How To Improve Law Firm Lead Generation Through Conversion Research

It is likely you have spent a few thousand dollars building a website for your law firm, but have not taken the time to focus on a simple question: Does the website generate revenue? Just having people visit your website will not make your law practice successful. You need to convert these visitors into leads by encouraging them to contact you by phone or through web-inquiries.

How do you accomplish this?

There is a basic law firm internet marketing principle, which involves two simple steps:

1. You have to know what your visitors want.
2. You have to give it to them.

Do you know what they want? Let me guess… The answer is NO.

It’s not your fault. The fact is, most lawyers have no idea.

Before you spend another dollar on your law firm’s website, start asking these questions:

• Are your visitors taking any action on your site?
• Can they find what they are looking for?
• Where on your site are they scrolling or clicking?

Why Should You Care about Conversion?

You have already paid for the ability to get visitors to your website; your goal now is to get the maximum value from these visitors.

Let's examine a simple sales funnel.

Let's say 100 people visit your website every month. Five of them become your leads (they call you or make an inquiry via the Web). This means your lead conversion rate is 5% (5 leads / 100 visitors).

Looked at another way, there are 95 people who left your website and went somewhere else. Think about it… 95 out of 100... That's a lot.

It seems that you have a good website and everything is in place. The question is why do 95% of your visitors leave?

This is why you have to start thinking about improving your conversion rates. Done successfully, your web traffic can remain the same, but your number of new leads will increase.

Let’s Figure Out Why Visitors Are Leaving

The most common reasons people may leave your law firm’s website without taking action include:

• They can't find what they are looking for. Your website may be difficult to navigate, may not have enough information, or may have too much information for visitors to easily consume.
• They could not relate to the information provided in your website. Instead of presenting them with ways to overcome their legal problems, you talk about your accomplishments in school, your GPA, etc.
• Your website does not project an appearance of professionalism. It may be the site’s design, content, or even pictures that prevent visitors from feeling that they can trust in your firm.
• They are interested, but don't know what to do next. There is no call to action on the website.

Obtaining feedback from your visitors can go a long way toward improving the marketing of your practice. Getting answers to simple questions like “Did you find what you were looking for?” or “Did the website answer your questions?” can help you make informative decisions about how to improve a visitor’s experience. This, in turn, can increase the likelihood of visitors turning into leads.

There Are Ways to Find Out What Your Visitors Want

I suggest starting with these three tools:

• Google Consumer Surveys
• Crazy Egg
• User Testing

Google Consumer Surveys: Simply Ask Visitors What They Think

This is a great tool for measuring website satisfaction. The out-of-the-box version is free, and the custom version is very inexpensive (only 1¢ per response). The tool offers a non-intrusive survey for your website’s visitors that will pop up at the bottom of the page. The standard survey consists of the following four questions:

• Overall, how satisfied are you with this website?
• What, if anything, do you find frustrating or unappealing about this website?
• What is your main reason for visiting this website today?
• Did you successfully complete your main reason for visiting this website today?

Once you get the initial responses, you can customize it to ask more specific questions.

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Here is an example of what the survey looks like on the website.

How to install it?

1. Go to Google Consumer Surveys website
2. Get a code snippet provided to you and paste into your website
3. Activate your survey and wait for responses

Pro Tips

• Depending on how busy your website is, you should plan to keep the survey active for one or two months, or until you get enough responses to make appropriate decisions.
• When you review the survey results, look for patterns or general themes. Are your visitors happy? Do they usually find what they are looking for? Do they feel they can trust you? Whatever questions you may have, you can get answers.
• Don’t just look at the feedback; take action based on what your visitors have told you. Start making changes that can improve the quality and experience of your website. Then, survey your visitors again and make note of the differences in their responses..

Crazy Egg: Find Out Where Visitors Click and Scroll

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Crazy Egg shows where visitors on are clicking and where they stop scrolling on your website. Everything is displayed in heat map, overlay, scroll map, and confetti formats. A couple examples of how this works are:

• The “fancy menu” example. We had a client who had a fancy menu on his website that included 8 different links. He was complaining that his customers were not reacting to the most important information he provided on his website. We tested the menu and realized that visitors were clicking everywhere but on the menu items he most wanted them to read. Knowing this, we simplified the menu by removing the buttons that no visitors clicked on and moved the important information to more visible areas of the site for easier access.
• The “call to action” example. Another client had a long, content-filled page that explained the services he provided in great detail. However, the page did not result in visitors taking any action. The call to action, which included the contact information, was all the way at the bottom of the page. With a scroll map we found out that his visitors had a tendency to read only half of the page and therefore never reached the call to action area. With this in mind, we modified his site, breaking the content down into smaller, more readable chunks, and we added multiple calls to action throughout the page.

How to install it

1. Go to the Crazy Egg website and register. (Plans start at around $10/month.)
2. Click on Create a Snapshot and follow the simple instructions.
3. Get the code snippet that is provided to you and paste it into your website.
4. Wait for responses.

Pro Tips

• As in the previous example, wait for a month or two that that you have enough information to get an accurate picture. You will want to have about 500 to 1,000 responses. This should give you enough details to make the right call about how to improve your website.
• Carefully examine what the results are telling you. Look at the areas of the website with most clicks. There “hot” areas are where you should place your most important info.

User Testing: Get Feedback from Real People in a Video Format

Last but not least, you can find out what your visitors want by using a tool offered by UserTesting.com. You can set up a test there and select the number of participants you would like to have. These people will spend time on your website trying to take the actions you want them to.

For example, if you are a bankruptcy attorney, you might ask the participating visitors to find certain bankruptcy information as quickly as possible or you can ask them to schedule an appointment with you. You will get the participants’ live commentary as they take each step. This will include both positive and negative feedback.

Once several participants have completed the test, you will have a better idea of how user-friendly your site is and will also have an idea of what you may want to change in order to improve your visitors’ experiences.

How to set up a test

1. Go to UserTesting.com and register.
2. Select the number of participants from whom you would like to collect feedback. (It costs about $50 per participant.)
3. Set up your test.
4. Wait for responses.

Pro Tips

• I recommend using the site’s pre-defined templates. Shopping and PPC Landing Page templates are the best if you are looking to use this test for lead generation purposes.
• I know that you care about what your competitors are doing. While this is important, you should not base your marketing decisions solely on what others are doing. That said, you can use the site’s Competitor template to test how effective your competitors are with their marketing. This would be a good idea before you ask your web designer to update your site based on a competitor’s website.

Hopefully, by this time, you understand how to find out what your visitors want. All of these tools are relatively simple to use and none will break the bank.

Now the ball is in your court. It’s time to give them what they want. Take the feedback you have received and use it to address problems with your website.

Doing so will enable you to keep more of those 95 visitors who left earlier, and you will start seeing your numbers improve.

Which tools will you use to find out what your visitors want?