If you’re in any way responsible for legal marketing, you know that results matter. This is why law firm managers should be interested in the subject of conversion optimization. Because conversion optimization is all about measuring results – and improving ROI.
What is Conversion Optimization?
Conversion Optimization is the science and art of creating an experience for a website visitor with the goal of converting that visitor into a client. It was born out of the need to improve website lead generation and ROI.
Why Conversion Optimization for Lawyers?
If you improve your law firm website’s conversion performance, you will essentially be reducing your total cost per lead while also increasing the total number of leads from your current website traffic. Additionally, once your total cost per lead is manageable, you will be better positioned to pursue marketing opportunities that will increase your total number of visitors by spending more on Pay Per Click or other traffic generating opportunities.
What is a Conversion Rate?
Conversion Optimization Analysts will often speak of “conversion rates.” What this means is the percentage of web visitors that end up reaching a goal during a specific period of time.
A law firm website can have numerous goals which can be tracked. Such tracking can include the percentage of visitors that:
- called the firm (more difficult to track)
- subscribed to a newsletter
- submitted a web form
- downloaded a whitepaper
- left a blog comment
- bought an e-book
Why you should be interested in it?
If you already have a law firm website, you should be concerned with conversion rates — especially before you spend a significant amount of money on Pay Per Click (PPC) ads or other forms of traffic generating strategies.
As you may know, Pay Per Click rates for certain practice areas continue to skyrocket — and increasing bids is not necessarily the best strategy to compete more effectively. In fact, I think it is much wiser to make sure you have a website that is good at converting the people who visit it into leads — before you invest large sums of money into the PPC arena.
Another reason you should consider conversion optimization is that by increasing conversion rates, you would be essentially reducing your average cost per web lead — which could then leave you with more money for other law firm marketing channels.
Conversion Rates Explained
Let’s say you have a conversion rate of 10% for your existing law firm web form. This would mean that 9 out of every 10 visitors left your website without using it.
So how do you improve Conversion Rates?
By making and testing minor improvements throughout the site. Such improvements may be:
- changing a headline
- changing your home page text
- improving website usability
- changing photos
- adding testimonials (jurisdiction permitting)
- changing your “call to action”
- changing website colors
- using a new logo
- making your web form easier to use (ask for less info)
- adding a “no spam” guarantee to your webform
There are many things that can be done to improve conversion rates for attorney websites. However, to measure changes you will need to use some form of analytics software.
Fortunately, there are tools out there to help those looking to improve their conversion rates. Such tools include Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.
One of the things that makes owning a website so exciting, is the fact that it can be a constantly-changing experiment. You can literally test things out to see if they work — if they don’t, you can change it again or go back to the original way of doing things.
The change doesn’t necessarily have to be long term, it could just be to test something out and see if it is profitable.
Technology Changes But People Seldom Do
Direct response copywriters have been developing techniques that work for decades. The profession developed its wisdom by running thousands of split tests to find out what copy techniques worked — and which ones did not. And these same techniques still work today despite changes in technology.
Most web developers realize the need to become good at writing web copy — and some simply hire the best in the business for the job.
If your writing your own web content, I would suggest visiting the local library and checking out some books on writing direct response copy. It will help you learn how to write magnetic headlines and content that appeals to your target customer — and also improve your conversion optimization rates.
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