Written by Market My Market’s content team, with contributions from Tyler McNulty, Lauren Dominguez, Gina Ritch, Jordan Kimmel, Jessica Unkel, Amanda Guglietta, and Ryan Klein
Most law firms that are heavily engaged in their content marketing have a long-term game plan for additional pages on the websites, extensive and informative FAQs, and timely blogging that covers an array of trends and questions. Many of these pages are strictly informative, but there are several pages on the website created with one thing in mind: bringing in qualified traffic that converts into leads, and ultimately, clients.
When looking at analytics software such as Google Analytics, we can narrow down the organic traffic that comes to our website from the content we’ve been adding. If we take it a step further and add proper tracking for calls and contact forms, we can also see how many leads our content generates.
Let’s say we’ve been working tirelessly on a car accident page for our personal injury practice, and our efforts are to position this page for high-intent keywords (your city + “car accident lawyer”). Visitors via this specific landing page would usually be high-intent because of the keywords they had to use to get to the page in the first place.
Therefore, it makes sense to track the conversion rate of your web traffic. If there is one lead on the page for every 20 visitors, your conversion rate for that page is 5%. The industry-average conversion rate for a high-intent page should be closer to 15%, which may lead to you take steps towards engaging in conversion rate optimization or CRO.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the rate in which website visitors make a desired action. An action can be purchasing an item, adding a product to the cart, or subscribing to emails. You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors. Then, multiple that number by 100 to find the percentage.
A conversion is a general term for a site visitor completing a goal. Goals vary by business and fall into two categories: macro and micro. Macro conversions are visitors purchasing an item or subscribing to a service. A micro conversion is when someone signs up for an email list or creates an account.
When you optimize your site for conversion, you’re increasing the chance of gaining leads, increasing revenue, or lowering acquisition costs (or all three). As a business owner, you want to design your website so that it will convert visitors into paying customers. A high CRO means your website is well-designed and appeals to your audience. Overall, an effective website is the best way for your company to grow.
Contributed by Tyler McNulty, Content Specialist
What Pages Need CRO the Most?
The more emphasis there is on pages converting traffic into clients, the greater the need for CRO on the page. Pages used for high-cost campaigns, such as Google Ads and landers for massive marketing campaigns like TV and radio, are heavily scrutinized from a CRO standpoint to ensure all traffic has the highest likelihood of converting. This is when CRO goes as far as constant split testing, or A/B testing (or even A/B/C testing), nearly on a daily basis to ensure people are being served optimal content and messaging.
For a less consistent basis, which will be most pages on your website, you’ll still want to make sure the following pages have a CRO plan in place, especially for mobile:
- Home page.
- Attorney bios.
- Contact page.
- Practice area pages.
- Geo-specific pages, especially the ones you have offices in.
Contributed by Ryan Klein, Managing Partner
Why is Higher Engagement Important for My Website and Content?
It may feel like you’re spending considerable time taking these steps to track engagement, yet, more eyes on your site does not directly turn into more revenue. Ultimately, however, strong engagement is correlated with overall profitability. In the age of instant gratification and short attention spans, people who visit your website will be turned off by bland, visually-unappealing content.
Those who remain engaged are those who are deriving value from your website. Thus, tracking engagement can help you determine whether visitors to your site are finding what they seek. The more your visitors engage, the more educated they become about your services, and the more they trust you to be an expert in your field. Over time, engaged visitors will be more likely to reach out to you when they need your services and recommend you to people they know who need similar services.
A person in need of legal services, for example, may do research at different stages of their dilemma. Someone who just got involved in a car accident who does not yet know the extent of their injuries may casually research whether they should get an attorney involved. It may take several days for them to decide that they do want legal representation, after visiting doctors and receiving medical bills. The more engaging content you have, the more likely it is that they will return to your website throughout their decision-making process and ultimately call your firm. Additionally, higher engagement through shareable content makes it more likely that visitors will send people they know who might need your services your way.
Contributed by Lauren Dominguez, Content Lead
What Are the Benefits of Better CRO? What Improvements Can I Anticipate?
