Your webmaster tries to impress you with two numbers: (1) the number of visitors to your website (“web traffic”), and (2) the ranking of your website on the first page of the search engines (Google, Yahoo & Bing) for organic searches.
There’s nothing wrong with having a ton of traffic/visitors to your website, but converting prospects into clients is the only thing that really matters. Over the last six months, an article on www.ProtectingPatientRights.com, entitled “Discover How You Can Recognize the Difference Between a Bacterial Infection and Viral Infection”, received over 17k visits. For a 2,000-word article, www.ProtectingPatientRights.com, received its fair share of web traffic:
- 18,173 page views,
- 16,914 unique (first-time) page views, and
- 15 minutes, 27 seconds per average visit.
Not shabby results for a single web page, right? Think again. You’re just praying the prospect bypasses the paid and local ads and hope they find your organic web page. Making things even more difficult is that most law firm websites list multiple practice areas (i.e., criminal defense, personal injury, etc.), and that is confusing and makes for a bad user experience for consumers. Such random-shot marketing is not strategic, intentional or proactive.
You Don’t Get Paid to Raise Awareness
The question is not how many visitors your website gets, but how many new leads, accepted cases and $ that you make. Next time the webmaster comes for a meeting, come prepared to ask about three numbers:
- Number of new leads generated by your website;
- Number of cases generated by your website that you accepted for litigation; and
- Revenue/income generated by your website.
Next, ask for your bookkeeper for the total amount of money that you spent on your website over the last 6 months. Are you making more $ than you’re spending? If not, spending more $ on your website is just a bad business decision. If your website isn’t generating new cases and making more $ than you spend, it’s time to look at other marketing tools with a higher return on investment.
Getting in Front of the Right Prospects
But how can you take a more strategic, pro-active approach to internet marketing that converts prospects into clients? Not by spending more $.
4 campaigns that generate new potential case with high value:
- Truck collisions,
- Construction falls,
- Birth injury, and
- Burn cases.
For the birth injury campaign, target on keywords that birth injury mothers use. Malpractice victims don’t use keywords like, “cerebral palsy lawyer”—they are more likely to use the keywords, “baby injured by forceps” or “HIE” [hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy]. You might have a landing page just for kernicterus or hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy.
Focus your ads on the regions where the injuries are most likely to occur—this is known as “proximity targeting”. With your ads, target hospitals with bad reputations for the birth injury campaign. For the truck wreck campaign, target truck corridors that have the most fatalities and blanket those areas with paid ads. For the burn injury campaign, pay for a display ad on a burn trauma’s website, i.e., “If you’re injured by a burn, we can help.”
Prequalify Leads with a Funnel
Think of Amazon’s friendly user experience—it is very easy to search and find products that you want and buy with a single click. This should be the goal for your landing pages. You want to prequalify prospects with 2-3 simple questions and then drop them into a funnel that nurtures and cultivates them as a prospective client.
Rather than sending the prospect to the landing page of your website (which is crowded and confusing), you send them to a landing page that is specific to their inquiry. Your landing page should be short and simple with 150 words, 1 video, 3-5 bullet points and a testimonial—less is more. The landing page of the law firm, Robins Kaplan, for birth injury has roughly 150 words, a video, 1 testimonial and a Call to Action that is custom-made for the inquiry. For the video, think of what you would say to the prospect if she was right in front of you.
Have the prospect answer a series of questions that prequalifies them as a prospective client.
- Do you have a child with cerebral palsy?
- Was your child born within the last ten years?
- Do you have concerns about the medical care during your labor and delivery?
If they answer the questions, “yes”, you have a legitimate prospect. The website, Lead Pages, has thousands of lead pages that can use to create multiple variations of landing pages. You can split test multiple ads for truck wrecks and in just a week, you will know which ad is generating the most phone calls and best cases.
The landing pages are not self-focused about your verdicts, settlements or pedigree. Your landing page provides valuable information in a non-threatening environment that can raise awareness on a large scale.
photo credit: Joe The Goat Farmer Conversion Optimization via photopin (license)
