How many leads are you getting from your website or blog each month?  It should be enough to justify the investment you’ve made, and the number should also be growing with time.

Most law firms have a website, but many have made the common mistake of treating their site like an online brochure. Here are some steps you need to take that can double your Internet and website leads:

Clean up your onsite optimization. If you don’t know SEO, then this is definitely something you need to farm out. Your title tags should reflect what each page’s content is about and each one should be unique to the content on that page. Have page headers (i.e., “Scottsdale Car Accident Attorney”) that represent each page’s content, as Google will pull that up in search results. Have meta descriptions that motivate prospects to click on your link in search results. Pay attention to your URL structure and be sure the terms in the URL represent the focus of each page on your website.

Strengthen your onsite content.   When it comes to content, more is better and better is better. So what is good quality content? It all depends on your user. What is your prospective client going online to find? Probably not a laundry list of your accomplishments (although you do want that too). They are looking for usable information that is relevant to their situation. FAQs are a great way to accomplish this, with quick links to even more detailed content on that particular subject. For example, if you are a personal injury attorney, you will want to have content for every type of accident your prospects are likely to encounter — car, truck, bicycle, motorcycle, pedestrian, etc.

Market like a news publisher. Did you know that you could hang just about everything you do on the Internet (marketing-wise) to a great blog? A blog is the best way for lawyers to establish their credibility and build an online reputation that will help draw potential clients to you. Here’s how it works:

• Create a blog on your website

• Post to it 3-5 times per week with relevant, original content

• Link your blog posts to your social media profiles and pages

• Watch your traffic and search results improve

Embrace mobile and offer a great mobile experience for prospects. Mobile platforms have now surpassed desktop computers in terms of where consumers access online content. And if you do not have a website that is optimized for mobile, then you are letting leads fall through your fingers.  Consumer attorneys especially need to have mobile websites, since it is far more likely your services will be needed when a mobile device is the only convenient one at hand.  Research shows that 40% of mobile searches are local, and 81% of those searches lead to action — a phone call or email to your firm.

Improve your Local Search. Local search is becoming increasingly important when trying to improve the ranking for your law firm website on Google and other search engines. After all, someone searching for an attorney in Scottsdale will not care about a lawyer in Scarsdale…and Google knows that. Google is all about delivering relevant search results to its users…hence, the importance of doing whatever you can to rank well for local search.

Update your photography and improve your bio page. Every attorney on your website should have a current photo; to make the quality consistent, I recommend you have custom photography taken. Consider making it unique by having more casual shots taken outdoors at local landmarks people will recognize.   Make your bio a narrative, not a resume. Frankly, your prospect doesn’t care where you want to law school or that you were on the rowing team — leave that for the end of the bio. And always include videos on your site! This gives prospects a true feel for what it’s like to do business with you.

Make it easy to contact you. On every page of your website you should have three ways for people to contact you: your phone number prominently displayed at the top of your site (in the header), a contact form that people can fill out that asks for their name, email or phone and a Comments box, and a Live Chat function that allows a prospect to chat online with someone immediately. Our clients tell us some of their best and hottest leads are chat leads and many are converting into good cases.