Lawyer Marketing

 Search Engine Optimization is changing the way business spend their marketing and operating budgets.  To be found by your target customers via the big search engines takes time, strategy and in the case of PPC….money.  But now that you have potential customers on your site, are you converting them?  Do you even know?  The answer to both of these questions should be yes.  Too often today the emphasis of your site being found overshadows the importance of whether or not your site is designed optimally for conversion.  Visiting a website is not like driving to the store to look for something you want to purchase….it’s very easy to leave a website thus making it even easier to shop around. 

 So how do you design your site so that it maximizes visitor conversion? Well, that in itself is an art and unique to the site itself, but there are some guiding principles. 

 1.       Decide on what conversion means to you.  If you’re selling products online perhaps conversion is synonymous with a sale.  If you’re providing a service such as mortgages or something else, perhaps you measure success by inquiries for rates and other information via an online form.  Depending on what your website strategy is, there are many different ways to measure conversion. 

2.       Be wary of long introductions (e.g. Flash) where visitors are forced to wait.  People have a reason to be on your site; to accomplish something.  To sit through a cool intro is probably not it. 

3.       Don’t overdesign.  Don’t crowd out important information about you for the sake of design.  You now have the visitor’s attention (if for only briefly) , present them with what they are looking for…not with what you want.  I’m not suggesting a completely spartan looking website, but am rather suggesting you search for the delicate balance of just enough design.

4.       Study site metrics.  Learn where people are going on your site (and where they leave).  What are the trends you are seeing?

5.       Employ site conversion tools.  This is taking studying metrics one step further by actually implementing testing software and learning what is driving conversion. Whether this is through A-B testing, or some other manner, site conversion tools can give you quantitative proof as to what is and is not working for your site.   

 Don’t underestimate the need to optimize conversion and don’t rely on aesthetics alone to get it done.  Decide what conversion means to you and your business and look at it quantitatively…because your competitors probably are.