Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- Why are Websites Essential
- Problems with High-end Website Development
- The Better Options to Start Your Digital Venture
Don’t Buy an Expensive Website
Today, we’re talking about why you shouldn’t invest in a high-end website for your law firm. There’s a big difference between a high-quality website that will support your marketing goals and an expensive but dysfunctional site that will only be a drag. I’m going to cover some of the mistakes I see law firm owners making and how you can avoid them.
Welcome to another episode of the Optimized Law Firm podcast, where we help you run a more profitable and enjoyable law firm. I am your host, Patrick Carver. Thanks for joining us, and I’m the owner of Constellation Marketing. We help hungry law firm owners transcend seven figures and get total clarity on their ROI. And today we’re talking about why you should not invest in a super high end law firm website.
There’s a big difference for me between a high quality website that will support your marketing goals and an expensive but ultimately dysfunctional one that’s really only going to be a drag and kind of work against you in your other marketing efforts. I’m going to cover some of the mistakes that I see law firm owners making and how you can avoid them and ultimately get a better, more functional website that’s going to support all of your marketing efforts. So let’s get to it. So today I’m going to break this discussion down into three parts. The first, I’m going to talk about a little refresh on why websites are so essential.
[00:01:20]: Importance of websites in today’s marketing landscape
And then I’m going to get into the meat of the discussion, talking about the problems with high end website development and kind of the impact it can have on your firm and why it ultimately is going to hold you back. And then finally, I’ll talk about some of the better options out there for law firm owners and what you can do at a variety of price points to accomplish your goals and ultimately put you on a really solid footing for what you want to do with all of your other marketing efforts. So let’s get to the first part, which is why websites are essential, continue to be essential in today’s marketing landscape for law firms. And one of the statistics that we talk about a lot is this one from the National Law Review, which it’s been a few years, but I think it’s hard to argue against it. It talks about how 96% of people use a search engine to find an attorney.
And I think it’s hard to argue that those numbers have gone down over the past few years. I think it’s highly likely that it just has continued to increase. Where we always talk about the scenario of how when someone is in that moment of need, they are going to get out their phone or they’re going to get on their computer and search for lawyer near me, lawyer in my city, if they don’t already have somebody in their mind, a family friend or something like that. Websites are really the basis of that experience. And within the search engine, you’ve got a couple of things happening.
You’ve got advertising, you’ve got the map pack, and then you’ve got the organic search listings. And so with both of those, with advertising and the others, websites are going to be essential. You want to typically put people to a landing page and that is often going to be done through your website or a subdomain on your website. The Map pack and the broader regular organic search listings are all going to work very closely with that website of yours. And so it’s very rare, especially in a competitive environment, a city where there’s multiple lawyers, highly competitive practice area, even in smaller cities, where you are not going to benefit from having a well developed website that not only is attractive, it meets all of the kind of visual criteria that you would, you would want.
Looks like, you know, it’s, it’s relatively recent, it’s new, it’s updated, that sort of thing, but also meets the technology requirements. And all those things really work together and impact whether or not you are going to be found in those organic listings. So it’s so essential and so important that you put some time and energy into building a website. And this brings me to what I see as the big problem that I’ve come across in discussions with prospects and ultimately folks who become a client. And the situation that I come across is that we are talking with the prospect and they’ll tell me that they’ve already started working on their website or they’re waiting, they’ve been waiting for a couple of months now to get their website done.
And it’s really being created without the input of us or a marketing team in general. And you might be wondering kind of what’s the difference between a website development company and a marketing team or a marketing company. And I’ll get into some of the nitty gritty here in the next point. But basically the problem with it is that the folks who are designing a website particularly are going to focus on the design elements. They’re really going to pay a lot of attention with that and not really think so much about how it’s going to function within the organic search results.
