As an attorney you realize the important role that your website plays in getting you new clients. For this reason, you have likely invested quite a bit of time and capital into creating an informative, easy-to-navigate, and modern site. What if I told you that it could be even better and you could get more clients from it than you currently are? By testing different changes you can increase your website's conversions and ROI. Here is how you can get started with optimizing your conversion rate:
1. Research
The research stage is the most important part of conversion rate optimization. CRO is not just testing whatever pops into your head one day and hoping it works – it is about taking the time to do both qualitative and quantitative research and crafting hypotheses based on your findings.
Qualitative research can take the form of interviewing current clients or adding an exit poll or survey on your site, among a number of different methods. The goal of this research is to understand your customer base and how they are using your site. You can also use things like screen recordings and heat maps to identify any specific points of friction or functionalities that are not working correctly.
If you are an SSD attorney, you might find that some of your users are having trouble navigating your site or facing other accessibility issues. These are extremely important to identify and correct as users with disabilities likely make up the bulk of your website visitors.
Quantitative research is usually done using your analytics software to take a deep dive into the data. You want to take a look at things like bounce rate, pages per session, average session duration and so on. For the bounce rate, anything over 90% should be cause for concern and it is definitely worth figuring out what is causing this. Once you've gathered as many insights as possible from the data, it's time to move onto the next step.
2. Develop Hypotheses
Based on your research, you should be able to identify some issues on your site. Did you find that some users were missing your call to action due to a lack of contrast or that they were having usability issues with your contact form? No matter the issue consider the best way to fix it. Always make sure that any change you make will enhance the user experience. Craft your hypothesis to explain what you are going to change and the effect that you think it will have.
3. Test
Depending on what you are testing, determine the best way to implement the change and what resources you need to do so. You will likely want to run an A/B test, which allows you to test your original page against a variation. This allows you to determine with confidence whether or not the change increases your conversion rate since the only difference between the pages will be that one change.
Some testing software offer a visual editor so that you can make changes to colors or text without the need for a developer. Once the variation looks the way you want, you can start the test. Best practice for A/B testing is to keep the experiment running for at least 2 weeks. However, you should aim to keep it running until you have reached a statistical significance level of at least 90%. How long this takes will depend on the overall conversion rate and amount of traffic to your site.
Once your test is complete evaluate the data. If the test had your desired result and you were able to increase your conversion rate, that's great! If not, don't worry! Take another look at your research and anything you learned from the previous experiment and come up with another hypothesis. Whether your test is successful or not, the key to conversion rate optimization is to always be testing. While these tips will hopefully help you to generate more leads from your website, if you are looking to further increase your caseload contact us today about our legal case leads!