Is Your Website Repulsing Clients?
Many lawyers obsess about SEO, social media, advertising and other ways of getting more clients. But many miss easy ways to drastically increase the number of clients they bring in. Read on to see how making simple changes on your website, even just changing one word, can dramatically improve your business.
Little things can make a big difference
How can changing one word on your website drastically increase the number of potential clients who contact you? Over at the Clicktales blog, they tell the story of how they did it.
Their sign up form was originally like this:
After doing a little analysis, they discovered that a huge chunk of people abandoned their form when they reached the phone number field. The Clicktales people speculated that although the phone number was optional (indicated by no purple asterisk), people didn’t realize it was optional and bailed because they felt the question was too invasive. So Clicktales revised the form to make it clearer that the phone number field was optional:
The result was that the percentage of people who filled out the entire form nearly doubled. Other examples abound of simple changes in contact forms making a huge difference. For example, when this Chicago web development firm reduced its contact form from 11 questions to 4, the number of contacts increased by 120%. Another company changed its contact form to resemble “Mad Libs” and increased contacts by 40%.
How long are your contact forms?
What information are you asking for on your contact forms? If it’s more than is absolutely necessary, than you’re likely losing clients. It’s impossible to know for sure without testing, but it’s likely that painfully long contact forms are turning potential clients off.
Beyond contact forms
One word, one color, one image…it’s amazing how tiny, seemingly-inconsequential changes can make a huge difference in how people react to your website. Fortunately this does not have to be guesswork. There are a variety of tools that you can use, like Google’s free Website Optimizer, to scientifically test the effect of small changes (Trevor Claiborne from Google did a presentation on this at the Avvocating conference).
Realistically, a time-strapped lawyer probably isn’t going to perform these tests himself, but if you’re paying people thousands of dollars for web design, SEO, social media, advertising or whatever else is hot these days, consider spending some money on people who will make sure your website is optimized for conversions (potential clients contacting you).
If you’ve ever been frustrated with how fluffy and uncertain all of this social media and SEO stuff can be, AB testing your website or contact forms is just the opposite. It’s as concrete and scientific as it gets, with a clear impact on your bottom line.
June 7th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Thanks for the tips. I am just starting the SEO process and learning fast. One issue re Avvo. They want a list of specialty percentages, and I assume this creates word search responses. The problem is they allow only a total of 100 percent. My practice is 100 % intellectual property of which 70% is patents, 20% is trademarks and 10% is licensing and advise. How can I solve this dilemma.
July 19th, 2010 at 12:50 am
I have the same problem with my bankruptcy practice which has several potential listings, all of which are 100% in my practice. Still waiting for them to answer that issue. My thought is that they need to combine same practice issues into one item or allow more than 100% when there are multiple topic listings for the same thing.