Trial Magazine

Your next clients expect to find online information about you and your firm quickly and efficiently. Their experience in getting that information may play a significant role in molding their first impression of you. Applying the same ethics rules that guide your practice offline, you can follow this 10-point checklist to see whether your firm’s web presence is helping you put your best foot forward or whether it’s hurting you. By no means comprehensive, this is a quick diagnostic that you can use on a regular basis (monthly, quarterly, or at least annually).

1 Google My Business

Claim, complete, and verify your information.

Probably the most important tool in your web presence arsenal is your Google My Business profile (www.google.com/business), which lets you manage how your firm appears on Google Search and Google Maps. Confirm that you have claimed, completed, and verified a Google My Business listing for each physical office location. (The link above has steps for doing so.) Also consider whether it makes sense to claim a profile for each lawyer (or perhaps partner) using the same process that you do for the firm.

2 Security

Protect your site and your visitors’ ­information from hackers.

Too many law firm websites have security vulnerabilities. This creates security issues for visitor information, such as sensitive information shared via forms and live chat, and other headaches such as site hacks that harm search rankings. Check that your website properly uses HTTPS protocol and that it also passes Sucuri’s SiteCheck (https://sitecheck.sucuri.net).

3 Mobile Friendly

Confirm your pages load properly across devices, particularly mobile devices.

People use a variety of devices, and many searches will be performed on smartphones. If potential clients have to pinch and swipe to read your webpages, they’ll likely become frustrated and move on. Check that your pages are mobile-friendly by using Google’s “Mobile-Friendly Test” (https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly).

4 Speed

Make sure your pages load in less than three seconds.

Prospective clients have short attention spans, high expectations, and many options when choosing a lawyer. They are unlikely to wait for pages to appear, so don’t lose potential clients because of a slow-loading website. A good benchmark for speed is scoring 90+ for “Performance” in Google Chrome’s “Lighthouse Performance Audit.” Learn more about speed benchmarking at https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse or at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights.

5 Positioning

Make sure this is clear on all webpages: whom you help, how you help them, and why you’re uniquely qualified to do so.

To stand out in a competitive market, you must position yourself as the most qualified. The more specific you are, the more you elevate yourself above the crowd. For example, instead of positioning your firm as “personal injury lawyers,” perhaps you position it as “the only firm in Chicago focusing on scooter and motor vehicle collisions.” 

6 Contact Information

Confirm that on all of your site’s pages, visitors can easily find how to contact the firm.

Your website should make it extremely easy for people to find contact information. Your firm’s address and phone number should appear prominently on every page of the website (for example, in the footer). If you have contact information for each lawyer, including direct office lines and email addresses, that information should be listed too.

7 Search Engine Optimization

Your pages should be properly crawled and indexed by major search engines so people can find you online easily.

Regardless of how people get your firm’s name, at some point they’ll likely look online for information—and most of the time they’ll use Google. One of the most important tools for marketing a practice online, search engine optimization (SEO) includes all of the things you can do to improve the visibility of your pages in organic search results—generally by creating content, earning backlinks, and fixing technical issues. Make sure your website scores 90+ under “SEO” in the Lighthouse Performance Audit (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse), which offers a decent test to check whether you’re covering some of the basics, such as meta descriptions and page titles. For a more comprehensive SEO auditing tool, I strongly recommend 
Screaming Frog (www.screamingfrog.co.uk). 

8 Accessability

Verify that your pages can be used by as many people as possible.

Although commonly considered in the context of people with disabilities, website accessibility is beneficial to all users. You can complete a good, basic accessibility check by ensuring your website scores 90+ for “Accessibility” in the Lighthouse Performance Audit (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse). This tool checks for features such as buttons with accessible names that screen readers can announce, documents containing title elements, and images containing “alt attributes” (text that describes the picture). For more robust accessibility auditing, I recommend W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (www.w3.org/WAI).

9 Social Media

Check that people can find you on major social networking sites.

People expect businesses to have a social media presence, so make it easy to find information about your firm on at least Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Use these tools personally, and explore each platform’s business offerings (www.facebook.com/business; https://business.linkedin.com; https://business.twitter.com). People want to ask people they know, like, and trust for lawyer recommendations. When people search for your name on Google and click a link to your LinkedIn profile, they will be encouraged to find whether you have mutual connections. 

10 Reviews

Where permissible, testimonials should appear prominently on your pages and around the web (via Google My Business, Facebook, and legal directories). Your ethical obligations apply equally online as they do offline. Consult applicable legal ethics rules, comments, and decisions with respect to anything you do online.

Check that client testimonials appear at the top of search results for your name and firm name. People expect to be able to find satisfied clients praising you online, and this could be the single most important factor in whether they decide to contact you. Testimonials should appear on Google My Business; Facebook; and major legal and business directories, such as Avvo and Yelp. You should create systems and processes to encourage happy clients to publish reviews on these platforms (I like using gatherup.com.), particularly on Google My Business (https://tinyurl.com/qkwssmq).

Gyi Tsakalakis is the founder of AttorneySync in Chicago and can be reached at gyi@attorney sync.com. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not constitute an endorsement of any product or service by Trial or AAJ.