Did you know that 77% of what people use as "landing pages" are simply the homepage for their website? A landing page is so much more, but too many companies, including law firms, don't use landing pages to capture and convert potential clients adequately.
Whether you practice family law, personal injury, criminal defense, or something else, attorney landing pages are designed to target people ready to hire an attorney. That means they have more of a call-to-action push than other pages on your site.
A landing page should speak directly to your ideal clients for a specific practice area within a particular region. You can often spot these on law firm websites where the page title is something like "San Diego motorcycle accident lawyer." A landing page may include information similar to a general practice area page. It also further explains your unique value proposition and calls to action, prompting the viewer to take the next step.
Use these five tips to get more ideal clients reviewing and taking action from landing pages.
Step 1: Setting Clear Objectives and Identifying Your Audience
You need a specific intention for every landing page you create. It may surprise you that among savvy marketers using landing pages, nearly half of them create a new landing page for every single campaign. For a lawyer, that could mean a new page for every town or neighborhood you serve.
The reason to create custom goals for every campaign and landing page is to personalize the experience for the person who clicked the ad, image, or link that took them to the landing page in the first place.
To accomplish this, you must answer these questions:
- What kind of case does this client have?
- At what phase of the process does this client find themself?
- Where does this person live?
- What do you want them to know about your law office before they exit this page?
This landing page clearly explains when someone has a motorcycle accident case, answers the most common questions associated with a potential lawsuit, and directs the viewer to either fill out a form for a free consultation or complete the chatbot to get help from the law firm.
Everything on this page is designed to showcase this firm as an ideal place to get help with a complex motorcycle injury and prompts the person reading it to reach out.
Step 2: Designing for Maximum Engagement
It's not enough to list everything you think someone should know about a certain kind of case. Every word and design element used on a law firm landing page should have a purpose. As with every page that you build on your overall law firm website design, you need to make it responsive.
The goal of a landing page should be to clarify information, highlight the firm's expertise or other value proposition, and encourage action. This means incorporating things like:
- At least one way for a potential client to contact you
- A clear headline above the fold on the page since this is high-value real estate
- Information specific to the kind of case and the region in which you take cases
- Use of visual elements that connect with viewers, like images, infographics, or short videos
- Case studies that show the kind of results you get or how you've helped other clients
This landing page from Thon Beck uses a good headline, visual elements like a checklist, and a short video, and it captures contact information. With all of this above the fold, it's a great way to connect with clients immediately.
Here, Amanda Demanda Injury Lawyers displays a phone number and a contact form to give the website visitor two options to reach out to hear from an attorney. Either call directly or fill out a contact form. The use of different text types and the inclusion of a video balances out the page.
To start with your landing page web design, research competitors or law firms in other regions. You'll begin to notice these common elements in lawyer landing pages, and they exist because they work! Use this to create your own legal marketing landing page template. You'll still personalize it for each new campaign, but the landing page design and format elements remain mostly the same.
Step 3: Crafting Content that Resonates
Too many lawyers put most of their effort on landing pages into talking about how amazing they are. While it's true that your new clients want to know you have the experience necessary to succeed, they're far more invested in what you can do for them and what makes you different from other firms. This is best done through testimonials.
Well-structured and engaging content is critical for making a solid first impression. Content can make or break the success of a landing page of a legal practice. Make use of ways to break up the text, such as:
- Using headers/subheaders to make content accessible to scan
- Avoiding large walls of text
- Choosing a readable font and color
- Use bullet points
Outside of formatting, choose words and phrasing that connect with your reader's problem and questions about their legal issue. Ask yourself, "Does my potential client really care about this?" before adding things to your content.
Dolman Law Group is an excellent example of writing relevant content for readers on a landing page. There are multiple ways for a prospective client to reach out here, which is a solid start. However, the writer also includes information aligned with a Chicago audience, pulling out specific phrases and words.
Lawyers should hire an expert copywriter to craft landing page content. This helps ensure that you get the most mileage out of the page. Someone who understands the legal industry can more easily build trust through landing page content.
Step 4: Enhancing Visibility with SEO and Structured Data
Most landing pages drive traffic from sources like pay-per-click ads on Google or Facebook ads. You're investing a lot of time and expense to optimize these, so you must incorporate SEO elements in every landing page.
You need technical aspects behind your landing page to verify that it delivers properly and is accurately tagged with search engines. Integrating SEO best practices and structured data markup is essential for improving the page's online visibility.
First, here are a few things to note when adding SEO to your landing pages:
- Choose primary bottom-of-funnel keywords to indicate someone ready to hire
- Use those keywords naturally throughout the content
- Reference city, town, neighborhood, or landmark info to target a geographic area
- Use on-page SEO elements like title tags, meta descriptions, headings, internal links, and alt-text
- In your title tag, place important keywords as far to the left as you can
Secondly, hire an expert to help you with structured data markup. While this sounds complicated, it's just an annotation system you can add to your lawyer website to allow Google or other web platforms to read your site and pull information about your legal services from your HTML.
Step 5: Analyzing and Optimizing for Continuous Improvement
Once a landing page goes live, watch your analytics. You'll get a decent sense of how it's performing from your Google Analytics, but this is also the time to ensure you're capturing the correct info during intake. A landing page exists to bring you new clients, but it might only give you a piece of the puzzle unless you look at the bigger picture.
Imagine getting calls from potential clients who saw the landing page, but few turn into actual cases. That could indicate that the messaging in the copy needs to be corrected or that something's falling short in your response and intake process. Use what you learn to continue tweaking existing landing pages and making strategic decisions about when to publish new ones.
You can also A/B test landing pages. If you have two versions of a landing page, consider running ads to both using different keywords. This can tell you more about when certain pages perform better, and you can turn off the least successful ads later. Watch metrics like time spent on the page, whether or not someone clicks on/uses the CTA, and overall conversion rate.
To get high-quality clients, include landing pages in your law firm website design plan and digital marketing strategy.