You can boost response from potential clients who visit your website by making it easy for them to contact you impulsively. Significant buying decisions always have an emotional foundation, especially when we have a limited understanding of what we’re buying. We do basic analysis: this seems like good SUV, good computer network, good physician, good attorney. Then we decide whether we “feel” this is a good choice for us. Do we “like” this choice? Will it make us happier? Do we feel comfortable and confident that it’s right for us? For our business or company? We usually don’t stop to analyze feelings. Once we “feel this is a good choice” or “feel right about this” we also feel ready to act. If it’s easy to act impulsively, we probably will. Conversely, if our impulsiveness is slowed down or frustrated, our positive feelings begin to fade. We can use this knowledge to boost response to a legal website by making impulsive contact easy while eliminating frustrations and slow-downs. Here are four simple ways: Limit the navigation menu choices on any page. Numerous page links (especially on the home page), drop-down menus, and “search this site” boxes have all been proven to diminish response. Offering fewer and more relevant choices leads to faster, easier, more impulsive action. Put your less-important page choices on sub-menus on inside pages. Put your telephone number in large or bold type at the top and bottom of every page. If your clients live in more than one telephone area code, a toll-free phone number has been shown to boost response even among wealthy or corporate clients. Make your “contact us” button prominent at the far left or top of every navigation menu and sub-menu, in a bright color setting it apart from other page links. This is your “take action” button—it’s equivalent to “buy now” on a retail site. Provide multiple ways to contact you on the contact us page: an administrative e-mail address, fax number, phone, street address, and contact form. Put a very simple contact form at the bottom of every single page on your site. Make it fast and easy to complete with blanks only for a name, email address, a message box for potential clients to answer “how can I help you?” and (at their option) their home or work phone number. Avoid the temptation to use the contact form as a screening device by including blanks for any other information. An easy contact form lets a new client stay on the page that has inspired them and make that contact decision instantly – it’s often the biggest response-booster of all. Another way you can significantly increase the response to your website is if you organize it by the kind of problems you solve for clients rather than by your practice areas. The reason is this: fewer than 1% of clients use the web to search for words like attorney, lawyer, or law firm, or for typical practice area names, like “business litigation” or “personal injury.” Website visitor statistics show the other 99% arrive at attorney websites through searches performed on search engines using words and phrases that describe their problem – such as: collecting money owed me defending a preference spinal cord injury dui arrest child custody The reason: clients are looking for information and solutions to their problem. They don’t care whether the solution is an attorney, an accountant, a computer program, or a gizmo in a box delivered by UPS. To get these clients to come to your website, you’ll need to come up at the top of the search engine results when they type in words describing the kind of problem you can handle. The only way to do that is to create pages within your website that each discuss a client problem in detail. That’s because search engines give priority in rankings to pages that are devoted to discussing a single topic (such as “selling a business”) and that use words related to that topic over and over again in normal sentences. Each problem-oriented page should be about 600 to 900 words long and should explain in detail how you can handle and solve that particular client problem. There’s a second benefit to doing this: when a potential client arrives at your website from a search engine, they arrive on the page that correlates to their problem, and can immediately see that you can provide a solution. They’ll then be much more likely to stay on your site and learn about your services. And because your site will be organized the way clients think, they’ll also be more likely to return to your site, and to keep you in mind for future business and referrals. It’s definitely more work to organize your website by client problems than by your practice areas, and it usually means your website will have numerous pages. But the potential payoff is worth it. Websites that are organized by client problems, and that explain how the attorney can handle and solve each problem, attract more clients and generate more calls than websites organized by practice areas. The financial rewards and increased business make problem-solution organization the best one for increasing response to attorney websites. Free tools to research keywords To obtain your desired potential clients from search engines, you’ll need to determine what search phrases they’re using. Two fast, cheap research tools work well for this: http://inventory.overture.com (free) http://www.wordtracker.com (free trial – use the back button on your browser to keep testing phrases; $8 for one day gives more extensive information) Both tools will report how many searches there were for each phrase you type into the blank http://inventory.overture.com will also show related searches that used at least one of the words in your phrase, and http://www.wordtracker.com will show synonyms and popular related searches. How to organize your web site The following is one example and is based on “Selling a Business” Make separate pages for the little problems that are included in the … Continue reading Give your website a boost and get more clients for your firm