Questions to Ask Yourself When Evaluating Your Conversion Rate

Is your conversion rate where it should be? Ask yourself these questions to work on raising it!

Conversion rate is web marketing speak for the rate at which visitors to your website decide to request your services. While most SEO practices are geared toward improving the number of visitors that see your site, raising your conversion rate is also important as it represents the rate at which your law practice makes money.

Notes on conversion rates

All legal professionals should focus on raising their websites’ conversion rates through the use of good design, well-written copy and other elements discussed below. A website’s conversion rate is an excellent quantifier of its overall value.

The average conversion rate on most websites is one to three percent, though this is generally the case for products rather than services. You may define a conversion as getting a user to sign up for a consultation, join a mailing list or express interest in some other way. The ideal parameter for a law firm’s website is from five to 10 percent, meaning that five to 10 percent of people visiting the site sign up for the service.

How to raise conversion rate

Say you are a law firm with a special focus on Arkansas estate planning and are experiencing lower conversion rates than you’d like. How do you go about improving customer conversion? Ask the following questions about your site’s content and style:

• Does the website have informative content in a variety of different forms? Multimedia sites with blogs, videos and solid data will be more likely to convert visitors into clients. The quality of your site’s content must be consistent throughout the site, and it must be easy to find.
• Are the incentives to sign up clearly portrayed? Incentivizing conversion is the most important thing you can do. Be sure to make it clear that when a client signs up for a legal consultation, newsletter or other service, they are receiving unquestionable value.
• Is the branding on the website an accurate representation of the firm? You want to make sure that your branding is strong and consistent throughout your site. Speak with a marketing or image consultant about what colors and design styles to use if you are not sure. Nonverbal brand design elements have a greater impact than you might think, and you want them to draw your clients in.
• Who is being attracted by my site’s SEO practices? Think about the socioeconomic, geographic and career statuses of your target audience, then tailor your online efforts to reach out to the crowd that is most likely to sign up for your services. Getting millions of hits isn’t useful if only one or two of those hits actually convert.

It is sometimes easy to miss the forest of your overall business model for the trees of improving your website’s SEO. Conversion rate, not online visits, is the number that you should be looking at when analyzing your web marketing strategy. Think about your website from this perspective, redesign it appropriately, and you’ll see your firm’s online business skyrocket.