And you’ll probably hear if you work with a company like that, which really their bread and butter is developing the website, is that they’re going to use, quote unquote, SEO best practices. And that’s absolutely better than nothing. But with the landscape being so competitive that the top competitors out there are using highly specialized law firm marketing companies and these SEO firms, our self included, are going to go so far above and beyond the SEO best practices in order for you to rank. And so really what I’m getting at with this, highlighting this problem, is that if you don’t pay attention to those components, that will elevate you in the organic search results from the start in the kind of the DNA the fabric of the website that you’re developing, it’s going to be really hard to rank your site and get a lot of value out of it later down the road. You can still do a variety of things like put landing pages on that website.
It will serve as a really good visual advertisement for your law firm when people get to that website, and it ultimately will give you a pretty polished look. But the problem again with that is that you’re assuming that people are coming to your website, you’ve already got traffic coming, you’ve already got people coming. And then really the only function of the website is not really that digital billboard, it’s just helping convert people who already know who you are or already getting to your website, either through paid ads, which ultimately are going to be less cost efficient than search engine optimization. Or they just know who you are and you’re getting them via referrals and stuff like that. And so that will not ultimately help you that much if you buy into what we talk about and preach is that search engine optimization is really the backbone of a strong foundation for the long term success and sustainability of your law firm.
[00:08:08]: SEO as the backbone of a law firm’s success
Because time and time again when we do analysis over our clients and we’re working with 85 firms at the moment, so we’re analyzing thousands and thousands of leads on a monthly basis. Ultimately, SEO proves to be the best option because it’s the most cost efficient way to bring leads in, and it has the potential to give you the best visibility, the widest visibility, and cast a much larger net than advertising can, given the cost restraints to it. So let’s move on to the second portion of this discussion, which is really talking about what is a high end website, right? And what are some of the problems with going that route. So I’ll try to best describe what I see as the most common scenario, what I would consider a high end website development.
So think about for me, these are like specialized website development companies that really focus narrowly on building websites. They’re going to build really beautiful websites with lots of animation. Often there’s video and kind of custom elements that give you that really high end feeling when you look at the website and you scroll down and you’ve got elements kind of like flying in and doing different animation type effects. And you look at it and there’s no question that those type of websites are very attractive, right? And there’s no question that if you were to go and look at them without knowing any of this other material, and you’ve got a successful law firm, you’re trying to make a splash, you want to show people in your market that you are the high end option, you are the best possible option.
It makes complete sense that you would look at that and say, I want that. I want to personify this idea of the highly successful law firm that is putting a lot of time, energy and money into their image. Now, the company that you would work with to create this might have some SEO experience, but typically what I have seen in my experience is that these companies are mostly comprised of web developers and there’s a big difference between those two things. A web developer is someone who’s really just focused on building that website. They use code and imagery and really going to focus on just the visual aspect of that website, whereas somebody with SEO experience is going to be more focused on what that web page communicates to Google and other search engines.
So it’s a very different type of experience because Google the way they function to get a better understanding of your website and your presence online, they’re sending out crawlers. So this is just automated software, it’s not a person. So what they’re looking for are really more of the things that are not quantified from an eyeball. So they’re not looking at how pretty is this website, things like that, they’re looking at how fast it loads, what content is on the page, what elements are on the page, what do they say, what do they not say, all those sorts of things. And so it’s really two different mentalities when coming up with what is a good website page or a good website in general.
Some other elements that go into what these companies are going to look like. They’re going to use a custom content management system, one that is very rare or maybe they developed it themselves, or is just going to be a little bit more niche compared to the one that we’re going to talk about the most, and we prefer called WordPress. Some of these systems are like Joomla or Drupal, there’s other ones out there. And a content management system, well there’s a couple of different variations of how I see these websites being built. You have one version which is essentially completely custom coded from the ground up.
And so in this case, a developer is going to primarily build the website all through code. That was how all websites were built for a while and then came along these things called content management systems which use code, but a lot of the code is really done in the back end. And so a CMS content management system is kind of like a way to build with all that code, but you don’t have to spend as much time actually within the code, writing the code, stuff like that. A lot of it is done automatically for you and so you can really focus more on the material on the site. And it’s really a way to make websites much more approachable for people who don’t have that background with code development, but still be able to make attractive looking websites.
