Some sectors work under restrictions on advertising and marketing, and lawyers and law firms sit right at the front of that queue. Which is exactly why the website becomes so important. There are a few reasons successful law firms and lawyers benefit from working with an experienced agency like Türk SEM. Security is one of them, but the most important by far is the SEO work behind the organic rankings.
So; what should a law firm website actually have? Let us go through it as a companion piece to our SEO for lawyers page.
Note: Türk SEM started offering web design agency services in 2024. Our web design team holds 1 software engineer and 1 software developer.
Put Your Audience First
Your website is a tool for reaching new clients, but it is worth remembering that the process carries on face to face.
So what does that mean?
We see a tendency in marketing for law firms; a lot of them want to market aggressively to potential clients. But; the truth is the work is mostly tied to your own location. Being aggressive may look useful for your career, but in the short run it may not get you anywhere.
Do not fall into the trap of choosing a law firm web design that does not serve your audience or your potential clients. Think properly about who you want to draw to the firm’s website and, in the end, to your practice. If you already have a site, look at the analytics you have and see which pages are actually taking traffic.
Making decisions from data is the best way to lift your site’s performance, and with it the firm’s.
Every lawyer has one main area of expertise and one target location. The mixture of those two is where your website style begins.
Make Your Contact Details Easy to Reach
Truthfully, most lawyers do not see this as a problem at all. But plenty of firms skip a step that matters: “thinking like the client”.
Remember, all of it comes down to user experience.
Think of it this way: people looking for legal help may be in a bad emotional state, short of sleep, or not thinking clearly. Make sure you have defined your audience precisely. If someone arrives on your site after searching a phrase that suggests they are almost certainly facing a penalty, serve content that fits where they are.
Making it easy for a potential client to find what they need at a hard moment can be the difference between winning them and losing them.
Put your contact details somewhere visible and make sure they are correct. To clear away any obstacles, give visitors several ways to reach you, social media profiles among them (and reply quickly when they do).
Make the Firm’s Website User Friendly
Your potential clients are not there to browse, they want information. Making sure the firm’s web design is accessible and user friendly is on you.
A great way to test it is to have someone try to complete a task on your site, submitting a contact form or finding the sort of general information a potential client would look for. Ask people to visit the site, then put questions to them. That bit of survey work will sharpen your grasp of UX.
A site that works well on desktops, tablets and mobile devices lifts the user experience across the board. And do not forget that mobile use now outweighs desktop.
Think About Your Core Pages
A law firm’s web design has to be tailored to the firm itself. As you weigh up the structure of the site, there are a few sections or pages you will almost certainly want, and really ought to have:
- About
- Contact (with a form, preferably)
- Blog
- Ask a lawyer
- Practice areas
Use HTML Headings (H1, H2, H3)
Headings break up the text, true, but they serve a much more important purpose than that.
When you (or your marketing agency) use heading tags in your HTML, it signals to Google how important the information is and builds a content hierarchy.
The best comparison is a book’s table of contents. With chapter headings, subheadings and the rest, reading a site’s content or finding the part you need is far easier. A clear flow of information makes learning far easier too.
Use heading tags properly in the firm’s web design and search engines like Google will see more clearly what your site, and your content, is about.
Catch the Digital Faults
Broken links and pages with no clear content reflect badly on your audience and on your search rankings alike.
You will want to test your links regularly, or have an agency team do it for you. Problems can develop in the mobile view of your site over time. Run a mobile friendly test now and then and keep checking for them.
Türk SEM web design services come with the basic SEO settings in place. For more on those, we would recommend looking through our what SEO is page.
Make Sure the Design Is Actually Useful
While the firm’s website is being designed or updated, ask yourself this: does this feature make the site more useful, or does it lower its value?
To answer that honestly, putting yourself in the position of your potential client, the visitor, usually works well.
Do not let the money side of it overshadow your vision on the main subject.
To be clear: happy clients should always be the goal.
Can Lawyers Have a Website?
Before we get to design, let us settle the question we hear most: yes, every lawyer and every law firm may set up and publish a website. There is no prohibition. The limit is not whether the site exists, it is the language on it.
The professional rules allow you to inform and do not allow you to advertise. In practice the line falls here: setting out your areas of practice, your team, how you work and your reading of legal questions is unproblematic. Trouble starts with promises of outcomes, with comparisons, with claims of being "the best" and with anything aimed directly at drumming up work. Write the text on your site with that measure in mind.
On the domain side, lawyers in Turkey mostly prefer the av.tr extension, which is reserved for members of the profession and allocated under specific rules. With the recent opening of the single-level .tr extension it also became possible to register available names there. Beyond those, the most widely used extensions are .com and .org. None of the four conflicts with the professional rules; the choice is entirely yours.
How to build visibility in search while staying inside that frame is set out in detail on our SEO for lawyers page.
