Have questions about law firm websites? We have answers.

FindLaw recently hosted the webcast “From Foundation to Conversion: How a Law Firm Website Can Thrive in Your Overall Marketing Mix” to highlight the central role a contemporary-looking, mobile-adaptive law firm website plays in a law firm’s marketing mix. During the course of that conversation, attendees had some questions. Since you may well have those same questions, too, we provide answers to them here:

How often should I look at analytics for my website?

As is so often the case, the answer depends on your practice, your geographic market, and your ideal client base. Someone who practices DWI defense in a college town might get a lot more interest from users than someone in a rural area whose bread and butter is transfer of land ownership, so there might be more material to make sense of.

That being said, a monthly look at website analytics is probably enough for most attorneys in most practices. That’s often enough to give you a good sense of what’s working and what might not be, and over time, you will be able to notice whether any trends are developing.

To demystify website analytics, FindLaw uses INSIGHT, a proprietary performance analytics dashboard that goes further than providing raw data and contextualizes website usership numbers for busy attorneys who want to fully understand how their website is performing without having to make a lot of superfluous effort. One of its chief advantages is that it can show you, the website owner, where your traffic is coming from and what visitors do when they get to your website.

Does FindLaw engage attorneys to ask clients for reviews directly, or do you work through someone else?

Broadly speaking, FindLaw’s goal is to take as much of the marketing burden off attorneys’ plates as possible. When it comes to building a body of positive online reviews though, operating completely independently often isn’t entirely the right way to go. We’ve worked with law firms and attorneys and studied how to best generate a body of positive online reviews.

What we’ve learned is that for some attorneys, a hands-off approach works wonderfully, whereas in other cases, attorney participation might be necessary if the goal is to meet ambitious benchmarks on a short timeline. In short, we’re familiar with the different goals, strengths, and time constraints that come with each practice and can work with circumstances as they stand to deliver the desired result.

Where are some places I can go to get ideas for blog posts?

The absolute best answer to this is quite simple: Your practice.

The reason we say that is that no one knows better than you what’s timely and newsworthy with respect to your audience — and let’s take a moment to unpack that. “Timely” (meaning, of course, current) and “newsworthy” (meaning of special note, significance, or potential impact) are qualities possessed by the best blog posts.

Blog posts that are timely and newsworthy are ones people want to read, because they’re seeking to gather knowledge and inform themselves. “Your audience” is important to consider, too. You should have an ideal reader in mind – someone for whose benefit you are doing all this work — and keep that person front and center at all times. Doing so will help you decide what to write and, post by post, build a blog that is valuable and interesting to potential clients.

Are there any considerations I should be making in terms of imagery for my refreshed firm’s website?

Yes, quite a few! In the interest of time and space, we’ll share just a few of them:

• Accessibility: There’s a well-justified movement afoot to make the Internet more accessible to people with disabilities, like those with vision impairments. Image should have an alt text, a very short description that screen-reading software, which can’t detect images, can read out loud. It’s a small step that is very welcomed by people who need to interact with your website in a different way.
• Tone: A dark, stormy sky communicates a looming threat or potential danger, and it’s reasonable to think that creating a sense of immediacy might prompt a viewer into action. But would that image be a good choice for, say, a wills, estates, and trust website? Probably not, because it’s too likely to backfire and instead create the impression that bad things will happen in the viewer’s life no matter what. When selecting imagery for your website, think very carefully about what sense the imagery conveys, and try as hard as you can to think of other ways it might be perceived beyond your initial reaction to it.
• Consistency: Even when it’s hard to put a finger on, people pick up on inconsistency. It creates a sense of dissonance, or clash between two dissimilar elements. If you’ve chosen a script for your content that looks refined and elegant, for example, it would look odd paired with, say, a picture of a charging bull. The imagery you choose should complement, not contrast, all other components of your website.

Learn more about presenting your firm online by watching our full webcast, now available for on-demand viewing.