These are the top five mistakes you're making on your website and how to fix them. Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. We're going to explore the five biggest mistakes that lawyers make on their websites when it comes to marketing. And I'll provide you with the practical solutions to actually fix them. So let's jump right in. Picture this. visit a law firm's website in search of legal assistance. You're greeted with a cluttered homepage and you can't find a clear call to action. You don't know what to do. Frustrated. You navigate through this site only to be bombarded with complicated legal jargon and terms you don't understand that just leaves you googling different stuff and scratching your head. Sound familiar? Well, you're not alone. Mistake number one in website building is neglecting a clear and compelling call to action. So how do we fix this? Think about the desired action you want your website visitors to take when they first land on the website. Is it scheduling a consultation, signing up for a newsletter, or do you want them to go straight away and contact your firm? Whatever it is, make sure your call to action stands out on your homepage and on other key pages like your content pages, your contact page. You need to use persuasive language and throughout your content emphasize the benefits of taking action and call back to that call to action. Instead of a generic just contact us button thrown in the top right corner, try something a little more creative like schedule your free consultation or get expert legal advice today. Of course, be sure to check with your bar rules. But it's important in your call to action to be clear, to be persuasive, and hopefully you'll see your conversion rate soar. Okay, let's tackle mistake number two. Overloading your website with complex legal jargon. We talked about this in the last episode, but as legal professionals, it's easy for you guys to forget that not everyone understands the intricacies of the law, and most people don't understand half the words in most statute. Your visitors to your website are seeking solutions to their legal problems, not a crash course in legal terminology. If they had gone to law school themselves, they wouldn't be on your website. So what is our solution? First, we want to simplify our language and communicate in a way that resonates with your target audiences. Avoid unnecessary legal jargon and explain concepts in plain English. We talked about this in the last episode. You can tell client stories, you can use real life examples to illustrate your points, and by making your content relatable and more understandable, you'll start to build this connection with your potential clients and instill more confidence and set yourself apart from the competition. That's key. Mistake number three, though. Mistake number three is big, and it's something that most lawyers are aware of, but they may not understand it, they may not know if they're doing it or not, and often we're We're trusting our website companies to make sure that this is happening, but mistake number three is neglecting mobile responsiveness. In today's digital age, people are glued to their smartphones and tablets. If your website isn't optimized for devices, you're missing out on probably half of the potential searches that you could. And that's going to be a significant chunk of potential clients. So how do we deal with this? First, there's an easy way. Take your phone out, visit your website. And try to do this on a couple of different types of devices. Use your kid's iPhone, your wife, or your husband's iPhone, or a friend that's around. Check it out. See what it looks like. Does everything render properly? Is it easy to navigate? Can you go back into new pages easily? Does it load quickly? You want to look at the design and the responsiveness and make sure it adapts to a couple of different screen sizes. If you have an iPad or a tablet, try that as well. What we're trying to do here is optimize the content. Optimize everything that we're delivering to users for mobile. We want to break up long paragraphs, use bullet points, and make sure the font size is legible and not broken for smaller screens. By providing a much more user-friendly experience, you'll keep visitors engaged and increase the chances of converting them into clients. Not to mention all of the things that come with mobile speed and making sure that people with all kinds of different connections can access your actual website. Moving on to number four, though, a huge mistake that lawyers make on their website is having just a lack of engaging and high quality content. We see websites from a handful of different providers that are basically copy-paste. There's even a couple of providers that provide a content library that everyone they work with is using. Now, there's nothing wrong with getting some content from a library when you're starting out, but imagine visiting a law firm's website and finding just uninspiring content that doesn't even really address your specific need or is only tangentially related to the jurisdiction you're in. Using this type of content or creating things that aren't the best you can do is such a missed opportunity, and you should be using it to showcase your expertise and build trust with your potential clients, with your audience, with everybody. So what do we do? Really the one way we can deal with this is by investing in content more. Whether that's time or effort or paying someone to work on high quality content, we want to create compelling content that actually educates people and captivates potential clients. You can start a blog where you can share valuable insights or legal updates and practical tips or start a YouTube or TikTok channel where you can share the same type of content in a slightly different format. You can also incorporate different media formats even if you don't do YouTube or TikTok. You can add videos, you can add podcasts, have your staff create infographics to help users understand the information. By offering valuable content, you'll position yourself as a trusted authority in your field, attract a loyal following, and stand out from the crowd. There's tons of examples of lawyers who have built essentially their own miniature Wikipedia and had huge success in their jurisdictions. But last up, number five, this is a big mistake as well. A lot of lawyers tend to ignore search engine optimization or SEO. Now I don't consider myself a full-time SEO person, but I know that having a beautiful website isn't going to do you a lot of good if it's buried on the tenth page of search engine results. just how the internet works. So again, what do we do? First off, we wanna know what keywords to actually target. So we do keyword research to identify the phrases in terms your potential clients are using when searching for legal services. We can incorporate these naturally into the website content, including in page titles, headings, throughout the content itself, and especially in meta descriptions. Make sure that your website's technical aspects as well, such as paid speed, mobile friendliness, all the stuff we've talked about, are fully optimized for search engines. Make sure you're linked to the search engine consoles. We've talked a little bit about SEO and there's a lot more that we will talk about than we can get to in this episode. But you can also look at backlinks, you can optimize for mobile specifically, you can work on getting different citations, all kinds of different media can help with the SEO process. The big thing though is that by optimizing your website for search engines, you'll attract more organic traffic, traffic that you're not going to have to pay for into the future. And you'll position yourself as the go-to expert in your practice area. When we talked about having really valuable content, sites building their own essential mini Wikipedia, that's what we're talking about here, providing the resources so that we can be seen as experts in our practice areas. That wraps up, though, our episode on the five biggest mistakes you're probably making on your website. By working on these issues, working with your web company or hiring somebody like me to implement the suggested solutions, you'll start to transform your website into a powerful marketing tool that not only attracts clients and enhances your firm's efficiency, but becomes an appreciating asset for your marketing. Stay tuned for our next episode where we're going to talk about even more exciting topics designed to supercharge your legal marketing strategies. That's it for Legal Marketing Check out rosanadvertising.com for more. Thanks.(gentle music)(upbeat music)[MUSIC]
