Law Firm Web Design

In our experience, much of the work which makes a website redesign for law firms successful happens behind the scenes. 

A successful web design project is broken down into the 7 areas outlined below. Some of these items may be better aimed towards an article on digital marketing for solicitors but they are still important to be aware of at the website design stage.

1. Professional design 
2. Website content 
3. Social proof
4. Multilingual support 
5. Data compliance + data security 
6. Google my business 
7. Regular maintenance and updates

One of the most important aspects of website design for solicitors is making sure that your website looks and feels professional.

People will make judgments about your business based on your website, so it’s important it works. 

Here is our web design for law firms checklist:

High quality content that explains your services in detail is critical when it comes to convincing new customers to use your services. 

Content is also necessary to explain to search engines (like Google and Bing) what your business does. This is where a site map becomes important, your sitemap is the data structure that search engines use to understand your site and its content. It’s essentially an index that shows their algorithms what content you have and where to find it. 

Every website should be adding content on a regular basis (2 times per month). This shows Google that your website is active, and growing and it helps them understand your service offerings better. 

We have a full article on content writing for solicitor SEO here.

Your website is more than just a collection of services, it’s an opportunity to showcase your past experience and highlight your firm’s track record of excellence.

Where possible we like to include some or all of the following:

Part of a successful digital strategy is automating the collection of customer reviews. This means sending out an email and/or SMS automatically when a case is marked as resolved, we have systems in place to help your admin team manage this process better.

Only 5% of websites are multilingual in the world. This represents a competitive advantage for firms willing to add a multilingual element to their website. 

We can translate your website into a number of different languages at the touch of a button. This means that for a polish person searching for help with a legal query, he finds your website in polish. This allows the complicated legal information to be translated for him so he better understands the services on offer before he makes contact with your firm. 

Data protection is upon us, whether we like it or not. In Europe we have GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), in the USA we have the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) and in Australia we have APP (Australian Privacy Policy). 

GDPR is by far the strictest data protection policy out there, and we adhere to all of its data protection requirements on your website (via forms, privacy policies & cookie notices). There are also off site considerations that we incorporate into your data compliance structure (analytics, tag manager, and/or third party plugins). 

Data security is the process of protecting your users data from unauthorised access. It is a part of any good data privacy policy, but it is also overlooked. 

As part of our service, we operate a “zero data model” where no sensitive user data is stored on the website, meaning that in the unlikely event of a security breach we have no sensitive data to lose.

Did you know that 15-25% of small business website traffic comes from their Google Maps listings? 

Making your website easy to find on Google Maps can supercharge your online growth, particularly because your competitors are less likely to focus on this area of growth. 

Keeping your website up to date, secure and fully operational is a must. Our team have 100% managed plans where we perform all checkups, maintenance and updates to the website and server, so your site is always available.

Search engines do not give guidelines on ranking, but they regularly update their rankings allowing websites to jump up the results page. 

Many things impact how quickly your website will ranking and what position you will, these include:

Some key indicators of a successful launch are: 

We can expect to see some or all of these factors in the first 6 months of new website launch.

Ranking in Google is becoming more and more complicated. AI means that some websites can create content that would have taken a human writer a month, in a single day. Search engines do not like AI content sites and they are being penalised if their content is spotted. For this reason we never use AI content. 

Our job is to prove to the search engines that we are a legitimate business, and that our content deserves to be top of Google. If we do not see significant results in the first 6 months, it is usually for one of the following 3 reasons:

Author: 

James is the author of this article, and the managing director of Hawthorn Legal.

James has been involved in the design and development of hundreds of website projects and has helped grow brands in the UK and Ireland to the top of Google. 

James is always available for a chat.