Ep. 55 - Why Your Law Firm Website Is Driving Clients Away

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor, I break down one of the most overlooked factors in SEO — and one that can quietly cost your firm clients: user experience.

You can have strong content, solid keyword strategy, and a well-structured site on paper. But if your website is slow, difficult to navigate, or frustrating to use, potential clients won’t stick around long enough to see any of it.

I explain how user behavior signals like bounce rate, time on site, and page flow impact your rankings, and how to identify when your website experience is turning visitors away. We also cover practical considerations like mobile optimization, accessibility, site speed, and navigation — and why even small usability issues can create major drops in engagement.

If you’ve ever wondered why your website traffic isn’t converting into real clients, this episode will help you diagnose the problem and improve the experience in a way that supports both SEO performance and client acquisition.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

Hi and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came by to join me today. For my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm, from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from a 10,000 square foot headquarters. When was the last time you thought about how your website performs and functions from a user standpoint? This is an important question because user experience can elevate or tank your SEO rankings. Did you know that? Did you know you can have great content all day long? You can have the keywords perfect, you can have everything mapped out to the nth degree. And it all looks good on paper. But if your visitors find your site clunky or difficult to manage or tough to navigate, they're going to go somewhere else. User experience is probably one of the most obvious and yet most overlooked aspects of SEO. And in a way, this makes a lot of sense because you get so used to looking at the website as it's being built and as it runs. But once it's turned loose on the public, then it kind of becomes wallpaper to you. This can be a good thing if everything's tight, but it could be a real problem if there are issues that you don't notice because you're accustomed to dealing with them. A website should be fast loading, smooth reading, and have lots of options that make it easy for your potential clients to become actual clients. So you've got to think about your user experience a bit differently. Think about your favorite website for a minute, not your firm's website, but your personal favorite website. What are its strong points? What are its weaknesses? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? You have to put yourself in the user seat and ask yourself, okay, does this do what I want it to do? If your favorite website doesn't do everything that you want it to do, you can apply that same thought process to yours by saying, oh well, I don't like when my favorite website does this, so I'm going to make sure that my firm's website doesn't do that or doesn't do this, or whatever the case may be. Or you you decide to do something with your website that you like. So how can you tell if you've got a good user experience? Well, one great marker is how long are people staying on your website? What's the average bounce rate? Do you have a lot of people staying on site for a while and looking around, checking out different pages, filtering down to the contact us section? Great. If that's the case, you've got a good start. If any of those are out of joint, say if you have a lot of people spending 10 seconds on your site and then bouncing, that could indicate a couple of problems. One, it could indicate a cyber attack. Another could be that your site doesn't load fast enough, or the information is not well organized, or there's some sort of mismatch between what they were looking for and what they believe your business is about when they land on your website. The key is going to be understanding what people in your field of law or people who need your services, your potential clients, are looking for. What are they expecting to see? And what are the results that your website can give them that will tell them that you can get them the results they want? Because if your website doesn't measure up to their expectations, they're not even going to give you a chance to defend your education or your experience or your uh success uh in your practice area. It doesn't matter if the last 10 cases you argued uh came out in your client's favor or if your website uh doesn't demonstrate that same commitment to excellence. So you need to start there and consider if I don't like this function in my favorite website, why is it on my website? If this is a problem for me and this is a site that I enjoy visiting, why would somebody want to put up with it on a site that they're visiting because they have to, not because they want to? Let's face it, most people don't come to attorneys because of something positive. They don't want to uh come to to see their lawyer. What happens is they have a need that only an attorney can fill. So your website has to demonstrate that you're the one that can fulfill their needs. So if you look at your bounce rate, uh you look at how long people are spending on your site, how many people are looking through multiple pages of your site, the more informative and interesting your content is, the more likely it is that you're going to keep people on that page. And the more likely it is that they're going to want to learn more. So you want to make sure that you have plenty of links to related content on your site so that people can drill down into those concepts. They can find out more about you and your field of law and how you practice it and why you practice it in this particular way, or why you've chosen this field of law in the first place, uh, and why any of that is going to help them with their legal matters. We assume at this point that you've already got the color scheme down, you've got the logo, the textures, everything looks great. But just because it looks good on your office computer doesn't mean it's necessarily going to follow that it's going to look good on your phone or on your tablet. I'm surprised at how many attorneys don't really look into that. They look at their website on their PC at their office or maybe on their laptop and they say, okay, this looks good. But they don't consider that not everybody's going to use a PC or laptop to get to your website. A lot of people, in fact, uh some uh statistics say it's now the majority are using cell phones or tablets. A lot of people are using their smartphones uh while they're searching on the run. And most out-of-the-box SEO solutions like WordPress are actually really good about optimizing for uh cross-platform continuity so that your site's gonna work well. Whether you're on a PC or laptop or a mobile phone, but you can't guarantee that. You need to double check for yourself and make sure that it's up to your standards. Now, your SEO agency can build you something. At least they better be able to. Otherwise, why are you doing business with them? But just because they can build a website doesn't mean it's going to be a website that you're happy with uh once you have access to it on your phone. And if you're not happy with it, why would you expect your clients to be? Uh so you've got your bounce rate. How are people looking for you? And how much time are they spending on your site? Whether they're looking at multiple pages, and are you giving them the tools to do so? Are you making related content easy for them to find? Are you making your call to action or contact us or click here for a consultation? Uh, whatever your call to action is, is it clearly noted uh where