And so now companies typically will do some sort of hybrid of that where they’re using a lot of code, but within a content management system like Joomla or Drupal. And in terms of what these companies look like, it’s going to be often a kind of local generalist company. And what I mean by that is the company is a specialist website builder, but they built the local bank’s website, they’ve built nonprofits, they’ve built insurance companies or all across the board. And they do a variety of things. They’re not specifically focused for law firms.
There’s also a handful of companies out there who do only law firm websites. So lawlytics is one, there’s a couple of others out there that all they do is just, hey, we build the website. We don’t do ads, we don’t do marketing, SEO or anything like that. And we also have other companies like the big national law firm marketing companies, FindLaw, Scorpion and they actually have their own custom CMS system. So, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, these are all available for anyone to use.
You pay and can use them. Whereas with Finelaw or Scorpion they’ve taken those concepts with like WordPress and these companies and kind of made their own so that they can build in a lot of efficiency. They know the way to manage these websites, makes it a lot easier for them and allows them to also build in a little bit of a moat around their services. Because once you’re in one of these custom content, management systems, it becomes really hard to leave because there’s no way to really pull that material and then make it work on another content management system. So these are the type of companies and kind of situations that we see law firms that we’re working with or about to work with find themselves that they’ve built a relationship and they’ve decided to go down this path of, okay, hey, we’re going to have you build our big website.
[00:16:35]: Problems with Expensive Websites
So talked a lot about what they look like. Let’s get into some of the problems associated with these type of situations. The first and biggest one is that is it expensive? There’s a wide range of price points on these type of sites, but we often see that these companies, because it’s their bread and butter, their primary service that they offer their websites are going to be $10,000 or more. That can absolutely vary.
You’re going to find people on the lower end of that chain that maybe are going to do a little bit more of a templated type of option and those maybe are a couple of $1,000. But the ones who really pride themselves on we are kind of the high end, most beautiful, top notch website builder in this town. It’s going to be $10,000 or more. So just right off the bat, it’s a lot of money and in my opinion could be better used in actual applied marketing as opposed to spending that on a website. Another problem with this approach is that it takes a long time to build.
We have spoken with clients more than once where they’re coming to us because now they kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel from a long website build and they’re ready to start do some marketing. And we’ve heard that these websites situations where it can take three months, six months, really depends. And it’s not always the fault of the website builder. It’s just when you are building a custom website from scratch, there’s a lot of things to consider and there’s a lot of elements that need to be approved by the law firm. And if you know any lawyer, or you’re a lawyer yourself, you know that time is at a premium, especially if you’re a solo or you’re in a small law firm environment.
You’ve got a million different things that you need to put your focus on and it is really hard to find time to do the review process. And so you get into one of these situations, they are not able to really complete the work because it’s so custom specific. They need your input, they need your approval, they can’t continue to work until you get that approval. A lot of the times you will kind of detail what you want and then they’ll come back with a mockup and it doesn’t look anything like what you had in mind. And so you’re going back to the drawing board.
And so the point here is that by spending six months building a website and going through this whole process, you are unable to start to make any gains on the website front when it comes to SEO. And so SEO is such a time game that the quicker you start to build content, start to build links, optimize your existing pages, the better off you are. You cannot do that really until you have that new website in place. And so we get into a position at times where people say, hey, we really want to get started with you, but it’s going to be two months before we get the website up. And so we don’t feel like it makes sense to start paying you to do that.
And so it hurts the clients efforts because we can’t do any of that beneficial work by adding content, developing it and putting it on the website to where it’s going to start to get crawled, get indexed on Google until that website is actually live. So it’s a big drag. It slows all of your marketing efforts and delays some of those gains from being realized that can be gained by creating great website content that’s going to help you rank for the keywords that are out there. People are searching for and looking for when it comes to your services that you offer in your market. The next one up is these websites are often built in a custom CMS.
So again, that’s a content management system. And the problem here is that you may feel like you’ve hired a great group who’s going to build the website. They’re trustworthy all of those things, that they’re not going to be a problem down the line, that if you ever need to make changes or you need to update the website or move to a different company to do marketing, not going to be a big deal. They’ll be helpful and work on it. A lot of problems with that though.
