The legal industry can be a competitive one, which is why it’s crucial that your law firm stands out from the crowd. A great first step to make sure potential clients notice you is to create a website for your law practice and show them that you've got the skills and the knowledge to take on their case and win.
Thanks to WordPress and hundreds of themes designed with lawyers in mind, creating law firm websites is easy. But, if you want to stand out from the competition, you need to go beyond using a premade theme as it looks out of the box. That’s why in this article, we’re sharing our top law firm website design tips that'll help you create an engaging and beautiful website for your law firm or legal practice.
Branding Tips
Great branding goes beyond your logo and colors. Your brand is what makes you stand out from others in your industry and how clients remember you. As such, your brand needs to be reflected on your website. Here are a few branding tips for your law firm’s website design.
1. Use Your Logo and Law Firm Name
Your logo should be used in your attorney website design as this builds brands recognition. Brand recognition will then allow potential clients to immediately recognize your posts everywhere else both online and offline.
You should also use your law firm’s or legal practice’s name in the URL of your website rather than using exact-match domains such as bostonpersonalinjuryattorney[dot]com. While this was standard practice back in the early days of the Internet, today it has no bearing on your SEO rank.
Consider the example of Sweeney Morrigan, a personal injury attorney from Boston. He uses his law firm name as the domain name, but also describes the area of the law he practices in and his location right on the homepage of his website.
2. Use Your Brand Colors
A great way to make your lawyer website design stand out from the crowd even with a premade theme is to use your brand colors. You can use them as a background, on buttons and calls-to-action, in links or to add visual separation to different sections of your website.
Nowadays, WordPress themes come with plenty of customization options that allow you to change colors with the click of a mouse. You can easily incorporate your brand colors in different areas of your website, but do keep in mind to provide sufficient contrast between background and text.
Another tip to keep in mind is to save brighter colors in your palette such as reds or oranges for calls-to-action to make them easier to spot.
3. Stress Your Advantage
You’ll also want to find out what sets you apart from other law firms that specialize in the same area of practice and stress it throughout your attorney website design. Your advantage (also known as a Unique Selling Point or USP) will help potential clients relate to you and decide whether you're the right lawyer or attorney for their case.
You can use your advantage in headlines on your site, use it on the About page or even incorporate it as your tagline.
Marketing Tips
The following tips will help you not only to make your site more visible in search engines, but also to attract more traffic to your site through social media and content marketing.
4. List Your Law Firm With Google My Business
One of the first things you should do is to list your law firm with Google My Business.
Creating a listing with Google My Business is completely free and requires you to enter the basic information such as your business name, location, website, and industry. You’ll then need to verify your business by entering a code, which will be mailed to you.
Once your business is verified, you’ll be able to enter more information such as your business hours, description of who you are and what you do, and more. This increases the chances of your website showing up in search results when someone performs a Google search for lawyers or attorneys near them.
As you can see from the screenshot below, the results display law firms with a star rating, phone number, hours of operation as well as directions and a link to the law firm’s website. You’ll also notice reviews which helps you build your reputation.
5. Use Social Listening to Create Content
Sharing case studies on your website is a great way to showcase your legal knowledge and expertise and to demonstrate results you’ve gotten for your clients. But, with social listening, you can create even more engaging content for your site that'll help you drive traffic to it organically.
Social listening involves monitoring social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and any other platform for certain keywords and hashtags that are related to your industry. Doing so allows you to gain insight into what others in your industry are talking about as well as into problems and issues potential clients are having.
You can then create blog posts and articles around those keywords and search terms, share them on social media, and even participate in conversations by pointing your followers to your blog and website.
6. Optimize for SEO
Your site should be optimized for search engines so you can enjoy the benefits of organic traffic. If you use WordPress for your site, you should know that WordPress has great SEO features already built in.
There are also plenty of lawyer and attorney WordPress themes that have been optimized for SEO and there are quite a few SEO plugins that allow you to further optimize your site and your content for search engines.
Likewise, if you prefer HTML templates, there is no shortage of law firm HTML templates that are optimized for search engines. However, here are a few tips to keep in mind when it comes to SEO:
Avoid stuffing your posts and pages with keywords related to your practice as this can have the opposite effect and result in search engines penalizing your site.
