We cannot make it any clearer than to say if you put fresh content on your law firm website you will get more website visitors. Internet users are savvier now than they were just 2 years ago. The more users turn to the internet to solve their problems and queries, the greater their demands become for information-rich, up-to-date content.
With the avalanche of information freely available and competing for their attention, simply owning a law firm website with an attractive theme, high-quality images and static content no longer cuts the grade – visitors identify such websites immediately… and leave!
Keeping your visitors interested and enticing them to regularly return to your website or request additional information, requires interest-piquing content that is current, adds value to their life and justifies their time in reading your content.
Benefits of fresh content on your website
Here are four great reasons how your firm can benefit:
Give Your Customers What They Want
The relevance of your information is key. In the fast-paced world in which we live, search queries today are vastly different to search queries in the past. Therefore, it’s imperative that your content reflects information relevant to current situations. Visitors are time-poor and want immediate access to information directly related to their search query. They don’t want to be wasting time wading through irrelevant, dated content.
Keep ahead of your competition by ensuring the content on your law firm website is up-to-date with current laws, news topics, trends and answers to questions your customers are seeking. This content can take the form of the process involved in the different areas of law your firm undertakes, blog posts, videos, audio, infographics etc.
The key is to ensure your content is of value to the visitor and to remember that issues that you as a lawyer, might think are interesting, might be very different to what a visitor thinks is interesting. Your visitors are probably not budding law professors – they are people who have a legal issue and happen to have been referred to your firm and are checking you out first or have found you online. The important issue for you in these circumstances is what will they do now – contact you or move on to another law firm website.
Improve Engagement and Returning Visitors
The more frequent you update your legal practice website with interesting, high-quality content, the more compelling it is for visitors to return to your website on a regular basis.
Most of us have trusted websites we regularly visit for information in various sectors – your aim is to be the chosen law firm website for your customers to turn to when in need. Furthermore, the more captivating your content, the greater visitor engagement will be. Not only will you encourage visitors to comment on your posts (search engines love this too!), but social sharing will also increase, which in turn generates more engagement and enquiries.
Increase Your Footprint
For every piece of content you add to your legal website, you create another window of opportunity to be seen by your customers as the search engines will create a new indexed page. The more pages you have indexed in the search engines, the greater the presence of your law firm in the search results. Hence the better your visibility is when customers are searching for your services online.
By way of an example, if one of your categories is Family Law and you have 4 pieces of content in this category, you have 4 potential windows of opportunity to be found in search results. However, if you have 24 pieces of content your net is significantly broader, and you could even have multiple listings on page 1 of the search results – thereby dominating search results and increasing your chances of driving traffic to your law firm website.
Receive Search Engine Love
Search engines love fresh, updated websites and consider those with recent content to be more relevant to users, and as a result, rewards them accordingly. With every new piece of content you publish on your website, you attract search engine bots to crawl your website, index the new pages and recalculate your search engine rankings. Each indexed page is an opportunity to be found in the search results for keywords your customers are searching for.
As mentioned above, the more relevant pages you have indexed, the greater the opportunity to dominate search results for your chosen keywords, the more traffic you will drive to your website and ultimately the more business you will receive.
It essentially comes down to quality – post regular high-quality content relevant to your audience, search engines will love you and reward you with better search engine rankings, you will be found by customers, who in turn will value your high-quality information, they will share it and take your desired actions when applicable and your business will grow.
Applying Fresh Content on your law firm website
Keep in mind that updated website content is not restricted to blog posts only, but also includes the information on your Home page, Services you provide, your Profile pages, Contact Us and About Us pages too.
So many websites have high calibre or highly experienced lawyers and yet their staff profile content consists of the bones. The year they were admitted, what they do (without anything concerning the scope of breadth of their work) and what footy team they follow.
Consider how much better your website could be today
As your law practice grows and develops, make sure the information on these static pages remain relevant. Presenting a website that contains dated, irrelevant information reflects negatively on your law firm, thereby impacting your lead generation and practice success.
Just because you might be good at the legal work you do or have wonderful staff that can genuinely help people with legal issues, doesn’t mean that visitors will contact you. Saying you are good at something doesn’t help at all. Your website must be filled with fresh and valuable content, so the visitor is compelled to contact you. Fresh content on your law firm website means you will get more website visitors. Invest in the necessary resources to keep your website up to date – benefiting your website readers, your clients and your law firm too.
About the author
Peter Heazlewood
Peter Heazlewood is a management and marketing consultant, he specialises in helping law firms develop their practices using business planning marketing and performance reporting techniques refined in his own successful law firm. Peter lives in Sydney with his wife and is the father of five adult children.
