By Bill Kammer
Do you have a website? Here are a few basic considerations for lawyers who don’t.
Getting Started
Many resources cover the basics of establishing an online presence; just Google “how to start a website.” The elements of that advice vary little. Start by choosing your own domain name and then where to host your site. For example, “benjaminfranklinlaw.com” could uniquely identify you. Hosting a website with its own name costs only a few dollars a month and is a far better alternative than a site named “yourfirm.wix.com.” Who should design your website? Years ago, you had to code in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to design a website. Today there are various user-friendly alternatives that feature drop-down menus or templates to achieve your design. You could do it yourself, retain a consultant or even use the website templates provided by professional associations such as AAEPA. Good sources of advice include www.lawyerist.com, www.lawsitesblog.com and the extremely popular wordpress.com — its software powers about 25 percent of the internet.
Going Beyond the Basics with Content
After establishing a website, the next challenge is providing information of value to prospective clients and referral sources. Obvious components would include contact information, the breadth of your practice and your experience. No matter the design quality, a website with only that information is unlikely to interest many prospective clients. Content can be king, and to the extent you populate your website with information, references and timely updates, it becomes a more likely destination for those using search engines to review alternatives.
But if you decide to provide content to your visitors, you should continually update that information and augment it with new content as the law and literature evolves. We have all seen legal websites with outdated information, a lack of updates and even copyright marks from several years ago.
Improving Potential Reach with SEO
Assuming you’ve made a commitment to publish content that will distinguish your site from your competitors, try to optimize it to improve your standing in search engine results with search engine optimization (SEO). If you already have a website, you may receive solicitations offering to make your site one of the most attractive and popular. There are several guides to doing that yourself (e.g., 37 ways, www.practicalecommerce.com/checklist), but with a little due diligence, you may locate firms that offer SEO services. Other than reports from your peers who experienced success from revisions, we will always have difficulty judging the quality of the advice being offered by vendors.
Assuming you purchase that advice, there is a reasonably simple way to judge its success — for instance, using Google Analytics (analytics.google.com.) You need only register and obtain a tracking code from Google. Paste that code into your webpages and then you can review data about the people who visit your site. That data includes substantial information about the number of visitors, the way they arrived at your site and the domain from which they came (e.g., .edu, .mil or .com).
Establishing a website and maintaining it will always be a work in progress. To a certain extent, the jury is still out on whether maintenance of a website by solo practitioners and small- to medium-sized firms is productive of new clients and of enhanced relationships with old clients. We probably will never know the answers to those questions, but as the internet evolves, more potential clients will arrive at your office by way of a visit to your website. Already some reports suggest that more than half of individuals and companies begin their search for attorneys by using their browsers to focus searches on particular localities and practice areas. We can’t afford to neglect the possibility that our next great client will arrive in that fashion. Consequently, it’s best to seriously consider creating and regularly maintaining a website.
Bill Kammer (wkammer@swsslaw.com) is a partner with Solomon Ward Seidenwurm & Smith, LLP.