Use alt text and proper names for images as this helps search engines understand the content on your site better.
Use proper formatting for your text to make it easier to read and to help search engines understand the importance of the content on your pages and posts.
Make sure your links use contextual descriptions instead of “click here” or “click this” as this makes it easier on your readers to understand what the link is about and it helps search engines determine whether you’re linking to relevant sources.
7. Share Testimonials
Use testimonials from past clients to help you build trust and credibility. When website visitors see that you’ve successfully led and won cases similar to theirs, they'll be more inclined to schedule a consultation.
According to research, customer testimonials are the most powerful form of content marketing tactic, so use those testimonials to your advantage. You can display them on your homepage, on a separate page on your site or on individual attorney and lawyer profiles.
For example, Arami Law Office displays testimonials on their homepage and they also have a whole page dedicated to client’s testimonials.
8. Display Achievements and Practice Areas on Attorney Profiles
Whether you've got several lawyers working for you or it’s just you, make sure to list your awards and achievements on individual attorney profiles. This is another way not only to promote your skills, but also to build credibility and trust in potential clients.
It’s also a good idea to list your areas of practice along with contact information so clients know who the right person is to get in touch with directly. Consider the example from Rochelle Friedman Walk. Her profile clearly shows her achievements, practice areas, and her biography.
Law Firm Website Design Tips
The attorney website design tips below will ensure that your website shows the most important information on your website and ensure your visitors have the best possible user experience no matter how or where they visit your site.
9. List Your Services
Your website should clearly state what services you offer and how you best help your clients. This allows visitors to immediately know whether they should hire you and whether you've got the necessary skills for their particular situation.
Like testimonials, you can list them on your homepage and provide more information on a separate page or you can simply link to the services page like The Mendini Law website does in the screenshot below:
10. Use Multiple Calls-to-Action
The primary goal of your attorney website design is to encourage visitors to request a consultation or get in touch with you. To ensure this happens, you need to lead them through your website and use multiple calls-to-action that'll facilitate getting in touch with you or scheduling the consultation.
Calls-to-action should be used on your homepage and on other pages of your website such as the About page and the attorney profile pages. You can also include a call-to-action in your sidebar on blog page or below individual blog posts.
11. Make Sure Your Website Is Responsive and Fast
Nowadays, almost everyone uses their smartphone or tablet to search and even work online. Don’t let visitors on mobile devices leave your website in frustration because they've got to scroll in all directions or because your website takes ages to load.
Your website needs to be responsive, which means it should resize according to the screen size of the device it’s viewed on. This allows visitors on any device to access and read your content without any problems.
On top of that, a slow loading website drives visitors away even if it is responsive. To avoid this from happening, be sure to test your website speed with Google Pagespeed Insights. Then, implement their recommendations to improve your page speed.
12. Make it Easy to Use
In line with point above, ensuring your law firm website design is responsive will make it easy to use on both desktop computers and devices like smartphones and tablets. However, there are a few other things to consider if you want to make sure your site is easy to use.
Keep the main navigation free of unnecessary links.
Make sure your text is easy to read.
Minimize the distractions such as flashy animations, popups, and automatic plays of audio and video content.
13. Simplify Contact Forms
Lastly, simplify your contact and consultation forms and ask only for the absolute necessary information. By doing this, you'll avoid visitors feeling overwhelmed and backing away before filling out the form completely.
Asking for their names and email address or phone along with a brief message is more than enough for initial contact on the contact form. You can always get more details about their case once they’ve scheduled a meeting.
You can also consider using a booking form that allows them to schedule the date and time and reduce the time spent on phone scheduling, however, try and keep the booking form as simple as possible and ask only for the necessary information.
Take Your Law Firm Website to the Next Level With These Tips
The tips in this article will put you on the right path towards creating an engaging and unique law firm website design that turns visitors into clients. If you’re just getting started with your website, make the first step by choosing the perfect WordPress theme or HTML template and then apply the tips we shared here to brand, market, and design a website you can be proud of.
