Landing pages occupy a unique and crucial niche in the online legal marketing world. They can be used to rank highly for some of the most basic keywords in your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. They can also serve as an important part of your online marketing funnel, turning interested clients into paying clients.
But crafting an effective landing page for each one of your practice areas is not easy. Getting a landing page to rank well often requires plenty of content, which makes the page long. However, effectively funneling visitors from the landing page to the contact information requires the page to be short. Finding the line between these extremes can be difficult, and might not fit your firm’s strategy or vision.
Background: Keywords and Types of Search Queries
If you’re a law firm and you’re doing the online marketing thing, one of your targeted keywords is almost certainly “[location] [practice area] attorney,” like “San Francisco personal injury attorney,” or “Orlando criminal defense attorney.”
Queries with these keywords are especially hot because they’re being done by someone who’s actively looking for an attorney, already. Unlike someone who’s merely researching their legal problem and conducting informational queries, people making these types of queries know what they want, and are online to get it. These leads are very warm, and should be converted at a high rate.
This is where your landing page can come into play.
Landing Pages that Rank
If you have a landing page with lots of great content and plenty of both internal links and backlinks pointing to it, you’ll be at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) when someone enters one of these searches. This gets you more clicks, which boosts your traffic and solidifies your placement at the top of the charts.
But once all of these people get to your high-ranking landing page, they’re confronted with a massive page containing all of this valuable information that they might not necessarily need or even want. They already know what they’re looking for. Dealing with all of this information instead of a streamlined contact form might even deter them from reaching out to your law firm.
Streamlined Landing Pages
On the other hand, you can make your landing pages streamlined. Without much content in them, they are easily navigable, allowing potential clients to get to the contact information that they’re likely looking for without any hassle.
The ease with which these landing pages convert hot leads into paying clients is great. However, without much content in them, they tend to rank poorly and rarely generate backlinks from other sites.
Three Options for Landing Pages
This dichotomy means there are three different general strategies that you can adopt for your law firm’s website:
- A streamlined landing page that converts,
- A content-filled landing page that ranks well, or
- Something in between.
Trying to toe the line between these two extremes is risky: While it could pay off and be successful in both areas, it’s more likely that it succeeds in neither, falling behind the pages that focus on one or the other in both areas. Creating two landing pages, on the other hand, splits the links and traffic that they would receive, making each one about half as strong.
Myers Freelance Writes Successful Landing Pages
Landing pages are a great example of the kind of thing that they didn’t teach you in law school. They’re all about marketing your firm, rather than actually practicing the law. Contracting it out to the professional legal writers and legal bloggers at Myers Freelance is just practical business sense. Contact us online to get the process started, and we can help create the landing pages you need to grow your firm.