How to Get More High-Quality Website Traffic — Today

More Traffic Isn’t Always Better

Seeing more and more website visitors every month is a great feeling, but what if your phones still aren’t ringing? If we’re all being honest, website traffic is a classic example of a vanity metric — it looks great, but it tends to only be loosely associated with the real results most law firms and other businesses are after: conversions such as phone calls, form fills, chats, and emails in which a potential client is making contact. 

Ultimately, having a page with only 5 views that gets 5 conversions is better than having a page with 5,000 views that gets none. And having 5 highly-qualified conversions is better than having 5 conversions that don’t end up becoming actual clients. 

So how do you get more high-quality traffic to your website?  

At LaFleur, we use our direct experience with law firms across the United States, and we continually review our clients’ data to try to discover trends that can increase the quality of traffic arriving to their sites.  

A few of the questions we ask about each of our clients’ websites include: 

1. Are there specific, relevant topics (or categories of topics) that do better than others on the site? 
2. Is our content sufficiently geo-targeted to disqualify traffic from outside our client’s area of service? 
3. Does a particular style of post do well with a certain length, reading level, format, approach, or other characteristic(s)? 

You may have intuitions about the answers to these questions — but, unfortunately, if they are not backed up with concrete data, you’re simply guessing.  

Below, we have outlined three proven ways to increase the quality of traffic to your website that you can start using today: persona and keyword research, compelling copy, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. 

Make Sure to Do Your (Keyword) Research 

Attracting high-quality website visitors begins with knowing who your ideal visitor is. Most of our attorney clients can instantly recall cases that were home runs for them. By blending the narratives of those ideal cases, it’s possible to create a picture of what a future ideal case looks like and the type of person who is at the center of such a case.  

• What is their primary issue that needs to be resolved?  
• What is their age?  
• What is their income?  
• What is their education level?  
• Where do they live?  
• What are their interests?  
• At what point are they ready to contact an attorney? 

In marketing, we call this picture of an ideal client a “persona.” And we have written about how to create them so you can build your own personas from scratch. Naturally, having hard data will make your persona(s) much more accurate and effective. 

The simple act of creating a persona (or a set of personas) will provide you and your team with a much clearer picture of who you are trying to bring to your website. Then, it’s time to start developing website content that caters to that ideal future client. 

Here are some important factors to consider as you develop topics to write about: 

1. Is the topic relevant to your ideal audience? Based on your persona, will the topic address the unique needs of the clients you want to get? Furthermore, does it fully address their needs, or does it just offer a cursory overview and withhold important details? 
2. Is the topic relevant to your practice? Trends in the news and media — like fidget spinners — might seem like tempting topics because they will draw a lot of traffic, but if a topic doesn’t have anything to do with your practice, it’s best to steer clear because the traffic you will get will be of very low quality. 
3. Is your topic something your ideal audience is searching for? A lot of topics can be relevant to both your ideal clients and your practice, but are they topics that people are actually searching for? This post, for example, is framed as a “how to” – not a list of strategies or an academic discussion of why high-quality traffic is important in the first place. When people are trying to learn about website traffic, they are typing in queries like “get website traffic,” “increase website traffic,” “how to get website traffic,” and “how to get traffic to website” — those are 4 of the top 10 related queries to “website traffic.” And there’s a free tool, Google Trends, that you can use to explore data about search queries and traffic. 

These are the basic questions to ask about your content, and if you want to delve deeper into keyword research and content planning, you can check out the following articles: 

• How and Why We Choose Our Blog Topics 
• Analyze This! Leveraging Google Analytics to Optimize Your Law Firm’s Content Marketing 

Craft Some Truly Outstanding Content for Your Website

Compelling content is the foundation of any good online marketing strategy. If you spent enough time building your persona(s) and brainstorming excellent topics, the words should start filling up the page very easily and be compelling on their own merit.  

