Websites and online services raise many questions and issues for solicitors. One point firms need to decide is if their website is primarily to retain or gain clients. For many firms it’s a mixture of the two, but the emphasis is important in deciding how the website is then promoted.
To gain clients requires effort and expenses that includes fighting for position on search engine rankings, competing against the many websites already out there and setting up your firm to take the incoming enquiry volumes (should they materialise).
To retain clients means looking at how you can help the people you already know by reinforcing their view that your firm is ‘their solicitor’; promoting the benefits of and how easy it is for the clients to get immediate help via the website.
Both approaches are there to capture client enquiries. The question to ask is not how good the website looks or what is does, but how good the promotion of it is to the people that you want to use it.
I don’t believe that a well designed website can’t efficiently help solicitors to gain new clients on the one hand, while retaining existing ones on the other. I appreciate that a one or two page very basic website looking positively circa 1999 can’t do everything. Maybe it’s more a question of better website design and implementation rather than putting needless roadblocks in a firm’s overarching marketing strategy from the get-go?
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