Attracting new clients remains one of the main challenges for law firms.
Most practices now use digital marketing to bolster referrals as they see online searches overtake offline recommendations as their main source of new business.
Boylen designs websites for law firms that are:
But …
There are two mistakes we regularly encounter:
1. Websites that look good but are underperforming (high website abandonment - too few conversions from "visitor" to "fee-paying client"). The fundamental failing is over-reliance on ‘pretty’ design and the failure to design to satisy user preferences.
At Boylen, we use evidence-based web design to create the best law firm websites. We know the hierarchy of needs of people coming to your firm's website and we redesign your website navigation to answer those needs. This then lead visitors to a conversion (eg. a call to action such as Book A Free Consultation).
2. Considerable wastage of advertising dollars. Over-worked internal marketing staff and some agencies adopt a “bigger is better” approach. They chase a small set of Google Ads terms in bidding auctions that push up the cost per click (CPC), rather than adopting a more sophisticated strategy that includes long tail keywords. The latter brings in traffic that often has higher purchasing intent and lower CPC.
Boylen uses its experience of crafting and executing advertising campaigns in other sectors to increase ad clicks and bring down the CPC for your legal practice marketing.
We do legal digital marketing differently.
Click here if you would like to improve your legal website design and marketing.
It starts with research. What areas do you specialise in and what are the keyword terms that people search for?
Ideally you will create a website or web page that ranks well for your chosen keywords on the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, ranking on page one can take time so you may wish to consider using Google Ads for some of those terms while your organic SEO activities start to work.
Your website is a critical aspect in marketing your legal services, so this needs to be audited. We combine machine research that will give you scores for things such as page speed, mobile friendliness and the “authority” your website has in Google’s eyes. One of our expert staff will also look at your staff to assess how well your navigation works and whether you have clear pathways for different visitors – and if they are converting.
Other areas we would look at include email marketing and social media marketing, your reviews and so on.
We match your goals with the information we find and then develop a strategy to grow your practice.
Click here to arrange a time to discuss how we can help you:
As a general rule, growth-focused firms will embark on a redesign every three years. The simple rule of thumb is to overhaul your website as often as you upgrade your mobile phone.
Some sites are left untouched for 5-10 years but these sites do not show up on page one of Google, which attracts 95% of all clicks.
As an example, we Googled “Adelaide law firm” (using incognito mode) and then eliminated firms with “Adelaide” in their name and url. The top ranked firms had all redesigned their websites since 2020.
The down side is that many of them look the same. One of the main reasons to invest in a website redesign is to standout from your competition.
Our research shows that 2% to 3% of revenue is the average budget allocated to marketing by growth-focused law firms in South Australia.
This is typically spread across:
• Legal SEO
• Entire website redesigns
• Website improvements, including landing pages for specific promotions
• Google Ad campaigns
• TV, radio and print advertising
• Content creation – as part of SEO
• Social media.
You do. You own the design and any text we have written for you, even if you decide to move to move to a new legal practice web designer.
The same applies to your domain name. Even if we have purchased and managed it for you, it’s yours, not ours.
If your legal website is designed on WordPress, you are using open source website software so you can move it at will.
If you ask us to write specific software, that will depend on the situation. If it is a simple action that is commonly used in WordPress, then you would own the right to continue to use it even if you leave us, and we would continue to use that script on other sites.
If you engage us to create a significant amount of custom code, the IP would reside with you – and as a law firm, we’re sure you’d want that detailed in a contract which we would be happy to sign.
Click today if you need a web designer for law practices, a website developer or legal marketing consultant.
No, we don't work for your competitors. Just as we do with colleges, dentists and other competitive sectors, we will ask you to name your main competitor and our web designers and developers will not undertake web design for that practice.
If you engage us for onging SEO and digital marketing, we will ask you to nominate up to three firms that we will not work for.
Your success is our success.
We’ve been advising lawyers for 30 years. In the early days it was graphic design and now it is website design, online marketing, search engine optimization and Google Ad campaigns..
What hasn’t changed is our:
Law firm marketing has become more complex. Personal referrals are being overtaken – or already have been overtaken – by website visitors and the humble contact form. Personal connections are steadily being replaced by how well you rank on the Google results page.
Search engine optimisation gives you free listings on the search page results – which is where nine out of 10 people click, rather than the ads.
It’s an area in which we have deep experience. Our Adelaide staff will analyse your Google analytics. Audit your law practice site to see where improvements can be made. Benchmark you against the competition and recommend areas for improvement.
