Time on page has been an important factor in SEO rankings ever since Google became wise to the existence of click bots and outdated cell phones that had a second life as click farms. As a lawyer, you have even more to gain than the average business from having customers spend a minute or more on your site. According to Calin Yablonski of Inbound Law Marketing, most people who search online for legal advice are not looking to comparison shop for law firms. If they need a lawyer, they want to hire the first one they find. According to Yablonski, 74 percent of people who contact an attorney about a legal question hire the first lawyer they contact and do not contact other lawyers.
Therefore, it is of the utmost importance not just to rank on the first page but to be the first law firm in the organic search results for your city and practice area. The key to doing that is to building a site that will make prospective clients want to stay on the site for at least 60 seconds and ultimately click the contact button and set up a consultation.
How to Lose an Online Visitor in 60 Seconds or Less
Yablonski’s post contains lots of specific advice for how to make your website conducive to achieving first place on the list of search results. It also contains some don’ts which will make prospective clients lose interest in your site and click your competitor’s site. Remember that most clients only contact one lawyer, so if the web visitors end up visiting your competitor’s site, they will probably end up contacting and hiring your competitor instead of you. These are some mistakes that can make visitors to your website give up before they get around to contacting you.
· Formatting that is hard to skim – Format your page so that visitors can find the answer to their question in 10 seconds or less. That means putting important phrases in large type and breaking the text into short paragraphs, sometimes separated by images or subheadings. Once the clients find the answer, they will keep reading your site for more details. Otherwise, they will go straight to your competitors’ site.
· Zombie pages – Even more frustrating than a page with too much text is a page with little or no text. WordPress blogs sometimes create zombie category pages that just say something like “uncontested divorce” or “slip and fall lawsuits” and have no body text.
· Slow loading time – Most annoying of all is the law firm website that doesn’t load. In 1998, people happily went to the kitchen to brew coffee while a website loaded on the computer in the home office, but today, people are searching on their phones, and they want answers now.
Get Legal Content Writing Help
The best way to take your website to the top of the search results list is to hire professional content marketers. You can count on Law Blog Writers to create readable content for your law firm’s website and keep zombie pages at bay.