Many law firms are a conglomeration of lawyers doing different things. They may handle a variety of consumer cases ranging from personal injury to criminal law to family law. Other firms handle a range of commercial transactions from business formation to litigation to employment issues. It’s pretty common for a group of attorneys to come together in one practice and handle many, many types of matters.
How can a firm dealing in multiple practice areas build an effective website?
That depends on what constitutes “effective” in your mind.
If you’re building a site that informs visitors about a firm they’ve already heard about, then it’s easy to build a site. The site will be built around the lawyers and provide background, photographs, and other info about those attorneys and the services they provide. Visitors to the site are already generally sold on the lawyers and are mostly seeking to confirm their understanding about the firm’s ability to meet their needs. As a secondary function, such a site serves to inform clients with the effect of keeping them connected to the firm and cross-selling them additional services.
On the other hand, if you’re trying to build a site that generates new business without a prior referral, then the multi-practice firm website is much more challenging. These multi-practice sites don’t do well in the search engines because of their lack of focus. They also fail the three-second test for retaining visitors.
First, it’s important that websites rank in the search engines when the whole point of the site is to generate visitors. These multi-practice sites cover so many subjects that they don’t rank well for any particular type of search term. For instance, a site with information about family law, criminal law, and personal injury matters won’t rank well for any of the search terms related to those practice areas. The effectiveness of the site is diluted due to lack of focus.
These sites also fail the three-second test with visitors. Visitors come to a site and quickly decide whether to stay. Usually, they’ll give you about three seconds before they hit the back button. A multi-practice site has trouble keeping visitors because it’s not immediately clear to the visitors that the site solves their problem. They leave without really giving the site a chance.
It’s certainly possible to build a multi-practice area site that looks good. However, it won’t generate traffic from the search engines, and it won’t pass the three-second test. Those failings might not matter if you’re going to generate traffic to the site by means other than search engines. For instance, if you’re advertising the firm and the site, you’ll be less worried about the search engine problem. However, you’ll still need to make sure your site can hold the attention of your visitors.
If your goal is to generate traffic from search engines, then you’re going to have to take a different approach. You’re going to have to build a site for each practice area. These sites need to be information rich and oriented toward helping users understand and solve their problems. The site needs to focus on the problem rather than on the lawyers solving the problem. That’s how you rank well on search engines.
Some firms build these practice-specific sites in the form of blogs. They’ll build a main firm website focused on the lawyers and then build a separate blog for each specific practice area. The blog will delve deeply into the problems and solutions in language prospective clients understand. Over time, these separate sites rank well and generate new inquiries. This is an excellent approach.
These practice area-specific sites don’t need to be set up as blogs. You can simply build an information-rich site on the practice area and do just as well as a blog. The key is focus. By building a content rich, helpful site, you’ll generate inbound links, search engine rankings, and traffic. If traffic is your goal, then your best bet is to build something that specifically addresses the concerns of your prospective clients—make it about them and their problems and not about you.
Building effective websites starts with a careful assessment of your goals. Once you know what you need to achieve with the site, then you’re in a position to build what you need to achieve that objective. Lack of clear objectives will result in a lack of effectiveness. Don’t build a site that looks nice and makes you feel good. Build a site that does what you set out to do.
