You have spent countless hours writing blogs, posting to Facebook and twitter, and optimizing every page of your website. Over the lat two months you have increased traffic by 300%, and yet nobody is calling you, emailing you, much less hiring you. If this sounds familiar, you need to understand that the conversion rate optimization of your website sucks. Sorry if I have offended you in any way, but I would rather tell you the truth and then help you fix it.
You may know a great deal about DUI law, but you may not know why visitors don’t convert to clients on your website. You may have friends that tell you your website is awesome and that it looks very professional. That is great, but looking good and professional doesn’t pay the bills. Converting visitors to paying clients is what you need to focus on. You made it through law school, so lets get you thinking a bit about some numbers, and how they impact the potential income you have each month.
Numbers don’t lie, and the easiest way to increase your client base is to take your websites the existing visitors and get them to convert to clients. If you have 500 visitors a month to your website, and your conversion rate is 1%, you should get 5 new clients a month. If you get your visitors up to 1000, you can expect to get 10 new clients a month at the same 1% conversion rate. But what if you were able to get your conversion rate to 10%? With 500 visitors, you are looking at 50 new clients a month. 1000 visitors will get you 100 new clients a month. And all you did was manipulate one aspect of your website, the conversion rate, and look at the tremendous impact it would have on your business. Life changing is probably the best way to explain it.
Before you start worrying about hiring staff to accommodate all of the new potential clients you will have, lets talk about some of the things you can do on your website to increase the conversion rate. This if strictly for DUI lawyers, so if you got here by accident, either hit the back button or apply this to your industry.
What Do You Want Your Visitors To Do?
We have literally looked at thousands of DUI attorney websites over the years, and some of them have looked great, while others should have been removed from the web immediately. One of the biggest differences we see between sites that convert well and those that don’t, is a clear call to action. What is the goal you are trying to accomplish with your website. Notice I didn’t say web page, but website. What is the path you want a visitor to take, and what is the main goal you are looking for? By defining the goal, you can then work backwards to determine what action you want your potential client to take.
For some in depth discussion We will use an example of one of the DUI lawyers that works with us. The stated goal for their website is to get a phone conversion (i.e. the visitor to take action and call us). With this is our main goal, so we want to have a clear call out on the home page of the website. We want to see the phone number prominently displayed on the website, and we want to place it in an area that stands out among all other items on our website. We can do this in several locations on the site, but we want to be clear about what it is that we want. Here is an example of a clear call to action on an attorney website.
Do you think the visitor is going to be confused about what it is that we want them to do? Did we make it abundantly clear that they can call us right now and we will answer the phone and help them? We are not confusing them in any way, and we are actually asking them to call us. People need to be reminded about what it is that we want them to do. This is not pushy, this is online marketing, and it works. Eliminate confusion and clutter, and tell them what to do.
Below the header, we want to make sure that we are addressing problems that those being arrested for drinking and driving are facing. We want to direct people through our sales funnel, and get them to do the one thing that is most important….Call for a free consultation.
Most commonly, people want to know what penalties they are facing. Will they have to go to jail? Should they hire an attorney? Will they lose their license? Will they have to go to trial or is it likely that the case can be settled? What can they do to reduce their sentence?
So Why Are We Not Addressing These Questions?
These are all questions that everyone who gets arrested for drinking and driving are asking, so why don’t you answer them? Most attorneys are too busy talking about their accomplishments and awards, and explaining why someone who has been arrested should hire them, that they forget to speak to the audience. Someone is on your website with questions and problems, speak to them directly. The more that you can relate to them, the more likely they are to call you and ask for a free consultation. Connecting with your visitors will produce more results than any award or accomplishment you have ever received. This is not to say you shouldn’t have your AVVO rating of 10 displayed on your site, it just isn’t as important as connecting with your visitor.
In the content of your website, you want to be speaking directly to the visitor, and putting yourself in their shoes. You want to have internal links pointing them to the most important pages of your site. What are those pages? Contact US, DUI Penalties, Hiring An Attorney vs. Representing Yourself, Loss Of License, Reducing Your Sentence, etc. We do the same in the content that we are presenting you. Our goal with this page is to get your to visit our SEO for DUI lawyer page. We want to share information with you about online marketing for drunk driving lawyers, and move you through our Discovery Page which is targeting legal consultants. We have another Discovery form that we use, but for this particular funnel, we want to keep everything related to law. There may be some others, but you should get the point here. You want to take your visitor from the home page, to a page that is important to them, with the goal of creating a connection, and ultimately, getting them to take some sort of an action. That action may be a call, or it may be to capture their email address. On each page you can have the same header as above, but the content on each of the pages helps move them one step closer to contacting you.
If you layout the path you want your visitors to take, and write excellent content on each of those pages addressing their concerns, and explaining how you can fix those problems, your conversions will double in a matter of days. Start with the end result in mind, and build your path.
There is obviously more that goes into conversion optimization, but this is the most crucial step. With this foundation, you can accomplish so much more than you ever imagined with your website.
Analysis and Feedback
Once you have your path laid out, you can then start to measure your success and failures, working on improving them. This is pretty simple to do with Google Analytics. You can watch the visitor flow of your website, and see areas that cause a bottleneck. If you have 100 people land on your home page, and 85 of them hit the back button, then you know that your web page is not connecting with the visitor. You then can go in and make changes to the site to improve this interaction. You can do this with your entire website. Look at the bounce rate on each page, how long they stay on your site, where do they leave, or what actions do they take before they call you. By constantly improving your bounce rate on each web page, your website will convert higher and higher every day.
Overwhelmed by Conversion Optimization
If you are struggling to understand all of this, don’t worry about it. It is a complicated procedure and takes practice in order to get it right. You may not be a conversion expert overnight. If you are one who loves a challenge, then get to work. Start by building out the path, or sales funnel that you want visitors to take, and then start creating your content. Use the optimization tips on this landing page as your definitive guide for the best online results. If you would prefer to have it all done for you, then we got you covered. Call Hit Me SEO today at 240-477-7085 and let us know you want your website to convert higher and start producing new customers week after week. We will be happy to customize a plan just for your practice, and get your the results you are looking for.