Not all those relationships are going to be good forever. And when you need to then transition from the building phase of the website to now we want to then go and develop that website for adding content to build the SEO side of it, it creates a really big problem. And this is the situation that we get into a lot where we are inheriting a website that’s been built in a custom CMS by another developer, by a big national marketing company. And the client says, hey, is there any problem with can you work with them to do your SEO stuff, but with their website? And it’s a big problem because not only are there performance benefits, which I’ll talk about with the system that we use in WordPress, where we feel like you can’t get some of the things that we use in our tech stack to build that competitive advantage and get those SEO results.
But there’s a practical problem with the fact that you are then asking us to go and learn where this custom CMS is. And what often happens is we get into a website that’s been built by a local marketing company and it is very hard to navigate. It’s been built in a way that makes sense to the one developer that works for the local marketing company according to his or her preferences. But it’s very challenging for someone like us to then come in and kind of figure out where the bodies are buried, where and how we can edit and adjust things on the website that are going to be essential for improving your search engine optimization. And so what ends up happening is we have to go in and to make an edit that would normally take us 20 minutes, we’re going to make a change to some of the content that’s on a page or something like that.
We really have to go in and study the code of a web page and figure out where we need to implement our changes and how we need to do that to make sure that there’s no collateral damage. Those edits end up taking us 2 hours or it can be longer. That’s a real problem. And so we end up spending a lot of time having to go in, learn about their system and make these changes, or we’re just completely reliant on this website company to go in and make those changes for us. If we can’t actually do it ourselves, which can incur a lot of fees from the company having to go back in and charging $100 per hour or whatever that cost is, to go in and make those changes for us.
And so it’s really just very problematic because it hurts our ability to then go and get the results that you want and that you’re paying us to do and get that ROI. If every time we need to make a change to a page, it takes three weeks to then get that change enacted. So those are three weeks that the changes are not happening on SEO, three weeks later that Google sees the changes, three weeks later that the results can actually happen in these search results. And it’s problematic as well because then you are ultimately tied to that developer, that company, forever, unless you get somebody else. Whereas with something like WordPress or Joomla or Drupal, those are open content management systems where there are multiple people, lots and lots of people out there who know those systems and can come in and work on them.
They are more open rather than something that’s completely custom, where you are literally tied to that same developer from that local company who’s going to be working on your, you know, working on the website and, and maybe they, they go and take a different job, right? You’re in a bad position because you may not have access to that person anymore. Makes it really hard to then get changes to your website, even basic ones, like, hey, we got a new partner, we need to put their picture up, stuff like that. All right, so final two points on this, and then I’ll really get into the solution of what you can do and why you would want to get into that, some of the benefits of doing this in a different way. The other part here is that the technology that you’re going to use for your high end custom website is probably going to be obsolete within a couple of years.
And the guidelines that Google gives out to what is a good website? What are we looking for in a website as far as how fast it loads? The protocols that we want you to implement on a website like SSL, security, encryption, things like that, are changing all the time. They make new changes daily in the algorithm. And so if you are going to pay a bunch of money to have this website built, you really need to have them consistently making changes and improving that website and kind of growing and evolving with the technology as it changes.
And if you go in, have this big website built, and then that’s kind of the end of your engagement. It’s kind of like buying a car. Like the value of that website immediately goes down as the second it goes off the lot. Same with a website, right? It’s kind of a living, breathing thing that you have to continue to evolve and improve over time.
And if you’re not doing that, it’s really dying a slow death, in my opinion. The final part or final item I’ll talk about is that there’s really also not a lot of data I’ve seen out there that proves that a high end website, an expensive website leads to more conversions necessarily. And so I don’t think it’s debatable that an attractive website with social proof, with some of these other elements that makes it look professional, gives you a leg up in terms of your ability to convert people that come onto your website and maybe are assessing you versus other people in the market. But I’ve never seen real qualitative data that the $10,000 website with a video is going to convert people at a significantly higher percentage than the $2,000 website. That looks about as good, but does a way better job of bringing people in and has a lot more organic traffic, which, in my opinion, is that’s the scenario I would take all day as opposed to a slightly higher conversion rate.
