The Biggest Problem in Legal Marketing

by Nick Nichols, Professional Services Marketing Expert

The biggest problem I see in online legal marketing is not how to drive traffic to a website, but what happens – or doesn’t happen – when people get to the website.

It’s amazing to me how attorneys will spend serious money on SEO or PPC to get clicks, but then won’t invest money in having targeted landing pages created to convert visitors into clients.

Many PPC and SEO campaigns – no matter what the keyword – all point to the firm’s home page, making it confusing or impossible for the searcher to easily find what he or she was looking for. In fact, I just did a search for "Dallas truck accident lawyer" and 7 out of 11 Adwords ads pointed to home pages. That’s 63%. What a waste of money.

And to further prevent conversion, most legal web pages look similar and make similar offers, such as a free case evaluation. Seldom do they make a compelling, meaningful offer that’s truly different from what their competitors are doing. Only one firm in the search I just did had anything even close to a compelling offer.

Finally, a recent survey of Texas law firms found that 96% did not have secure, fast-loading websites. This is a shame, given that more people now access the Internet via their smart phones than via desktops. Why invest money in promotion only to have visitors click away because your website won’t load or they perceive it to be unsafe?

Remember, it’s not the number of hits* that matters… it’s how many viable leads your Internet marketing generates that’s the true measure of success.

*Hits: "How Idiots Track Success"