the end, this means your website generates more leads and cases for your law firm. While we see a lot of firms aggressively market their practice and spend heavily on SEO and PPC, one of the biggest mistakes law firms make is to not to invest in a great website. Your website is the foundation of your marketing success and it is often the difference between landing a large case or losing it to a competitor.
What do consumers say?
Watch the video above to see some commentary from study group participants, they provide some great insight. Without question, consumers care about what your law firm website looks like. This is not just our opinion. It’s the feedback we’ve collected over the years after conducting number consumer focus groups, user testing and conducting surveys. We’ve studied those who have no experience hiring a lawyer and those who have hired a lawyer in the past. What we’ve found out is that consumers feel there is a direct correlation between the way your website looks and the immediate impression your visitors have about your law firm. If your website looks outdated, the feedback we get from study participants is that your law firm may be “behind the times” when it comes to keeping up with current laws or the use of technology. If you have video on your website that you produced yourself and it doesn’t look or sound like it was professionally done, you have a very high chance of losing that visitor because as one consumer said “If you are really a successful lawyer, you wouldn’t be spending time trying to do make your own videos. You’d be able to afford having professional videos made.” On the other hand, law firm websites with a strong design are more likely to encourage more serious cases and have the appearance of being more successful to the consumer. In our research, the more visually impressive websites consistently are the ones selected as the first call the participant would make. That doesn’t mean poorly designed websites won’t get calls (some of the test results have shocked me) because design is a subjective thing. One mans trash website is another mans treasure. However the great majority of the time, a great website with both beauty and brains is going to end up the winner.