Let’s be brutally honest
about your website
If your website’s doing well that’s great. We can probably mastermind with you to monetise it even better, but it’s pretty good already — apparently.
For everyone else: Q. What’s the point of having your website?
You’ve been told you should have one, but “Everyone has one and it’s expected” is not a good answer.
There are three good reasons but only two apply to law firms.
Feel free to challenge my logic. Fair enough?
1. To get traffic i.e. visits from potential clients
- New clients. Not existing ones or ‘preaching to the converted’. You don’t need a website to talk to existing clients.
- Internet surfers tend to not go beyond page one of their Google search results for Services, fewer still venture beyond page two. Do You?
- Therefore if you aren’t on page one or two of Google search results, you may as well not have a website, since no one new is ever going to see it.
You’ve spent a comparatively huge amount of money to put your firm in the best geographic location you can, and make it look good.
- But is your internet property akin to that unpopular restaurant which opens everyday with high hopes but no one goes inside?
2. To convert that traffic into actual clients
- Having found your site, the visitor must feel the urge to contact you, or better still, to join your mailing list so you can contact them at will.
- Therefore if your website’s not designed to do this, you may as well not have it, since it’s just a doorman saying: ‘Hello. Goodbye.’
- You want that? Lawyers are meant to be a bit more street-smart than that.
3. Cheap efficient distribution of self-serve information
- Government & community sites need to self-serve information instead of fielding personal calls but law firms don’t have that role.
- Any presentation you offer should be linked to the objectives in 1 & 2 above.
Arguably there’s a 4th category related to prestige and reputation, but again, it’s related to 2 and relies on 1 because if no one actually finds your site it won’t matter how impressive your site is.
Like the Zen riddle “If a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” — “If there’s an impressive website presentation on the Internet but no one is there to see it, is it visible?”.
Recommendation
If you aren’t prominent in the Google search results and don’t intend to improve your ranking either, then you’re better off keeping the domain hosting for email, and euthanasing the website.
A bit over-dramatic?
Not really.
- Sadly, no one in the real world other than Google’s ambivalent search-bots will even notice you’ve gone.
- You’ll save on website maintenance costs.
- You’ll save time wasted on diffuse website busy-work which adds little or no value.
But most of all:
- At the moment you think you have a ticket in the Internet bonanza.
- You’ve got a website, you’ve ‘built it and they will come’.
- The insidious danger is that your Zombie site is influencing you to take no, or insufficient further action in this department, as you think you already have it ‘sorted’.
- You haven’t — it’s just playing pretend with your imaginary Unicorn.
- Would you pretend to have complied with a limitation date?
- Truth is you’ve been paying for a false sense of security.
- At least a Zombie knows it’s dead.
Please, repeat this mantra:
$ via Internet = Traffic x Conversion Rate
You can’t go wrong if you focus on this simple formula.
The way to win at this game is to increase both traffic and the conversion rate.
Personally, I’ve made a lot of these mistakes, in the past and should have known better since I started with a better than average skill-set. But probably like you, I was too busy doing my ‘real job’ to notice the deafening sound of crickets.
That was before I found the Light.
We know how to make your website earn its keep.
Click the button below to start moving into the limelight.
Now!
Respecfully,
Trevor Lewis
Former Solicitor/Barrister. |
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P.S. Are you or your staff in the grind of writing articles for your website? On top of the pressures of monthly billings, professional education & compliance, you have to do that too, for free? Find out if you’re wasting your scarce time on this widely-despised demand. Join the free Internet Marketing series to see what’s needed to make that strategy useful.
