Stop Sending Users to Your Home Page

If you're running PPC campaigns, you need to stop sending your users to your homepage right now. Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. If you're running campaigns on Google ads or Facebook ads or on Instagram or LinkedIn or anywhere really, and you're sending your users to the homepage of your website, honestly, you're probably best off just going and pausing those campaigns right now, because you're lawyers and you probably heard the probably in the last sentence. So before you go and pause your campaigns, let me just explain what I mean a little bit. Of course, we've talked plenty about the value of conversions on Legal Marketing 101. If you've got a great homepage that's hyper-optimized for conversion you're churning out clients left and right from your system then don't go and pause your campaigns right now. I am definitely a fan of the phrase if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But if you, like a lot of other lawyers out there, are paying thousands of dollars a month to a marketing company and they're sending all of your advertising traffic to your homepage, well then this is for you. We're not going to, and we don't need to, spend a huge amount of time on the why of this. We're going to spend a little bit of time on it, but if this core concept that I'm about to explain isn't something you're able to grasp quickly, then you need to go back and listen to a few more episodes, study up and then come back to this one. This isn't really an advanced strategy, but if you don't understand the why of this situation, this whole idea really just isn't going to help you that much. The why here, though, is that your homepage is very likely not going to be optimized to generate conversions from paid advertising, and if it is, that probably means it doesn't perform particularly well for organic. If you want to do both, that means running paid ads and capitalizing on your organic traffic, and you also want to use one page for all of that traffic. For some reason, you're going to have to make some compromises somewhere, and sure, I'm fine with compromises. I compromise on what to eat for dinner all the time but when it comes to the marketing and when it comes to things we actually do have control over, I'm going to take the optimize everything route every time I can.

So, when it comes to your homepage, we want this to be an entry to your site, we want it to rank, but we also really want it to encourage users to look deeper into the site, stay on the site longer to look into what you do, and we just want to get them engaged. But for paid ads while, yeah, we do want to get them engaged, this isn't really the general feel of what we're trying to do. The most of the time, we're trying to get a user to take a much more immediate action, whether that's to sign up for something and give us their email, or download something and give us their email, or whatever it is that makes that user give us their email or pick up the phone. Even that's what we want them to do. We really don't care how much they browse or how long they stay on the site or how many pages they visit. We had to pay a few good dollars to get them on our page in the first place and we want to capitalize quickly on that user's attention and make an exchange with them. These could work out in the long run for us and that user. But unless we're really focused on branding, then we need to strike while the iron is hot. But, metaphors aside, that's why we don't want to send traffic to our homepage. It's not the right tool for the job and that is very much literal, but you guys don't come here for me to just explain why things are.

The majority of you that I've talked with tell me you come here for more actionable ideas. So let's talk about what to do instead of using your homepage. Let's talk once again about landing pages. That's because if the difference between your homepage and an independent landing page is still sounding a bit fuzzy to you, I get it. So let's talk about what really sets a landing page apart from your homepage and above pretty much anything else. It's that landing pages should be focused on one action, and your homepage probably technically, in a certain light, is also focused on one action, and that's generating clients.

But in this scenario, when it comes to paid marketing, we need to be a lot more specific. Instead of that general goal of making this person into a client, we want to minimize a bunch of options like checking out your about page that lists your information, or looking at your blog or your practice area pages. We really want to only give one option for that user, and that option is give us your contact info. On our homepage, there are going to be a dozen distractions for users, but for a landing page, we're going to focus everything on that one specific action we want users to complete.

So let's use an ebook download as an example to give things here a bit more tangibility. Let's say, we want users to give us their name and their email so we can follow up with them. So we offer them a free ebook in exchange for their name and their email and then we can run an autoresponder sequence to start nurturing and engaging these potential clients. So when we advertise to these potential clients, we then focus on the free ebook. Everything about it is free ebook. Instead of contact us, it's get a free ebook. Instead of free consultation, it's free ebook. Instead of a map to our office, it's free ebook. Save five times fast free ebook.

The goal here is to make things really simple and really intuitive and to minimize the potential distractions and to minimize the points of friction for the user.

If we're going by the general rule in paid advertising, we only have about nine seconds or so to convince someone to stay on our landing page once they've clicked onto it. And once we convince them to do that, we want to try to recoup some of the value we paid for the user to click, even if the maximum we're getting in exchange is a name and email. At the end of the day, when it comes to our marketing system, that's all we really need to get the machine moving. So skip the blog, skip the main menu, skip all the social icons and the crap in your footer. They're not helping us generate enough clients to justify the distraction that they cause. If you want to build great landing pages, pick one thing, focus on that one thing and then beat it to death. This one thing might seem obvious or trivial or repetitive to you, but to a potential client that is experiencing this situation for the very first time, they're going to see what you're saying as a gospel. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenavertisingcom for more Thanks.