Let’s go ahead and acknowledge two of the worst-kept secrets in the industry: lawyers are busy, and filling your website with interesting, growth-driving content is hard.
Maybe you want to tell your law firm’s story better, but you’re drawing a blank when you sit down to write your service pages.
Maybe you’ve already started a blog but those blog posts aren’t translating into website visitors. (Let alone new clients!)
Or maybe you look at the world of online marketing and feel the way your clients might feel about their legal questions: overwhelmed.
Let’s lower the stress on this important-but-also-kind-of-complicated law firm marketing task. We’re spilling some of the secrets to website copywriting for law firms that you can put to use—today.
Why your law firm needs great website copywriting
Most of your potential clients are going to check out your website. So here’s the question: Is your website building trust with them, or is it scaring them away.
When your website copy is spot on, it jump starts your relationship with them. Your website copy has the power to:
- Showcase your firm’s knowledge and experience
- Direct potential clients to content that’s targeted to their specific needs
- Guide new prospects toward signing through carefully crafted calls to action
But prioritizing good marketing copy for your websites puts law firms in a conundrum.
- Writing high-quality copy is time consuming
- Every hour you spend on writing marketing materials is a lost billable hour
What’s more, good copywriting isn’t the end of the story. You still need to get your website seen by potential clients (i.e., optimize your website copy for SEO) and have it pass muster with legal marketing compliance regulations.
Starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with all this? Don’t worry—this is what we live, eat, and breathe every day here. We use our industry experience and marketing know-how to revitalize your firm’s site with valuable, compliance-aware, growth-driving website copy—all fully optimized to help your pages rank in search engine results.
What is website copywriting?
Let’s hit the rewind button for just a sec.
What are we talking about when we say “website copy”?
Website copywriting is the creation of written content. The goal of this copywriting? To bring new leads to a law firm’s website.
From service pages describing your firm’s practice areas to regular blog posts, your law firm website copy can take a number of forms.
Types of law firm website copywriting
All of the following types of website copy can draw more visitors to your site, demonstrate your firm’s experience and knowledge, and (our favorite part!) help your firm sign more clients.
Home page copywriting for law firms
Your home page is like the reception area, lobby, and help desk of your website, all in one! It’s the first glimpse many visitors will get of your practice and your first chance to get them interested in your services.
A good home page should be visually engaging, easy to navigate, informative, and tell a story. Visitors should have an immediate sense of who you are as a firm, your practice areas, your firm’s values, and what they can gain by reaching out to you.
Practice area page copywriting for law firms
Service pages lay out your firm’s primary practice areas for readers, helping them understand the scope of your practice and how you work with clients.
A well-constructed service page should explain the legal services you provide, speak to the major pain points your ideal clients may be experiencing, and flex your law firm’s knowledge and experience a bit.
The more robust and helpful your service pages are, the more likely it is that leads who need your services will keep on clicking around on your site to learn more—or reach out to your firm for a consultation.
Blogging for law firms
When it comes to building trust with your audience and boosting site traffic, a published blog is one of your best available resources.
Adding a regularly published blog to your law firm’s site allows you to push out a steady stream of engaging, useful content that speaks to your audience’s legal needs and demonstrates your firm’s experience.
Combined with the right links and calls to action, an informative, knowledgeable blog post serves as an ideal first “hook” to get prospective clients interested in your services.
Lead magnets for law firms
If your marketing strategy includes email campaigns—and we’re all about email campaigns at FocusWorks Marketing—lead magnets help you grow your email list and better target your marketing efforts toward leads who are actually interested.
A type of gated content, lead magnets are helpful, downloadable resources that site visitors can obtain in exchange for their contact information. Lead magnets come in the form of a guide, e-book, or whitepaper, but you can also get creative and use quizzes, infographics, toolkits, webinars, and more.
Like blog posts, a good lead magnet will speak to your audience’s pain points with useful explainers about the legal process. Think tips for finding the right personal injury lawyer or an in-depth dive into the nuances of your state’s estate planning laws.
Unlike blog posts, though, lead magnets also build out your email list with potential clients.
Landing pages for law firms
Typically, a landing page is where your interested prospects will “land” after clicking the link in an email, an advertisement, or another page on your site.
Landing pages serve as the final step in encouraging leads to engage in an action you want (such as reaching out to your firm or signing up for your contact list), so an exceptional landing page needs to be lean, mean, and focused. Its whole purpose is to guide the prospect toward taking the desired action.
FocusWorks can help
The team at FocusWorks is ready to handle all of your website copywriting needs, from knowledgeable, search-optimized service pages to e-books and guides to accessible blog posts specifically designed to reach your ideal clients.
We can help you fill out your site with content that generates and converts leads—all while taking the marketing load off your plate and freeing up your schedule for billable hours.
Get your website copywriting team
Website copywriting tips for law firms
Great website copy isn’t just readable and informative—it also needs to consistently bring new visitors to your site, then bring those visitors one step closer to signing on with your firm.
