5 Things Every Law Firm Website Needs

Daniel Dean on May 10, 2023

Just like a briefcase and a cell phone, every lawyer needs a website. Not having a web presence

1. Bio

Nobody wants to hire a lawyer who is too mysterious. Make sure your website includes a bio that outlines your experience as an attorney, your education, and your successes. And it never hurts to tell your prospective clients a little about you, too.

2. Practice Areas

All lawyers have specialties. Even if you’re taking any and all cases that come your way, you need to show that you’ve got strong experience tackling a couple of different areas to attract potential clients.

3. SEO

If people can’t find you, you’re already behind the curve. Best practices include installing a search optimization plugin, such as Yoast, and submitting your site to a search index.

4. Contact Form

Your website is useless if it doesn’t give people a way to contact you. You may want only your phone number, and that’s fine. But in today’s world, people are used to filling out forms. It’s no longer the stigmatized feature it once was.

Just remember to install a reCaptcha to prevent others from spamming your website.

5. Appropriate Disclaimers

Lawyers are required to have disclaimers on any advertising they produce. Your website is just that — advertising.

Getting SEO Right

Daniel Dean on October 12, 2022

A website is no good if people can’t find it.

That’s why you get a good domain. That’s why you want a .com domain. That’s why you put your website on all your marketing materials. And that’s why you need to show up on search engines.

Use Yoast SEO Pro

Yoast is the internet’s top SEO plugin for WordPress. They make it easy for everyone. You can get basic set optimization with their free plugin and you can customize your site much more with their pro version.

Yoast allows you to easily set up meta descriptions, those little snippets of text that search engines use to examine and evaluate your site’s purpose and by extension your ranking in search engine results.

Choose Great Keywords

Your goal when choosing keywords is to choose terms that people might enter into a search engine. Search engines crawl websites and note content based on keywords, content, links, and images. While search engines can use your content on its own, keywords help improve search engine rankings, which helps put eyes on your site.

Write Great Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are what introduces your site to SEO algorithms. Usually about one sentence in length, it’s imperative that your meta descriptions describe in as few words as possible what your company does or what your blog is about. These descriptions will appear in your search result, so make sure they are catchy!

Be Mobile Optimized

Search engines now evaluate mobile views of websites in their algorithms. That means if your site doesn’t have a mobile view or doesn’t function very well on a mobile device, your search rankings will suffer. Thankfully nearly all WordPress themes come ready for use on mobile devices.

Submit Your Site to Search Engines

This part isn’t as hard as it may sound. Once you’ve set everything up with Yoast and followed the tips above, you simply login to the Google Search Console, verify your ownership of the domain, and then request indexing.

Where Do I Get Stock Photos for My Website?

Daniel Dean on January 26, 2021

Nearly every website makes use of stock photography, graphics, or video. There are several options for you to choose from and you can find anything you need between these three websites.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock is our preferred source of stock photos. Of the more commonly used stock photo sites, Shutterstock has the largest library and the simplest pricing plan. They have great video and audio for your projects, too.

Price: Starts at $49.99 per month for ten images

Getty Images

Getty Images is the most high end photo website there is. They have photographers at historical and pop-culture events worldwide. They have photographers at the Super Bowl, Protests and Concerts. The biggest hindrance here for most people is the price.

Price: Photos start at $175 each for low resolution shots.

Adobe Stock

Adobe Stock is probably the easiest to integrate with your work. Most web designers and graphic designers subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Stock’s biggest selling point is it’s direct integration with other Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.

Price: 10 photos for $29.99 per month

Photodune

Photodune is the value customer’s best friend. Photodune images are by far the cheapest. They have a large selection of user submitted stock photos, which means you can easily find generic photos there. You won’t, however, find images of popular people or copyrighted things.

Price: Photos run as little as $1 each.