Five ways to squeeze more juice out of your website in 2021
The initial investment to create a suitable website for a top law firm can frequently run upwards of $500,000 to $1 million. Even for those whose revenue tops $1 billion/year, this is a significant expense—and one that doesn’t end at launch.
Nor should it.
As with everything from buildings to personal wellness, ongoing investment is required to mend, improve, and evolve. Yet, often in the legal sector, marketing experiences are constructed and then abandoned, left to wallow or become irrelevant, without receiving the benefits of upkeep to preserve their taste and utility past supposed sell-by dates.
While it’s critical to replatform well in advance of a provider ending support for your current software, it’s best to keep things fresh and squeeze more juice out of your website in between large-scale technology initiatives.
Here are five ways to get more out of what you have:
1. Integrate fully with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics...and use them
The more you know about your visitors and how they behave on your site, the more strategic and deliberate you can be with content-related decisions. Tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics will help you identify where your visitors are coming from and what content is performing best, which can then drive decisions around future content marketing initiatives. Use advanced Google Tag Manager functionality to track specific content zones and user interactivity with components of key pages on your site, and tweak page templates to increase these metrics. (If you don’t know how to use these tools, feel free to reach one of our team members or check out Google’s extensive training materials.)
2. Ace Google’s PageSpeed Insights Test
Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and Page Experience Optimized by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Using it’s color-coded—Red, Yellow, or Green light—indicators, you can tell whether your website is already delivering an optimal experience for your visitors or whether it needs tuning (fine or wholesale) to bring it up to modern standards. Minor website enhancements can improve functionality for new web browsers, mobile devices, and screen sizes, making your content available to more audiences. If you don’t have bandwidth or resources to consider the whole site, pick up some quick wins by focusing on key pages (which are heavily-trafficked) like the Homepage or Professional Bio pages.
3. Deploy audio and video content across all platforms and browsers
Multimedia content is now essential to any digital experience. It’s also a great way to make a drab or dated site more dynamic and alive. Replace boring, static images with modern solutions that leverage video and dynamic animation. Going one step further, introduce new sections and features to your website, such as a video gallery or biographical video features of your lawyers. Podcasts on professional topics have skyrocketed in recent years: consider adding one to supplement your thought leadership publishing efforts. Beyond that, create portals for firm clients, or develop industry-focused tools, databases, and calculators that will drive engagement and value and for visitors. Remember, if you’re tracking everything, you can leverage your analytics to drive internal budgeting conversations for even more ambitious endeavors.
4. Provide social media content and meta information
Make the most of your fans and followers, especially on social media. Provided your website captures meta information for social media sharing, you can take advantage of network effects on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Meta information with optimized titles, headlines, and images will ensure that your opinions, commentary, news, and insights reach far beyond just your website.
5. Provide visitors with an effective, efficient search function
Help your website visitors find what they are seeking, and what you want them to uncover, faster and with greater precision. Searchable features about attorneys, recent legal matters, and blog posts must be treated as distinct attributes in search engine results. Provided you publish specific search fields like Name, Specialty, Clerkships, Office, or Language (to name a few); or, that you allow for keyword searches by type of content, you will have a better chance of surfacing what searchers are seeking. Consider including alternate search terms, e.g., clients may search for “David Jones” or “Dave Jones,” and adapt your search functionality to accommodate multiple languages. This is just the tip of the “Search Iceberg,” with machine learning and other mechanisms for biasing search results also possible.
With the investment required to build a new website from scratch, it’s worth exploring and optimizing the above tactics first. Even if you’re not yet using RubyLaw, please feel free to reach one of our representatives to assess your current platform. There might be some juice yet to squeeze out of your current website and, when it’s time to upgrade, you’ll be in a better position to seamlessly switch over and enjoy the fruits of your efforts.