Spending time to improve the CRO of your website will improve your business’s bottom line. Once visitors land on your website, whether through SEO or compelling ads, what drives them to become a paying customer? If you want them to book a consultation, buy a product, or engage with your business in any way, focusing on CRO is a surefire way to achieve those goals.
Some other improvements you can anticipate by focusing on CRO include:
- More customers & increased sales: Enhancing CRO betters the customer experience by addressing objections and allowing online visitors to find what they were searching for in less time, encouraging them to become paying customers.
- Insight & strong understanding of your customers: While improving CRO, you’ll undoubtedly gain a strong sense of who your customers are, how they engage with your site, and what deters or compels them to convert.
- Enhanced SEO efforts: Improving CRO and converting more visitors sends a signal to Google that you have a qualitative website that enhances the customer experience. That, in turn, helps your website rank higher on the search results page.
- Increased customer lifetime value: By enhancing the customer experience and anticipating their needs by solving their pain points and challenges, you’re sure to turn one-off clients into loyal, long-time customers.
Better CRO means understanding your customers so well that online visitors convert into paying customers faster because your company is the solution to their pain points and problems. Increasing customers boosts sales, helps your site appear in search engines, and overall, leads to profits for your business.
Contributed by Gina Ritch, Content Specialist
Do Videos Assist with CRO and Higher Engagement?
When optimizing your content with the goal of increasing conversions, it’s vital to consider the impact that videos can have on your marketing strategy. After all, few things will push engagement away more than an endless wall of text. Videos allow consumers to see a product more clearly and in action, or to gain a better understanding of a service. As such, videos can often drive conversions better than text alone. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video about your service could very well be worth a thousand sales.
As video content is continuing to grow in popularity, it’s becoming more important than ever to stay on top of contemporary advances and statistics to create a strong digital video marketing strategy. However, producing effective video content is often tricky. For example, video production costs tend to be higher than the costs of written content. Likewise, many businesses find that it’s more difficult to produce a video that leaps out and functions well than it is to produce functional written content.
Nevertheless, it may be worth the time, effort, and expense. When done right, videos can help you attract attention, educate prospects, and close leads. Because video is the preferred medium in terms of engagement, it’s one of the easiest methods with which to boost your revenue, gain more brand awareness, and ultimately grow your company.
If you’re unsure how to use video to increase your conversion rates, consider the following strategies:
- Optimize video placement: It’s important to pick the best platform(s) for posting your video content. This may be through social media, YouTube, your company’s product page, or your landing page. Subscription-based businesses may generate more conversions by positioning videos on their landing page, while ecommerce retailers might consider inserting video content on their product pages.
- Spice up your testimonials: One common way you can enliven your site is to include a video testimonial. When executed properly, they can be incredibly powerful and persuasive.
- Make your videos short and immediately entertaining: You should strive to make your content as concise as possible to achieve the highest engagement. To do so, consider front-loading your video with the most important information at the beginning.
- Insert a lead capture form in the first 10-20% of your video: Another interesting way to capture leads is to gate your video after a few seconds. Using this strategy, a visitor will watch up to the point where they’re interested in continuing, and then you can put an email gate to watch the rest.
- Customize your thumbnail: Smiles connote friendliness and openness, so consider using a smiling person on your thumbnail. There are online tools that can help you come up with an eye-catching video thumbnail.
Video has proven itself to be one of the most memorable and engaging marketing mediums in the business. Likewise, you may also consider using other visual forms of engagement that might provide additional conversions, including infographics and informative images.
Contributed by Jordan Kimmel, Content Specialist
Do Infographics Assist with CRO and Higher Engagement?
In modern marketing, infographics and informative images are types of visual content that can drive conversion rates up to seven times higher than written content. Producing visually engaging content that offers relevant and useful information can also increase consumer attention.
One of the advantages of an infographic is the speed at which consumers are able to read and understand them. Studies have proven that humans process visual information roughly 600,000 times faster than written text and tend to remember visually-communicated data for longer than information given to them auditorily. Additionally, well-designed educational infographics are more likely to get passed around and shared to other potential consumers on social media or in messages, creating high engagement and traffic on your page.