Our SEO experience is at the heart of our legal marketing services. It ranks equally with web design, which is critical for a law firm site because people’s first impressions and assessments about the credibility of your legal firm are largely based on design. You have less than three seconds to make a great impression – and it’s overwhelmingly visual – and most people will leave your site within 15 seconds if your design can’t hold them, according to Microsoft research.
Site design cannot be emphasised enough. Whether you want a ‘young lawyer’ look and feel, or a more traditional law firm design that highlights your practice areas, today’s prospective client is:
So there is a clear link between site design and SERPs, with law firm SEO only being effective if it is underpinned by the best website design.
By best, we mean better than your competitors and not a mass produced template. Also, not “better” in a highly personal sense judged by the aesthetics of a lawyer or designer. We mean “best” as judged by the clicking behaviour of a potential client.
The best site design is the one that brings you in the most clients in your target zone, whether that’s new briefs for trial lawyers, an abundance of family law enquiries or high value areas in a particular practice area.
The search engine acts as an impartial filter of deciding whether a particular law firm website will fulfil the needs of a potential client. Using the family law example, if a person searches for a divorce lawyer in their area, the bots assess a series of elements on your website to see if you have the content to best answer the search query.
Let’s say your law firm website design is structured to emphasise the word divorce lawyer, as a subset of family law. Success! Your law firm website ranks first on Google.
You now have a potential new client. They accept Google's or Bing's recommendation that yours is an Adelaide law firm website worthy of consideration.
This is the point when the decision-making process switches to being highly subjective. The best law firm websites understand the needs of their target client when they embark on website development.
The design is evidence-based, as opposed to the curious preferences of the Managing Partner. Insights are gained from Google Analytics. A web design and SEO specialist will see patterns in the data that a lawyer will not. It’s their core business. We’re an Adelaide law firm web design specialist and we teach companies how to understand their analytics. We’ve done it one-on-one and also for audiences, such as presentations for the Small Business Commissioner. It always amazes us how little people can extract from the data – but how hungry they are to learn more because it is so critical to their online marketing.
So, the client searching for a lawyer lands on your website. They like what they see. Perhaps it’s a clean, modern design with smart use of white space and large, professional legal photography.
That’s only half the battle. Law firm websites must be able to take the next step and convert. A conversion is usually some form of interaction with your firm and you make the decision on that. A company such as Boylen – an Adelaide law firm website design specialist – will advise you on how to entice the visitor on a pathway to that action.
Whether the conversion is filling out a client contact form or phoning a lawyer, the fundamentals of the journey are the same.
The pathway needs to be clear. These are signalled by calls to action (CTAs). So the home page of good law firm websites will generally have a button that allows the person to Contact Us. (As opposed to Make A Payment which we saw on a lawyer's website recently.)
But let’s assume that the potential legal client doesn’t know enough about your law firm to take that step yet. Typically a secondary CTA would lead them through clearly defined steps that “sell” your firm and its lawyers, allowing the person to make that first contact at any point along the way.
It’s a lot more complex than that and we won’t give away all our IP here. However, legal practice websites should be employing many of the conversion techniques used by ecommerce companies (which we also happen to specialise in).
Trust signals are critical in law firm marketing because people are often stressed. So, too, is the placement of these signals. The best law firm websites nail it. Most don’t.
Law firm website development is also a combination of front end and back end techniques. We have the experience in both, normally with WordPress as the content management system (CMS). For example, you might have a great landing page or the best user pathways in the world but your site hasn’t been optimised for speed. Again, the best law firm websites in Adelaide and globally are characterised by their speed to load. Not just the home page, every page.
If only legal marketing was a simple as a nice logo and a brochure, or buying someone a nice lunch. But those days are gone.
Lawyers at the pinnacle can survive on reputation alone. There are lawyers with so much work that they don’t want their website ranking on Google because they don’t ned the tyre kickers. Lucky them!
The majority rely on website enquiries and the flow of leads from sector-specific, directory-style websites. Even the latter requires the person to make an assessment of your firm – and they will do that in the first instance via your website at a time and location of their choosing.
So back to the original question: why Boylen for your Adelaide firm's website design? As we hope this article demonstrates, we understand the finer details of best practice in lawyer website design and legal SEO. We work with some of South Australia’s largest Top 100 companies and we use that experience for your benefit.
And now here’s our call to action: if you’re looking for the best legal web design in Adelaide, Contact Us To Gain An Edge.