[00:29:55]: Better Options Available
So there may be data out there that proves this point. But I think honestly, it’s more about vanity and kind of this idea that we have the best, most attractive, highest premium looking website out there rather than something that is functional. And we’re now going to go into the third part of the discussion. And for me, that’s really this idea that there are better options out there. Because my underlying point to this whole discussion is that there are better options out there in terms of website selection that will give you a bigger benefit than spending a ton of money on a high end website while neglecting the SEO component of it.
Or neglecting a strategy where you’re investing in other parts of marketing like advertising, in order to just finance that big, expensive website. Because for me that is a much better use of your money and investment. Because when you think about it, it’s kind of the old adage, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s around to hear about it, did it happen? And maybe that’s not the best analogy for this discussion, but the point I’m trying to make with this is that a beautiful website is great and it’s fun to show off to friends and know that you’ve got a good looking website. But if nobody finds it, really, what’s the point of it?
And most of our clients, and I think law firms in general, at least ones who are trying to scale and grow their business, the big challenge that they are facing is that their business is completely reliant on referrals and word of mouth. The problem with that, as they try to scale their business and meet the financial goals that they want, or just the goals of their practice, which are potentially more focused on higher quality cases, they need to have more business coming in the door, which is impossible if you’re only relying on referrals. Referrals are notoriously difficult to scale, almost impossible to scale. You can do some things to improve that. But when people come to us, they almost all have the same scenario that’s happening to them.
They have these kind of boom and bust type of months where the referrals are great for one month, but then it’s completely dry for the next two months. And when you’re trying to grow a firm and you really feel like you need to add an intake person or another attorney, it’s really hard to do that when one month you’ve got ten cases coming in and the next month it’s two. It’s really impossible to forecast your revenue and think about how you can add salaries and stuff like that. With that you need that extra component that’s going to bring people in to your business. And our position is that the best way to do that is to connect with people through search engines and within that you do that through advertising and search engine optimization.
So given that the best way to do that is through those channels and strategies, then it doesn’t make any sense for us to spend more than you have to on a good looking website that’s going to basically meet. Some baseline criteria of it looks good. It’s modern, it’s professional. It’s easy to get in touch with you as the attorney, and it fits in with the pack or the market that it looks good. It looks and feels like what the competition is doing.
But beyond that, we think that anything on top of that is really just window dressing and kind of overspending on a problem that doesn’t really exist. Because again, we don’t see any real compelling data out there that speaks to this point of law firm potential clients are their biggest decision making factor. Is was there animation on the website? Was it a beautiful website with video? We just don’t see the data that points to that.
So given that we would recommend a different approach where you are still getting a good website but you’re not overspending on it, you’re not over complicating it or spending too much time and energy on it in lieu of actual marketing strategies that are going to be out there bringing people to your door. So what are the other options that you can pursue as a law firm? There’s two. The first one works okay. The second option is better than what we recommend, but to be fair, you can do either, right?
[00:36:02]: Option 1: DIY website using Wix or WordPress
So the first one is going to be the DIY route. And this is like if you were to go on a website like Wix or even WordPress, you can go in, sign up for a website and basically create the website yourself. You’re going to find a bunch of templates. They’ve got ones that are specialized for law firms and you just kind of go in there, sign up for it, you can click around and add your material. You type directly on the website.
You don’t need to know any code, you don’t need to really do anything. They built this for the type of consumer that wants a website. They don’t want to be really bothered with trying to learn. How to build a website or anything like that. It’s fast.
It’s very easy to do this yourself or have somebody in your office kind of take control of this and own it. Not really expensive. And you also retain control. So you’re not reliant on a third party company to go and add your picture or something like that. There’s downsides to this as well.
