Archive for the ‘Law Firm Website Tools’ Category

Copywriting Success on Your Website Through Your Offer

Friday, January 13th, 2012

Most new website owners are eager to apply what they already know about direct response marketing to their new Internet business, and there are an abundance of ways in which they can do this, however many believe the offer you make on your site is the most important aspect. In truth, knowing how to get customers or clients is a very valuable talent, both in the “real” world and in cyberspace. If you’ve always been great at bringing people to your business, then you know that there are many similarities when bringing people to your website and getting a conversion out of their visit.

First, Arouse Emotions

In order to get your potential customer to the point where they will actually read and consider your offer, you first have to grab their attention, and hit them in a way that brings their emotions into play. You must be able to tell your story in a way that is not only fascinating, but totally believable, therefore the highest quality copy is essential. You will then offer some sort of incentive that coaxes the reader to take the action you are leading them toward, and finally you will make your final pitch—your offer—and make it as easy as possible for the person to take that action and accept the offer.

Make Sure Your Leads are Highly Targeted

If you have designed your website for maximum SEO, have filled it with the highest quality, extremely targeted copy, along with the most relevant linking system, then the odds that the people who land on your site will find exactly what they want or need is high. In the “real” world, you know that you never advertise to anyone who isn’t likely to become a client or customer in the very near future. On the Internet, your goal is to only lead those who are highly likely to buy your product or read and pass along your informative content, to your site. Adding a component to your site which essentially says, “Let me tell you more,” is good marketing tactic no matter where it’s used. You can do this via e-mail marketing, or having people sign up on your website for your newsletter, or any other enticing offer which will bring them back to your site time and time again.

Your Reader Wants to Know What’s In It For Them

In our incredibly busy world, the time spent on any website by any person is incredibly short. This means you must grab their attention immediately and hold it mercilessly until they have read—or at least skimmed—the entire article or product description. Your reader’s primary motivation in reading your site is to find out quickly what’s in it for them—what’s the payoff, what will they gain from remaining on your site? Keep your headlines short, concise and informative, full of your very best targeted keywords. Your headlines should give your reader an idea of what’s to come, convincing them to read on.

The Actual Offer

If you’ve been successful in keeping your reader’s attention focused on your site, your information, your product or your services—congratulations! Now it’s time to reel them in through your offer. Your goal here is to make the offer absolutely irresistible—impossible to resist. You want the implication to be that a person would have to be crazy not to click on your offer, no matter what it is. Offer your potential customer something that has such obvious benefits that there would be absolutely no logical reason they wouldn’t click the “accept” button. The very best, most irresistible offer will have an incredibly high return on investment for the user or buyer, will have an instant summary of your basic offer, and will have the element of believability. In other words, although you want it to be fantastic, it also must not seem too good to be true. Work hard on crafting your offer, and you will be rewarded many times over.

The Best Tools for Optimizing Page Speed on Your Law Firm Website

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

When assessing your attorney website, be aware that the speed of the website happens to be one of the most important factors, both for the usability to your potential customers but also for search engine rankings, performance and profitability. Google recently updated the algorithms of their search engine ranking to take the speed of a website into account. In fact many law office website owners are finding, to their dismay, that potential advertisers are visiting websites to check out the speed prior to purchasing advertising. We Americans are becoming increasingly impatient, expecting our websites to load almost instantaneously. Even though I lived through the dial-up age of Internet, like everyone else I find myself closing pages that take longer than a mere nano-second to fully load. Although we may want to believe that broadband has triumphed and we no longer need to worry about speed, this is far from the truth. So, how does this need for speed we are engaged in affect your attorney website?

Webmasters must be highly cognizant of the speed issue and must know how to fully optimize their sites for speed. Toward the end of 2009, it was ever-so-gently suggested that Google would eventually be introducing the speed factor into their current algorithms, and, lo and behold, that day has arrived. Google’s site performance actually details the average time it takes the Google bots to download your indexed pages, and has a section known as “Let’s Make the Web Faster,” which will give you some excellent articles on the speed subject as well as tools to increase your speed. To get started on your search for speed for your law office websites, consider the following:

Optimizing Page Loading Speed

While optimizing images used to be a more difficult task, most graphic editors of today have special features which allow you to optimize images for the web—in other words, with a few clicks you can easily turn a 100kb file into 20kb with little loss of quality. Keep in mind that simply re-sizing an image using the height and width tags, while making the photo visibly smaller, still remains essentially the same, slowing down your law firm website considerably. Rather than using large images, consider thumbnails which can be clicked on should your viewer want to see the larger version. Some web site building software has automated thumb-nailing options. Ditch the animations if you want to increase your page’s loading speed—while animations can be cute, consider carefully whether they are seriously effective for your overall attorney website presentation.

Using Tables Carefully

Should you be using tables on your attorney website, use them carefully. Browsers wait until all items in a table are loaded before rendering the content. Therefore, your user sees absolutely nothing until all components of the table are loaded, then it magically appears. A user can get impatient, however, and click off somewhere else rather than waiting for the table to finish loading. If you must use tables, split the content into header, middle and footer tables which will allow your user to a least see something while the page is loading, persuading them to hang around to see it in its entirety.

YSlow or Page Speed?

Don’t forget that your site’s speed is not always 100% about what’s on your pages—some hosting company servers tend to be notoriously slow, most especially in a shared hosting environment where there may be in the hundreds of sites on the same server. When testing your server’s response time, a quarter to half a second response time is great, while a few seconds is just too long. The Google Speed site is attempting to make Web browsing just as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, so if you are responsible for your lawyer website, you may be wondering where to go to get an overall idea of your site’s performance. Go to your Google Webmaster Tools account and log in; click on Labs, then Site Performance where your site’s performance data will be displayed, based on feedback from crawlers. YSlow does much the same as Google’s Page Speed tool, however YSlow provides a grade for each page you review, handing out “grades” for each examined element. Page Speed offers only a green check, yellow triangle or red warning symbol.

It is really well-worth the time, when considering law firm SEO, to also consider the loading speed of your law firm website pages. If you want to remain at the top, bringing in more traffic—and conversions—optimize your site so that it literally zips along and keep your clients happy.

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