Lawyer Marketing Library

How to Organize Your Website to Boost Response - Part 1

by Suuzen Ty Anderson, Esq.

     Part 1 - Organize by Client Problem, not Practice Area
     Part 2 - Two Techniques for Organizing by Client Problem

Organize by Client Problem, not Practice Area

You can significantly increase the number of prospective clients that come to your website if you organize it by the kind of problems you solve for clients rather than by your practice areas. The reason is this: fewer than 5% of clients use the web to search for words like attorney, lawyer, or law firm, or for typical practice area names, like “business litigation” or “personal injury.”

Website visitor statistics show the other 95% arriving through search engines have searched for words and phrases that describe their problem - such as:
   selling a business
   spinal cord injury
   dui arrest, or
   child custody.
The reason: clients are looking for information and solutions to their problem. They don't care whether the solution is an attorney, an accountant, a computer program, or a gizmo in a box.

To get these clients to come to your website, you'll need to come up at the top of the search engine results when they type in words describing the kind of problem you can handle. The only way to do that is to create pages within your website that each discuss a client problem in detail. That’s because search engines give priority in rankings to pages that are devoted to discussing a single topic (such as "selling a business") and that use words related to that topic repeatedly in normal sentences. Each problem-oriented page should be about 600 to 900 words long and should explain in detail how you can handle and solve that particular client problem. (You'll get even higher rankings in Google if you create an entire section -- a set of related pages -- each devoted to a different aspect of the same problem.)

There's another benefit to organizing your site by client problems: when a potential client arrives at your website from a search engine, they arrive on the page that correlates to their problem, and can immediately see that you can provide a solution. They'll then be much more likely to stay on your site and learn about your services. And because your site will be organized the way clients think, they’ll also be more likely to return to your site, and to keep you in mind for future business and referrals.

It’s definitely more work to organize your website by client problems than by your practice areas, and it usually means your website will have numerous pages. But the potential payoff is worth it. Websites that are organized by client problems, and that explain how the attorney can handle and solve each problem, attract more clients and generate more calls than websites organized by practice areas. The financial rewards and increased business make problem-solution organization the best one for increasing response to attorney websites.
      -- Best regards, Suuzen Ty Anderson, Esq.