[00:37:59]: Option 2: Building a website on WordPress
It’s not great for SEO, although it is getting better. Companies like Wix have really invested heavily in improving this component. So if you are still kind of getting your bearings after you’ve hung your own shingle, it’s better than nothing, right? It’s better than not having a website or spending a bunch and being beholden to a website company. You can do this and start to build those rankings and then in year two you maybe move up and then you can build off of that early visibility that you’ve created.
WordPress allows you to build websites yourself as well, and a little more complicated. But there’s an enormous amount of resources out there on YouTube and just out there in general where if you are a little bit more technologically inclined or interested in that side of things, you can do it yourself, right? And I think we’re more often than not now kind of talking with lawyers who are part of that newer generation who grew up with the internet, grew up never advertised in a phone book. So it’s less of a barrier to go in and build those websites. But ultimately, if you are wanting to build a sustainable presence with a big foundation that is going to last for years, we recommend building on WordPress.
You could potentially use these other CMS systems like Joomla or Drupal, but we don’t recommend it because WordPress is used by about 70% or more of the entire internet for website development. And there are going to be people who are in these specialized website development companies who are. You talk to them and they’re like WordPress, it’s awful, it’s total junk. We use Drupal because yada yada. And I’m not going to argue that there’s not benefits to Joomla and Drupal and stuff like that.
[00:39:03]: Benefits of using WordPress for website development
But really what it comes down to is those systems have some specific design and just page development functionality that developers who live and breathe website development. It makes their job a little bit easier and they like it. It gives them more customization ability and ultimately they like it better. And so WordPress you could argue, is more built for the average Joe to some degree. It can be customized and there’s a high degree of you can kind of do a lot of customized and specialized things with it.
But if you were a website developer, that’s all you do and breathe. You might say, well, WordPress is like not great, but you as the law firm owner don’t really need something, a system that is going to support your lifestyle as a website developer because you’re not a website developer. So it’s really not a big point of emphasis of why you would need to do that. With so many websites being built on WordPress, there is just such an abundance of developers resources and at all price points. And so you can go from building this yourself to hiring someone who is going to cost a couple of be able to build you a very functional website that you can edit.
You can continue to have this relationship with them for them to make edits and stuff like that. So it’s a really great, not expensive, but good type of system that allows people at all entry points to come in and use it for their purposes. It’s also relatively easy to use. You can go from very basic to very complex and pretty much anything you want to do all the way up to building apps and different types of custom forms or different types of conditional logic type things for bringing in leads and filtering leads and stuff like that can all be done in WordPress. And really for us, the most important part of this is that it’s better for SEO than most custom CMS options.
Custom CMS like Drupal. Joomla, other ones like Fine Law and Scorpion that are completely custom are fine and they can go head to head with a WordPress website and get really good results. But there’s so many more plugins and material and functionality that’s being built for WordPress specifically because so much of the internet uses it, that it’s it’s much, you know, it’s it’s a much more robust system for SEO. There’s just so much more that’s available for us and for people who are developing on these websites to make it as good as possible. Okay, so let’s get to the wrap some of this up and where can you find this type of situation?
Well, of course you can hire us. We build websites with WordPress, we do some standalone and also if you hire us with one of our month to month contracts, we actually build websites and include it at a number of our plans where you get the website for free as long as you’re a customer. But if you don’t and you just want to develop it yourself, you can actually build a website yourself using WordPress on WordPress.org. You can also go on a site like Upwork where you’re just putting a job out, hire somebody with significant WordPress experience who’s going to build it and then kind of turn the keys over to you. Or you have a relationship.
And you can even hire one of these local companies or just a website company in general who focuses on just building websites. The key differentiator that I would warn you against is not to hire somebody that is going to build this high end system that’s going to cost you a ton of money. So it’s okay to hire somebody local or a company like this, but just don’t get suckered in to paying $10,000 plus on this type of system. There’s plenty of companies out there at different price points. So you will find somebody out there just by spending a little bit of time on Google.