However, there are a few key considerations that you will want to tend to as you write your content: 

1. It’s not about you. Put your readers first as you craft your content. It’s okay to briefly explain your relevant credentials, especially if they will help establish your authority on a given topic. What you don’t want to do is go on and on about how great you are. People are selfish — it’s why one of our innate impulses is often to talk about ourselves. People come to your website to get answers or get help for themselves. If you can keep their needs at the forefront of your content, you will build trust and demonstrate your credentials. At an opportune time, you may direct people to discover how awesome your team is, but keep that content where it belongs: on its own page. 
2. Format your work based on how people read online. Nothing will send people to the back button faster than a wall of text confronting them as soon as a page loads. Include a relevant image on the page. Break up your copy with headlines, bulleted or numbered lists, and callouts so people can skim if they want to. They should get the gist of a piece from that high-level content. But the actual copy shouldn’t just be filler — provide substance for the few people who do read all the way through; they are the highly qualified visitors who will likely reach out to you.  
3. Don’t skip the editing. People’s attitudes about grammar, punctuation, and mechanics have become much more nuanced since the advent of the internet. Notice a typo in a quick email or text? People are generally fine with that. Find a typo in someone’s resume? It goes in the garbage immediately. The expectations for content on your website are just below resume level. Fundamentally, you are representing your brand and your business online with your content. When it comes to attorneys, in particular, people want to have absolute confidence in a lawyer’s attention to detail and formal conventions. Typos, grammatical errors, and irregular usage (like capitalizing every single noun for some inexplicable reason) are immediate red flags for your visitors, especially if your competitors are providing more polished content. 

You can take a deeper dive into the nuances of writing high-quality content for your website in the articles below: 

• How to Write a Successful Blog Post, the Right Way 
• An Editorial Process for Creating Truly Outstanding Website Content 
• Heads Up! 4 Simple Strategies for Writing a Great Headline 

Pour Some Gas on Your Content Marketing Fire With Paid Advertising

As your content improves and you start seeing more conversions — not just more traffic — you will know your efforts are working. At that point, you will likely want to boost your reach, visibility, and return on investment with paid search. 

What’s the best thing about paid search? You basically have an infinite number of customized targeting options. Do you only want to show ads in a certain zip code? You can do that. Do you only want to show ads to people who visited a certain page on your site? You can do that. Do you only want to show ads to people searching for the phrase “fidget spinner product liability lawsuit”? You can do that. 

Essentially, if there is a qualifying characteristic that you know you want to target, you can do so through paid advertising. And you can do it in more places than just Google. Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and a wide variety of other platforms offer paid advertisements with their own suites of highly specific targeting customizations. 

Unfortunately, the legal industry is not really a place where you can simply dabble in paid advertising. Of the top 100 most expensive keyword phrases for pay-per-click advertising, 78 of them were legal terms, and 9 of the top 10 most expensive were related to lawyers. But I have some good news for you: our team of experts is ready to manage your paid advertising and bring you highly qualified website traffic. 

LaFleur Can Help You Get High-Quality Traffic to Your Website — Today

We know that attorneys are incredibly busy, the legal industry is incredibly competitive, and most small and medium sized law firms can’t afford to hire in-house experts in content marketing, paid advertising, and all of the other skills related to maintaining a web presence that attracts high-quality traffic. 

We’re here for you.

If you’d like to talk about your digital marketing needs, call our office at 888-222-1512 or fill out our brief online contact form. We look forward to hearing from you!

Not ready to talk to someone yet? That’s okay too. 

You can check out some of the resources linked in the content above or the related articles below. You can even subscribe to our blog by providing your email at the top right of this page. 

• Is Paid Search Right for Your Firm? 
• Legal Marketing 101: One of the Latest In-Depth Resources From LaFleur 
• How to Improve SEO on Your Law Firm’s Website Today 

References 

Lake, C. (2017, July 17). The most expensive 100 Google Adwords keywords in the US. Search Engine Watch. Retrieved from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/31/the-most-expensive-100-google-adwords-keywords-in-the-us/