Your law firm’s website is like a business card in that there are two goals to it:
- Potential clients see it, and
- They contact your firm.
In the context of online marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the ways to achieve goal #1. However, your site can score all of the SEO points and be seen by all of the potential clients in your market, and still be useless if they don’t reach out and become paying clients.
That is where your site’s conversion rate comes into play.
What is a Conversion?
In online marketing parlance, a “conversion” is what you get when you get a website visitor to do a particular something. For some sites, it could mean getting a visitor to sign up for a newsletter. For others, it could mean getting a reader to buy a subscription or other product.
For nearly all law firm websites, though, a conversion happens when you get a website visitor to actively contact your firm, whether through email, an online form, or on the phone.
Conversion Rates
From the definition of a conversion, it’s easy to see what a conversion rate would be: It’s the number of conversions, divided by the total number of potential conversions there were. For example, if your law firm’s website got 100 visitors in the past week and 10 called your firm, 5 emailed it, and 5 more filled out the online contact form, your site’s conversion rate would be 20%.
Conversion rates, however, do not necessarily have to be site-wide. You can break your site down into its individual pages and analyze each page’s conversion rate. You can also group your site’s pages into categories, like landing pages or blog posts, and compare the conversion rates of each one to see what is performing well and what is not.
Of course, no matter what a search engine marketer tells you, the reality is that not all conversions are the same or can be precisely tracked and analyzed. A conversion, after all, is something that really happens in the mind of someone looking at your website. It’s all a matter of intent on their part. Therefore, despite what analytics programs will tell you, just because someone visits your site, reads a blog post, and then goes to a landing page to fill out the online contact form there does not necessarily mean that it was the landing page that convinced them to reach out to your firm. This creates a certain amount of inherent uncertainty as you focus on where your conversions are coming from that is worth keeping in mind.
How Legal Blogging Impacts Conversion Rates
Because conversions on a law firm’s website are typically about making visitors contact your firm, hosting and maintaining a legal blog on your site usually increases the conversion rates of some parts of your website, despite your blog posts converting at a low pace.
The reason is that, in your law firm’s marketing funnel, legal blog posts sit at the widest part of the funnel, stretching out for clients who might not be aware that they need an attorney just yet. If written well, that legal blog post can sow the seeds of doubt that begin to convince a reader that they need to contact a lawyer, pulling them further down the marketing funnel. This is where your website’s landing pages come into play. While the goal of blog posts is to bring in cold leads and warm them up, landing pages are different than blog posts: They are crafted to convert those warm leads into paying clients. As a result, legal blog posts rarely do the actual converting – they just warm up online leads and pass them off to your site’s landing pages so they can close the deal. In many analytics programs, this makes legal blogs look like poor conversion tools. The reality, however, is much more complex.