An important aspect of infographics to consider when using them to increase CRO is that they need to be fully optimized before implementing them. Adding an informative image to your blog or article will only be beneficial if a search engine can crawl your page and identify what is being communicated by the graphic or chart. For search engines to effectively track the data presented in the image, you will need to:
- Optimizing captions with relevant keywords.
- Creating alt-text captions for readers who are visually-impaired.
- Ensuring that the image size is appropriate.
- Adding images to XML sitemaps.
Consumers gravitate towards methods of information that are visually appealing and easy to understand. Educational images, charts, and graphics allow individuals to quickly process and retain data. Including well-researched infographics in your content is an effective way to generate a stronger and more consistent CRO.
Contributed by Jessica Unkel, Content Specialist
Do I Need to Approach CRO Differently for Mobile Vs. Desktop?
One way you’ll inevitably set your CRO strategy up for failure is by treating mobile and desktop devices as equals. If your CRO initiative is intended to assess for equal means across all platforms, such as getting a user to navigate through your firm’s blog feed or “results” landing page, your website is probably lacking intuitive design and experience elements. So, what does this mean for you? Let’s talk about the details below.
To deliver mobile and desktop interactions tailored to your customers’ needs, you first need to understand when and why a customer might use a mobile device versus a desktop, and vice versa. For instance, consider the following two scenarios:
- If someone searches “truck accident lawyer Sacramento California” on their cellular device, it’s presumed that the user’s intention is to find the contact information of an attorney near them immediately after an emergency.
- If the user is visiting from a desktop device, it’s safe to assume they may be seeking comprehensive information about your services, accomplishments, or comparing your firm to another.
These circumstances are not always the case, but in general, individuals that use their phones want faster results, on-the-go, rather than those browsing the web on a desktop. Therefore, conditioning users to follow similar paths that they have no desire to interact with may result in a missed opportunity and lead to long-term disadvantages for your business. Knowing this, it’s critical that you implement both mobile and desktop user experience design principles and best practices that are geared towards the customer’s goal—whether that be speed and efficiency on their phones, or readability and accessibility on their desktops.
Contributed by Amanda Guglietta, Content Specialist
How Can I Keep Track If My Changes are Working for CRO and Higher Engagement?
The key here is making sure you do your changes incrementally. You don’t want to make sweeping changes all at once because if your changes work, you can’t necessarily replicate what worked on other projects since you didn’t narrow down what change made the biggest impact. Keep this in mind when working on your CRO, as you’ll be able to replicate your success much easier on your other marketing assets.
Also before proceeding, make sure your lead tracking it airtight across all channels: phone, chat, form submissions, and SMS if you have that in place. You may be able to see certain KPIs improve through CRO, such as time-on-site and scroll rate, but CRO is focused on leads, so the final say in the efforts towards CRO working will be that metric.
Make sure you can implement your CRO changes on pages that have a solid sample size of traffic. If you’re working on a page that only gets 5-10 visitors a day, the amount of data required to compare before and after changes may cause anomalies. It would be best to work with as much traffic/data as possible from one of your highest volume pages to be able to make reliable determinations of how your CRO changes affected the page either negatively or positively. If you are paying for traffic via Google Ads or social media and directly the traffic to the page, it may be a good idea to increase your spend temporarily to get the influx of traffic you need to analyze.
Maximize Engagement and Conversion with a Strategic Marketing Plan
When marketing to your audience, you have just a few minutes to capture them through engaging content. Successful content requires a solid content strategy and understanding of the type of information your audience seeks. If you’re unsure of how to develop such a plan, or wish to add content to your site more frequently, you could trust an expert marketing team to secure your approach to developing relevant, engaging content that will lead traffic your way.
At Market My Market, we have a whole team devoted to brainstorming creative content ideas and delivering top-notch content that stands out from the noise. If you’re ready to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, contact us for a free consultation.