Part of this equation is search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of designing content that will rank highly on search engine results pages. Without a solid SEO strategy in place, even the most enthusiastic potential clients won’t be able to find your site.
It’s also an issue of speaking to the right audience. Every piece of new content you publish should:
- Speak directly to the legal needs of the clients you most want to serve
- Offer those clients solutions for their pain points
- Guide them toward signing with your firm
At FocusWorks, we use rigorous testing, applied SEO expertise, and a collaborative, personalized approach to help you find a content marketing strategy for your website.
Here are a few of the ways your law firm can get started with better web copy.
Know your audience and what their pain points are
Understanding your audience is the cornerstone of any effective marketing campaign, and website copywriting is no exception.
You probably already have some idea of who your ideal clients are and what kind of services they’re looking for—but before you get started revitalizing your website with polished, informative copy, it’s worth asking yourself how well you really know them.
After all, your clients are more than just the facts of their cases. Each of your leads has their own aspirations, interests, life goals, and challenges—and having a better grasp of who they are as people allows you to target your copy specifically to them.
For example, if your firm specializes in workplace injury, your copy can speak to your potential client’s need for support during physical recovery, as well as financial compensation. If your firm focuses on real estate law, you would want to address different goals, such as streamlining complex business processes so that your client can focus on running their business.
At FocusWorks, we start off every website copy campaign by going beyond demographics. Instead, we drill down deep to get a sense of your audience’s specific pain points, desires, and needs. We can even help you build out personas and content pillars to keep your web copy laser-targeted to your ideal clients.
Once you have a firm understanding of what resonates with your audience, it’s much easier to build a content strategy that gets your firm results.
Establish your brand voice and tone
Here’s where we really start to get to the fun part—at least for us marketing geeks.
Accurate, informative writing on pressing legal issues is never going to go out of style or stop being relevant and useful—but it certainly is a lot more fun to read (and more likely to catch someone’s attention) if it’s authentically yours.
Web-weary travelers stumbling onto your site for the very first time will want to know who you are as a firm before they reach out to schedule a consultation. That’s why every page of your site needs to attest to your legal knowledge, your practice’s values, and yes, even your personality.
Create a content strategy for your law firm (and stick to it)
So you’ve made a website, identified your ideal audiences, and built a voice for your law firm that’s equal parts professional, knowledgeable, and engaging. Time to start filling that website in with all sorts of wonderful copy, right?
Not so fast.
If you want website copy that grows your practice and brings you returns, you’ll need to have a solid content strategy in place.
From the kinds of copy you choose to focus on to the frequency of your posts, your marketing strategy will need to be informed by your practice area, your audience, your preferred level of investment, and what returns you’d like to see.
You’ll also want to be sure that your strategy’s backed up by research—at FocusWorks, we help our clients arrive at a marketing plan that serves their aims through tried-and-tested methods, backed up by marketing industry research and constant fine-tuning and testing.
Once your plan is ready, it’s vital to stick with it. Even the best content strategy won’t generate results if you don’t follow through with consistent, quality content. Yes, it’s absolutely fine to adjust your content strategy over time, but you’ll still want to make sure that your initial plans are realistic and realizable.
Set measurable goals for your copywriting
And now for the best part of all: the results!
Investing in good website copywriting can boost your site’s traffic, bring in more leads, and turn those leads into clients—but you’ll have no way of knowing how much bang you’re getting for your buck if you don’t have some measurable goals in place.
Before you set your web-copy plans into motion, it’s worth considering what you’re looking to get out of your new marketing plan.
Maybe you just want to work on bringing more visitors to your site. Maybe your site is already buzzing with traffic, but somehow those visitors aren’t translating to growth for your law firm. Or maybe you want to see higher site traffic and more qualified leads.
The bottom line is this: Whatever your specific goals for your website are, you need to make sure that you can measure the results.
What’s the ROI on your law firm’s website copywriting?
When it comes to investing in professional copywriting for your website, we understand why you might feel a bit hesitant. After all, as a lawyer, you already know how to write about law—how hard could it be to generate content yourself?
But here’s the thing: your time is worth more than ours, and we mean that literally.
Your firm’s attorneys already have busy schedules, and every hour they spend on a new blog or webpage is time that they can’t put towards their billable hours.
Then there’s also the question of marketing knowledge. Website copy that generates growth for your firm needs to be more than just accurate and informative. If you want to see a real return on your investment, you need website copy that’s optimized for search engines and fine-tuned to guide site visitors toward becoming new clients.
Between saving you billable hours and generating greater returns for your firm, hiring a team of professional copywriters can more than pay for itself over time. Check out how much you could save.
And with our deep industry experience and long-standing focus on serving law firms specifically, you can rest assured that your site’s new copy will be polished, knowledgeable, growth-driving, and compliant with the bar rules for law firm advertising.
If you’re ready to start building a website that brings your firm more clients, get in touch! We’d love to help you grow your practice with a personalized website copywriting plan.
