Law Firm Web Site Design - Thinking in Reverse

A big mistake most companies (including law firms) make is that they build their web site without thinking in reverse; without first considering the end result they are trying to achieve. As a result, their sites don't receive any traffic and they end up having to go back and fix things. Don't fix things - get it right the first time!

So how do you do that?

You need to ask yourself these questions before building your web site:

1. What do I want people who arrive at my web site to do? This might seem like a funny question. Once they arrive at your site, you've got them right? Wrong! You need to define in advance a specific action you want your visitors to take and design your site with that in mind.

2. How do people search for law firms in my practice area or market? What search terms are they using to find web sites like yours? Those are the keywords for which you need to optimize your web site.

3. What is my competition doing? Not just any competitors, but the ones who rank highly in the search engines for keywords related to your practice area or market. Modeling what the most successful firms in your market are doing with their online marketing may provide a blueprint for what you should do, or how you should get started.

In other words, do some research before getting started! The worst thing you can do is build a web site without first having specific answers to the questions above. If you don't, you will end up re-doing many things and spending money and time that could be put to better use.

For example, if the main thing you want people to do is fill out a contact form, then the site should be designed in such a way as to encourage that action. These types of design decisions can be expensive to implement afterwards, so you can save yourself money, time and frustration (in the form of lost conversions) by building your site right the first time.

Your web site copy should emphasize a small set of primary keywords. They should be used in your web page titles, in headers and in the copy in bold, and in link text to other pages of your site. If you build the site first and THEN do your keyword research, you will have to go back and make those adjustments after the site is built.

Finally, there may be much to learn from studying your competitors, such as who links to them. A web site that links to a directly competing firm may be a good candidate to link to you. Or there may be certain directories or industry portals that have links to your competitors that are good candidates to host links to your own site. Don't keep your head stuck in a hole. You need to know what your competition is doing, and then do something better.

If you follow this advice and think from the perspective of what the final version of your web site needs to do for you, you will be more likely to build a web site that actually delivers leads and clients to your firm. And that, after all, is the whole point.