Why Law Firms and Legal Professionals Need a Website

Over the last few months, we’ve spoken at a number of legal-related conferences presenting a version of our “50 Tips to Online Marketing Success for Legal Professionals” presentation.

We typically start the talk with the question, “How many of you have a website?”

At most of these conferences, less than 50% of the audience raised their hands. I didn’t anticipate that so few attendees at an online marketing presentation would not have a website. But if I had, I would have armed myself with the stats from an infographic recently published by Sensible Internet called “Why you need a website“.

Below, I’ve sliced and diced the stats from this infographic and discuss how they relate to the legal professionals we work with – attorneys, process servers, private investigators, and bail agents.

One-third of the World Population Uses the Internet

This is a remarkable statistic when you factor in age, population in third world countries, and other socioeconomic factors. However, a more remarkable stat is that 75% of the US population will have been online in 2012.

What’s this mean? Increasingly, your clients rely on the internet to make informed decisions. How far away are we from that number being 100 percent? Ultimately, you won’t be able to compete without an online presence.

400,000 Geo-targeted Google Searches Every Minute

This is something we talk a lot about when we’re invited to speak at conferences and in our day-to-day conversations with our customers.

What does this mean? People are searching for terms like:

“denver private investigator”
“dui attorney in los angeles ca”
“green bay wisconsin process server”

…and so on

With search engines increasingly emphasizing their local listings, you don’t necessarily need a website to take advantage of this consumer behavior, but it’ll only help.

The takeaways here…

• get your business on Google+ Local (and the Yahoo and Bing equivalents)
• optimize your website for the type of service you offer and your location(s) – see above search examples

64% of Consumers “Shop” Online and 93% of Websites aren’t Mobile Friendly

This is a huge advantage for the 7%. If you are in the process of getting your website designed, you shouldn’t have to pay a lot more to have your website “mobile friendly.” For the most part, it’s driven by proper CSS development.

There are companies making good money by offering a “mobile version” of your website. Sadly, if their customer’s sites were built right in the first place, they wouldn’t need to subscribe to these products.

57% of Businesses Have Acquired Customers through their Blog

Whats the takeaway here? Blog!

Write about your business, industry, and the things that come up day-to-day. Whether you realize it, people are doing searches for the type of stuff you could write about. These searchers could be finding your site and could end up becoming customers.

Not sure what to write about? Keep a journal of just one day of work. Jot down the questions you get from new clients, customer service issues that arise, and of course, customer wins or testimonials. Even your operational processes and epiphanies are blog-worthy.

Thanks to Sensible for inspiring this post and helping support the argument with some great data (which is cited in the Infographic).

If you don’t yet have a website for your law firm or legal services company, hopefully this helps in understanding why it’s an important part of your marketing mix.