Case Study: Lawyer Website Optimization

Sometimes with a website, you know that it is doing OK.

It’s getting decent traffic and some clients. But, you know that it could be doing better.

If only there was a way you could take the existing site and hold on to what it’s doing well, while at the same time making some tweaks to the site to make it even better…

Smiley Law Firm, a Louisiana law firm that was focused primarily on construction law, reached out to JurisPage to help the firm redesign its website to expand its practice areas, get more traffic, and better convert the thousands of visitors it was getting each month into becoming paying clients.

How to Optimize Your Site

To optimize and grow your site, everything comes back to planning.

Is your goal to just get “more traffic”, to get more specific traffic, to get more phone calls, or a combination?

With your goal in mind, the next step is to audit your website. This will establish your benchmarks:

  • How much traffic is it getting now each month, on average?
  • How has the traffic grown in the past six months?
  • How many phone calls has your website generated in the past six months?
  • How many form submissions have you received?
  • What are your conversion rates (what % of people visiting the page will fill out a form or call)?

Once you perform this audit, the next step is to set goals, and then map out the optimization / redesign.

Getting A Better Conversion Rate

To get more conversions from a website, we look at a few things:

  • How many fields does the contact form have? 3-4 are ideal – Name, Email, Phone, Message – The rest you can get in an intake once they’re on the phone
  • What is the text of the “Submit” button? “Submit” is terrible, “Speak With a Lawyer” converts better
  • What color is the “Submit” button? It should stand out.
  • Is the site easy to navigate? Can I get to the page I want to get directly from the homepage?
  • Is the site mobile optimized? This one’s either a yes/no via Google’s testing tool
  • What kinds of calls to action do you have? Do you effectively ask people to contact you?

There is a lot that goes into improving your conversion rate. At JurisPage, we use a lot of data to show us what actually converts better. Without it, and without this approach, your redesign is just a guess at what will do better.

Here’s our interview with Seth Smiley of Smiley Law Firm:

What encouraged you to redesign on your firm’s website?

I wanted the firm to branch out more. We were primarily in construction law and I wanted to grow the practice areas. We also were getting traffic, and I wanted to see how we could get more out of that traffic.

At the time, we had Wordpress and we were doing the edits in-house. We were able to add blog posts just fine. But for making more substantial changes to the site, we couldn’t easily do that, and that’s where JurisPage came in.

Why did you end up working with JurisPage?

A huge reason we went with JurisPage is a lot of people do website management design but you guys are geared towards the legal fields. That lowered the number of potential candidates a lot. I wanted someone that understood the law.

Since your redesign, how have things changed?

It seems that almost every month our traffic goes up. If you look at the overall gain since July 2014, almost a year and a half now, it’s been a continuous upward trend. A lot of that has to do with the blogging too.

If you Google “New Orleans construction attorney” we’re the #1 hit.

I get a lot of out-of-state clients, which we never did before. People doing work in Louisiana but looking from out-of-state. That’s been a huge increase. It was crazy to me that people from Washington, Missouri, Georgia, and Alabama called me. That’s 100% from the website.

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By optimizing their site with a focus on improving conversions, Smiley Law Firm was able to get more of their website visitors to reach out to them. In adding additional practice areas to the site combined with blogging, they were also able to increase their traffic.

Main takeaway:

To get more traffic to your law firm website and get more potential clients reaching out to you from that traffic, your firm needs a plan of attack. Once you commit to the goal of increasing traffic and conversions, your firm needs to implement a plan to make it happen. Working with an experienced law firm website optimization team like the folks at JurisPage can help.

Call today to find out how JurisPage can help you optimize your site to get more business, while making your life easier 800-863-7603.