If you're like many law firms, you want to drive more traffic to your website. And indeed, that's what many marketing strategies try to achieve. But what if you can get more leads — potential customers who have demonstrated interest — and clients from your existing traffic? Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can help you achieve that.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization is about increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, or conversion, after they land on your website. The desired action could be to fill out a form, schedule a call, subscribe to an email list, or download an e-book.
The CRO process involves understanding your users, how they navigate your site, and the actions they take. It also includes identifying why they don’t perform the action you want from them and fixing the roadblocks.
What Is Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate is the percentage of website users who perform a desired action on your website. Divide the number of website visitors by the number of those who performed the action and multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
For example, if 100 persons visit your website and 20 perform the desired action, your conversion rate is 20%.
Note that the value for the “number of website visitors” may not be the total number of your site visitors, but the number of visitors for the webpages in which you listed the offer.
For example, if you have an offer for an e-book download listed on four webpages, the value of the “number of website visitors” is the total number of visits for those four pages.
Industry Conversion Rate
According to Wordstream, the average conversion rate is 2.35%. However, the top 25% of websites across industries have a 5.31% conversion rate or higher, while the top 10% have a conversion rate of 11.45% or higher.
So, how about the legal industry in particular?
The average conversion rate in the legal industry is 2.6%, according to a report by Ruler Analytics. However, top performers convert up to 15.7%.
How Does Conversion Rate Affect Your Overall Business?
Your conversion rate can directly affect your bottom line, especially if you're relying on it to get potential clients to call your office or schedule a consultation. A high conversion rate means you’re attracting enough leads who might later become clients. A low conversion rate means you may struggle to meet your practice goal.
Here are some ways your conversion rate can affect your overall business:
Revenue: Increasing your conversion rate means more leads, which eventually means more clients, and ultimately more revenue. For example, if you get 350 website visitors per month, and out of that number, 50 fill out a contact form, your conversion rate is 14.2%. If you can increase your conversion rate to 20%, that means you will get 70 leads. In other words, by simply increasing your conversion rate, you’re generating more leads from the same number of site visitors.
Cost per acquisition (CPA): In pay-per-click advertising (PPC), an ad for your website appears when people use specific words in a search engine like Google, and you only pay when they click on the ad. In this context, your conversion rate is the percentage of persons who, after clicking on your ad, take the action you want them to, such as filling out your contact form. If you can increase your conversion rate, you will reduce your cost per acquisition, or how much it costs to gain a new customer. Conversely, a low conversion rate results in a failed PPC campaign.
Why Should Law Firms Care About CRO?
Conversion rate optimization is essentially designing your website and marketing campaigns with your users in mind and making it easy for them to perform the specific actions you want from them.
Some essential conversion rate optimization tactics include using clear and compelling copy, ensuring your website loads fast, using clear and visually appealing calls-to-action, ensuring your website works well on mobile devices, and displaying positive customer reviews and social media posts about your firm.
Here are the reasons CRO is important for your law firm's website:
Generate Leads and Clients
Your law firm's website has one primary job — to help you generate leads and clients. Your website is the first point of contact many of your potential clients will have with your law firm and your chance to make a good first impression.
CRO helps you not just to make a good first impression, but to turn your leads into clients. The easier it is for users to navigate your website and find the information they need, the higher the chances of them becoming interested in your firm.
Improve Your Return on Investment (ROI)
Usually, if you want to generate more potential customers and clients, you will need to increase your marketing budget. However, CRO helps you accomplish this from your existing website traffic without increasing your marketing expense.
Let's say that you're running an online advertising campaign that is generating a modest number of clicks to the landing page — the webpage linked from your online ad. That landing page could be a webpage that's existed on your site since well before the advertising campaign. Conversion rate optimization would be updating that page to encourage visitors to take the desired action. If it works, you're getting more potential clients without spending any more money on marketing, meaning a greater return on investment.
In other words, CRO amplifies your results without increasing the number of visitors to your website. For example, let's say your law firm's SEO (search engine optimization) brings 5,000 site visitors and 150 leads monthly. If you do nothing else and just optimize your website for conversion, you can start turning more of those visitors into potential customers.
Conversion rate optimization is a cost-effective way to grow your practice.
Understand Your Potential Clients
CRO requires you to understand how your website visitors behave and the factors that affect their behavior. In optimizing your law firm website for conversion, you’ll use CRO tools and tips like A/B testing, heat maps, user surveys, and Google Analytics to track user behavior and gather data.
The whole CRO process forces you to understand your site users in the following ways:
- The pages on your website that are most popular and engaging, and the type of content that appeals to your audience the most
- The factors preventing visitors from completing a desired action, such as booking a consultation or subscribing to an email list
- The differences in site visitors' behavior across different channels and devices
Improve User Experience
CRO ensures your website is easy to navigate and that marketing campaigns are channeled toward the right prospective clients (AKA targeting). When you address the challenges users face on your website and the bottlenecks that stop them from taking the steps you expect from them, you will improve the user experience.
Website users who have a pleasant experience are more likely to trust your expertise and recommend you to other people.
Measure and Track Your Efforts
One CRO benefit is that you can measure and track the result of every strategy you implement on your website. By analyzing data on how your users behave and your conversion rate, you can measure and track the effectiveness of any CRO strategy you implement on your website.
For example, you may discover that the majority of your users visit your site on mobile devices, but your website is not mobile-responsive — it's not designed to work well on a mobile device. Working on your website’s mobile responsiveness can quickly increase the number of leads and clients you generate on your website. Another time, you may discover that your website loads slowly. In that case, increasing your website speed can give results quickly.
Stay Competitive
Consumers' needs are constantly changing, and what worked yesterday may no longer work tomorrow. By continuously monitoring how users interact with your website, you can discover opportunities to increase your conversion rate and maintain a competitive edge over other law firms.
Partner With Conversion Rate Optimization Experts To Grow Your Practice
Conversion rate optimization works by improving your website and marketing campaigns to make them more effective in generating leads and clients.
As a law firm, you may not have the skill or time to discover the weak links in your marketing campaign or areas where you can implement conversion rate optimization strategies on your website. A CRO agency or conversion rate experts will uncover areas in your website or marketing campaigns that can be tweaked to get a better conversion rate.
Our conversion rate experts at Scorpion are ready to provide fresh insight and perspective that can skyrocket your lead and client generation. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you meet your practice goal.
