Believe it or not there is alot more to a website than meets the eye, honestly.

What staggers me still is the vast variation in website quality. Now I’m not into web design anymore, we put that to the side in favour of a focus on what we’re really good at which is search engine marketing.

I often use Gordon Ramsay as an example. In this case I’m going to use him to prove where your focus should be.

If you’ve ever watched Gordon Ramsay on his TV shows you’ll notice how upset he gets when food comes back to the kitchen.

Why? Because the customer isn’t happy.

That’s why Gordon Ramsay is so successful, because his number 1 priority is pleasing the customer. This is the big mistake I see made in about 90% of websites that we are given to promote.

So how do you make a customer focused website?

Well it’s easy to show how NOT to do it and that’s to look at the majority of websites out there.
What are they going wrong to the customer you ask?

Not giving them what they want, is the answer.

Take a minute to think, really think as a potential buyer of legal services. You as a legal professional have to be conscious that you don’t know what your clients don’t know.

This leads to assumptions as to what the client already knows, which leads to confusion for the client due to the large gap between how much they actually know and how much YOU think they know.

Most website are put together in a way that to me looks like the designers went for a

“this is who we are and this is what we do” approach. That’s not good enough.
Just because you want to tell the client certain things, doesn’t mean that is what they want to know.

Everyone, not just solicitors, need to get it into their heads that unlike traditional advertising and marketing, website visitors are there for a specific reason.

They have come to your website consciously and have a goal. Until they reach this goal, you will never reach yours.

Your goal typically is for them to make a telephone enquiry or to complete and submit an online enquiry form. But like I say there’s very little chance of them doing this until they get what they want.

So what do they want? Could be many different things, and this is where understanding your clients is so important.

If you understand your clients and have experience of all the standard questions they ask and the different circumstances they are in when they contact you, that’s a start.

Let’s use my business as an example. What I’m talking about here applies to my business too as we’re right in the middle of completely overhauling www.uprightsolutions.co.uk with these principals in mind.

Let’s start with some example circumstances clients may be in when they come to our website.

1. They have just completed an overhaul of their company website and want to make sure it get’s plenty of relevant visitors but have never done any online marketing before
2. They are an established business, with an established website. They have just sacked their online marketing provider because they have been working with them for a while but never producing any results. Hence they’re looking to instruct a new company to act for them.
3. They have just started their business and are looking for cost effective ways to promote their business. They want to know what investment is required to market their business online.

So there we have three distinctly different profiles of website visitor. All looking for the same services (search engine optimisation, pay per click marketing, email marketing etc) but coming at it from very different angles.

So although the the tool is the same, the need for the tool is different and how they can apply the tool to their circumstances is unique to them.

So how do search engines affect the legal services industry?

Well to be honest, they affect the legal services industry as much as every other industry. The long and the short of it is this; there are thousands upon thousands of buyers of legal services using search engines to find companies they then do business with.

Are you on the receiving end of this?

The strange thing is that this happens in the background, silently without it being obvious.

One thing you can do is click on this tool:
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

And type in the word ’solicitor’ into the box.

At time of writing I saw the following numbers of searches were conducted in January:

• 40,500 for solicitors london (plural)
• 22,200 for solicitor londen (singular)
• 18,000 for property solicitor
• 14,000 for employement solicitor
• 14,000 for family solicitor
• 15,000 for injury solicitor
• 12,000 for conveyancing solicitor
• 9,500 for immigration solicitor
• 8,000 for criminal solicitor

The list goes on and on. Almost forever.

I wrote a breif article on how the Internet and specifically search engine marketing creates unlimited demand for law firms.

The keyword tool begins to explain how this works.

When you do any kind of research into keywords, you get the same old shape.

You get a massive amount of search volume for the big umbrella terms ‘law’, ‘car’, ‘travel’ etc

Then as you get more specific ‘law firm’, ‘used car’, ‘travel guide’, there’s still a massive amount of search volume but an increase in ‘quality’ in terms of identifying what the person wants.

This trend continues until we get to the low volume stuff like ‘french campaing holidays’ or ’solicitors in sheffield’ which obviously narrows down the number of times these terms are searched, but that doesn’t matter.

What we really want at the end of the day is new customers and having every man and his dog come to our website isn’t going to achieve that i.e. if our website appeared at the top of Google when someone typed in ‘law firm’ or ’solicitor’.

You don’t want a person searching for ’solicitor’ on your website, because by their nature they are wholelly unqualified.

How do you know what to do with this person? We know they want to buy legal services but what kind? What situation are they in?

The answer is we don’t know and that’s exactly the point. These people will end up wasting your time.

Now take it to the other end of the extreme to a firm like Adie O’Reilly a company we’ve had discussions with regarding online marketing.

Adie O’Reilly have a key strength in the area of construction law and are leaders in their field in their local market.

Bearing in mind Google provides complete freedom as to what you are allowed to type into the search box, couple that with the fact that the searcher doesn’t want to waste time and you end up with a search for ’specialist construction solicitor in lincoln’.

How qualified is that?

How likely is that to convert into a fee? It’s not guarunteed but it’s very high.

Imagine how comfortable the prospective client feels, they found you.