When looking to increase performance of your legal firm’s website and increase your conversion rate, you have to think about how your potential claimants will interact and use your firm’s site. Below we’ve pulled together ten of the most common mistakes, that will really frustrate your visitors.
1. 3-Click Rule
When designing your website, think about your claimants journey, if they can’t find what they came looking for in three clicks then chances are they will simply leave and find it elsewhere. So you need to make sure your navigation is clear and that pages link to other relevant pages of your site.
2. Scanning issues
When a potential claimant gets to a page they tend to scan the content, looking for the interesting and relevant points that will make it worth their while to actually read the page. But if your content is laid out in such a way that makes that difficult, such as overlapping columns or large fields of continuous text then they will give up looking. So try using bullet points, bolding key words and keeping a clear consistent layout across the whole of your website.
3. Don’t go below the fold
Obviously you will have content below the fold, but don’t go hiding all those important main points below large banner images or overly extravagant navigation menus. Think like a newspaper and provide a glimpse of the key points in your title and introduction, which can easily be placed above the fold and then expand on them throughout the rest of your content.
4. No way to search
Lots of people have an idea of what it is they are looking for when they visit a site, so instead of wasting their time learning your firm’s navigation they look instinctively for a search option. But if your site doesn’t have one then they will instinctively leave as they just don’t have time to go traversing your website in the hopes of what they want.
5. And no way to contact
Again some claimants will know exactly what they want and with the increase in local search performance that might be to get in touch with your firm. But if you don’t clearly feature your firm’s contact information, they again aren’t going to waste time looking, so make sure your contact information is visible on every page, but don’t let it distract from the rest of the pages content.
6. Giant Forms
When looking to increase case conversion rate, forms are a must have, be it for simply contacting your legal firm or for accessing an offer such as downloading an eBook. These forms let you gather data on your potential claimants and help you convert them into claimants. But when creating your forms you need to be precise with the information you’re asking for, as long forms with what seem to be an endless number of fields to complete will scare away visitors. It’s important that the fields you’re asking to be completed match your visitor’s perceived value of the offer you are giving them.
7. Slow performance
Something that will affect both your SEO performance and your user’s experience is the speed of your legal site. Large amounts of graphics, animation, video, or more technical aspects such as poor web coding and web hosting services can all cause degradation in your site’s speed and reduce the satisfaction of your users.
8. Hidden links
On your legal firm’s website it’s important to use internal linking to help users navigate and find more interesting and relevant content. But those links need to be clearly visible, hiding them in pictures or difficult to spot text will make it hard for users to find them, and once they’ve finished viewing the content on their current page, without being able to see any links they will simply leave your site.
9. And just as bad are dead links
Dead links occur when the page that was originally linked to no longer exists or has been moved to somewhere else. Not updating these links or at the very least not having a personalised and useful 404 error page will frustrate users and have negative repercussions on your SEO performance as well.
10. Too much noise
No I don’t mean sound, but the amount of distractions and interactions taking place on your web pages. Each page should try to answer a single question and link clearly to other pages which will answer other potential visitor’s questions, through an easy and simple navigation to clear internal linking.
So there you have it ten mistakes to avoid if you want to give your users a great website experience.
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