You can find a local option that you can talk to and really have that personal connection to or just as easily find a company or someone on upwork that’s going to give you a pretty good option as well. So to wrap this all up, what are really the benefits of doing this right? I’ve talked maybe too much about the nuance associated with what are the downsides of building one of these high end websites, spending a bunch of time, money, effort, delaying your ability to gain with SEO. So what are the benefits of going with someone like us who is going to build you a WordPress website that you own, you have access to, you can take it and easily find somebody else to work on it. If our relationship doesn’t end up working or you just want to move on, you’re not doing SEO or any of that stuff anymore.
Number one, you’re going to save money. So depending on where you are, 10,000 may not be that much money, but if you spend 2000 or 1500 on a website compared to ten or even 20, obviously you’re going to save a lot of money. That money can be better spent on SEO, on advertising that’s actually going to bring people to your doorstep and flip that into a return on your investment. You’re also going to save a lot of time and mental resources because the fact is you are going to have to be involved heavily on these custom website development processes because they’re going to need a lot of input to actually build the site. And you may go into it with the best intentions possible.
But the truth is that you are going to get busy, things are going to drag on, you are going to have it on your list of things to do and it’s always going to get pushed down on your docket because there are other things that have to be done sooner. And so it’s one of those things that’s nice to have. You end up taking longer to review and give approval. Ultimately, it’s going to make the process go slower and it’s something that you don’t need to spend your time on when we feel like it’s a better investment for you both mentally and financially to invest in those things that are going to more quickly bring people into your orbit who are going to pay for your services. And it allows you to focus on the right things and us as a marketing company, focus on the right things as well.
[00:48:05]: Importance of involving a marketing company in website development
Because if we are going to build you a website from the beginning, we are going to focus on how can we make this website really talk to Google and exceed all of those technical requirements that Google is looking for in their algorithm to put you in a position to get traffic, to be seen as an authority in your market. And if we don’t have an opportunity to do that while the website is being built from scratch, we are likely going to have to just go back in, change a bunch of stuff. And this has happened more than once, where someone has spent a bunch of money on building a website and then they get it to us and we’re like, look, you are not going to be able to get the SEO results that you’re looking for if you continue to use this website because it’s not really built correctly. It looks great, but from a technical standpoint, it’s not responsive, it’s not going to load quickly, it’s not going to allow us to make the changes necessary in terms of content adjustments. Using Schema, using all of these things that Google is looking for doesn’t allow us to do that.
And then we actually end up just having to go and build an entirely new site and kind of clone what they’ve done, but building it in an environment using our combination of WordPress and a variety of plugins tools and software to make it perform really well on Google. We have to go and start that process all over. So starting with a marketing company to have them integrated in that website development process, you’re going to be much better off, right? And so when you do that, you are then poised to take advantage of technological advances that are going to come up when Google adjusts their algorithm. You need to change your website.
You need to adopt new protocols, you need to change the things that are on your website to better match with what Google is looking for. If you have a WordPress site which has proven over the years to be very nimble, very easy to adopt these new protocols, you’ve got millions and millions of people out there thinking about how to maximize WordPress for these new protocols. You are in a much better position than having to go and beg the person who built your website to come and make changes to your website or get in an argument with them about they don’t think it’s really that important. And their point of view is, well, I’m not really focused on the SEO side, so I’m just not really going to do it or I’m going to try and talk you out of doing it. That’s not what you want.
You want somebody who’s on the cutting edge of building these websites and really holistically combining the best practices from how a website looks, making it very conversion friendly, maximizing the amount of conversions that people that happen when somebody does come on your site. But ultimately you need to solve the underlying problem, which is if no one comes to your website you are not going to grow your business. So focus on the right things. That’s how you’re going to grow your business. And you can do that by having a solid but cost efficient website.
I think that’s a great place to stop. So thank you so much for listening to everything. I’d love to answer any questions about building these websites, what you should kind of include or look out for when you’re talking to a company about building a website for you and get into some more of the specifics that you can look for to kind of make sure that you are putting yourself in a good position to succeed here. And with that, I think we’ll close it out again. I am Patrick Carver with the Optimized Law Firm Podcast.
My company is Constellation Marketing and we are so thankful for you to listen to this material today. Please reach out with any questions or any way I can help and hope you have a great day. Thanks.
