Recently, Market My Market did yet another survey of 250 participants to understand what traits a legal landing page should have. We asked them several questions based on the premise of a person urgently needing a lawyer to resolve a pending legal issue who comes across a legal landing page upon searching for a lawyer online. We uncovered some facts about what should absolutely be included in an effective legal landing page.
When reviewing this information, keep in mind that this survey focuses on people seeking legal help for urgent matters, such as criminal and personal injury-related legal issues. In some cases, people may need urgent assistance in resolving a family law or bankruptcy matter. A legal matter that takes longer to resolve, such as an estate planning matter, may include some factors but are not definitive based on the information gathered from this survey.
6 Factors to Include in Your Legal Landing Page
Question 1: What is the most important information you are looking for on this page? What missing information could impact your choice to avoid contacting the lawyer.
The breakdown of information deemed “important” is broken down as follows:
| Contact Info | 103 | 31.89% |
| Pricing | 61 | 18.89% |
| Services | 72 | 22.29% |
| Reviews/Testimonials/Past Cases | 31 | 9.60% |
| Credentials/Background/Experience | 50 | 15.48% |
| Location | 6 | 1.86% |
Contact information: An attorney’s contact info should always be clear and easy to find, no matter what. Contact information should always include a phone number and email address. It may be more effective to place vital contact information at the top of the website and in the footer (we’ll expand on this later).
Pricing: An attorney’s rate is not generally not included on their websites. Including a price range on your website is not an industry standard. This is slightly different for most personal injury lawyers, who typically work on a contingency. A criminal defense lawyer should use his or her discretion when choosing to feature this type of information. Attorneys who most frequently showcase their rates on their websites tend to be family law and divorce lawyers. Typically, they feature a range of hourly rates for their services. It may be worth considering adding this feature to a legal website during A/B testing.
Services: Visitors looking for lawyers will look for information about the attorney’s services. You may consider laying out all the granular practice areas within your general practice on your website in case the visitor is unsure about the type of cases you handle from your landing page. It’s important to be clear about what issues you can help with. If you are a criminal defense lawyer, for example, you might want to list “fraud” as one of the crimes you can defend in your menu. A family lawyer might want to highlight “child custody.” Consider listing each smaller practice area that falls under a more general area of law on your website.
Reviews, Testimonials, and Past Cases: Participants didn’t only regard services as a factor that influenced their decision to contact a lawyer, they also highly rated information such as reviews, testimonials, and past cases. This information serves to satisfy Google’s new EAT standards — which exist to rate quality content. It’s important to feature a review aggregation on a legal landing page, as well as testimonials. Ideally, you would also feature a few impactful cases you have won.
Credentials, Background, and Experience: The answers regarding information about an attorney’s credentials, background, and experience generated more respondents that considered these factors more important than reviews and testimonials. Be sure to include a link to your state bar profile, mention your law school, and any special certifications you may have as well as your years of experience on your landing page.
Location: An attorney’s location shows that he can be reached in a physical place. There was not a big emphasis here, meaning that it might not be necessary to include your law firm’s address on the page. It may be effective to highlight your practice in the context of the state in which you practice, rather than a specific city or neighborhood.
In conclusion, what we learned about having the most effective composition for a legal landing page differed from what we expected. This leads us to believe that what people are seeing and expecting change as often as the legal marketing industry itself.
How People Prefer to Contact Lawyers
Question 2: Out of the following forms of communication featured on the page (a chat window, an email address, a phone number, and a contact form), which is your preferred method to get in touch with the attorney?
| Chat | 44 | 16.79% |
| 85 | 32.44% | |
| Phone | 120 | 45.80% |
| Contact Form | 13 | 4.96% |
What we found most shocking about the above results is just how little people rely on contact forms. Unfortunately, there is a stigma about contact forms in which people believe that when they fill it out the information won’t go anywhere. Sometimes, this does happen on WordPress websites when plugins are not updated or tested regularly.
Calling a lawyer over-the-phone is the most popular choice, with email trailing behind as the second preferred method. Including your email address on your website is just one of the top ways to satisfy Google’s new EAT standards, which we previously mentioned.
Lastly, online chat windows continue to provide a great alternative means of communication to visitors, but isn’t as critical when the website features both a phone number and email address.
Consider Loading Times
Question 3: How many seconds of loading do you consider to be too long, and which might make you leave the page before it loads?
| Average | 25.19 seconds |
| Mode | 10 seconds |
| Median | 15 seconds |
All it takes are a few outliers nonchalantly stating “5 minutes is a good amount of time to wait for a website to load” to give an outrageously inaccurate average page load time of roughly 25 seconds. The most common response (mode) was 10 seconds, but per our experience, a load time of 5-7 seconds is frustrating for many users.
There’s certainly an art to making quality landing pages for your law firm to drive directory traffic, AdWords traffic, and highest organic traffic pages. Hopefully, some of this insight will assist you with the never-ending tweaking and testing of your conversion pages.
Read up on our other surveys and what we’ve uncovered about legal marketing here:
Are People Reading Lawyer Reviews Before Contacting Lawyers?