they're easy to find for users? Another thing that a lot of people don't think about is accessibility. If you're writing your website and you don't have options in place for text-to-voice translation, or if you maybe need to make the font a little bigger so that people with disabilities can more easily read them, this can also cause problems with search engine rankings. Accessibility is generally baked in again in a lot of the out-of-the-box website solutions, but your SEO team is still going to have to make some tweaks, adjustments, and refinements on the fly. So your firm's website will be as easy to manage and access for as many people as possible. If your website doesn't have that accessibility, you're already operating at a disadvantage. If your website is primarily in English, but your user base speaks primarily Spanish, this is a complication. And it is one that you're going to have a hard time navigating unless you have direct one-to-one translations of all of your content in English and Spanish, which is not a bad idea, especially in an area uh such as where I practice, we're in South Florida, where uh of the bilingual population is uh is immense, and sometimes it's often the rule. So there's a lot of different kinds of accessibility that you have to consider. But the biggest one is is your website a website that you would feel comfortable inviting other people to look at? Most people go into this thinking, well, we've got a website and people will naturally come to it because we have that website. But that's not true. You may like the color scheme on your site, but a lot of people may not. And that's where split testing is critical. So if you have a lot of people that take a glance at it and they don't like the color scheme, uh, or they don't think that uh the aesthetics or ideals uh align, uh, they're going to go somewhere else. Now, granted, you're not going to make everybody happy. And again, I feel the need to really hammer this point home. You're not going to please all the people all the time, and that's okay. Split testing is looking at uh a statistically significant number. You're not trying to capture every single person who clicks on your website. No, what you're looking for is your ideal client. So you have to ask, okay, does this website uh perform to the standard that if I was my own ideal client, I would expect this from a law firm covering these issues. And that only makes sense. You have to put yourself in the user's position before you can be sure that you're doing it right. Again, right is a very subjective idea, depending on what field of law you're practicing in, and whether you're more plaintiff side, defendant side, or whether you're more of a generalist. These are all things that you have to consider. And the problem with user experience is that the cracks in it usually don't show up until after the website has been deployed. You've got the content up and you're starting to see visitor traffic, and now you realize that you have a usability problem. So what do you do with it? Well, like I said, the first thing you should do is look at your bounce rate. How many people are staying on site longer than say 52 seconds? The reason I say 52 seconds is because that's how long the average user spends on a website, according to Google. Now, again, when you're talking about an average, they're aggregating billions of searches and trillions of results and uh and from different fields, and they're packaging all of that into an average that holds basically across the board, government websites, private websites, uh, across all industries. And it does matter. 52 seconds is about how long the average person spends on a website. You hope that a short visit means that this person found out exactly what they needed, uh, or they called your office or they found what they wanted to know uh and took action. But where do they move to? Did they go to a competitor? Did they say, okay, I've got the answer I've needed, now I'm gonna leave, or did they go to another page on your website? Did they fill out a contact form? Uh there's no way to know because most SEO metrics don't track individual users. Uh, but that what they do is track things like X amount of people pinged on this site. They stayed on this site for a blank amount of time. And and then it's how many of these people went somewhere else after this amount of time and where did they go? And how many went to another page on our website versus potentially a competitor? Now you have to ask which pages are moving you forward and which ones are the ones that are causing the problems. And again, this is somewhat subjective, and there's a bit of an art form to figuring out the difference between, okay, well, we're just having an off month versus we've got a systemic user experience problem on our website. But maybe your site is slower to load on a cell phone than it is on your PC. That's not good. We have to ask why that's happening. Now, some of that, of course, could come down to the individual user's equipment. If they're using, say, an older iPhone to surf the web, then no, they're probably not going to get the same results than if they're using the latest next generation uh phone that's out there. And some programming schemes will work better than Safari, uh, better with Safari than with Firefox, for example, and others will work better with Chrome. So you can't take any of these points in a vacuum. You have to look at them globally and say, my load time is under 500 milliseconds, for example. Uh, that would be pretty good. And you know, the more you can trim that, the better off you are. And that's why, of course, a lot of websites have stopped using music and videos on the homepage because they tend to go for image-heavy carousels and longer form text with a lot of links, uh, both internal and external, because that cuts down on the load time. The next thing you need to know is is your site easy to navigate? Now, your website should be easy for you to navigate. You built it and caused it to be built or caused it to be built by someone else. And at least ideally, you're looking in on it during the website construction process. So you already know what's going on with your site and what its little twitches might be and how to work around them. But an average user is not going to know that. And they're not going to care. Uh, they're going to care about can I get the information I need in a quick, efficient, and entertaining manner? And if the answers to those questions are no, they're probably not going to stay. Now, again, the kind of law that you practice is going to make a huge difference as well, because some forms of law are, let's face it, just more cut and dried than others. There aren't as many options for things to get interesting, especially in a way that you could talk about with the general public because of client confidentiality, for example. So you need to be looking at every aspect of your user experience as if you've never seen the website before. And unfortunately for a lot of attorneys, this is probably absolutely true. They looked at their website one time on their laptop or maybe their desktop and they gave the go-ahead. They said it looked good and they moved on to the next fire to put out, which is understandable. It's also problematic. What I recommend is that you deploy your new website, and when you make any changes to it, you or someone in your company that you trust should be looking at it as well. But not just looking at it on their desktop, also check on their laptop, go to a tablet, check on a smartphone, perhaps, if possible, even different types of phones may show your website differently. And if they say, okay, well, it loaded well on the laptop and it loaded fine on my phone, but it was a little glitchy on my iPad or tablet, then you need to figure out why that is. And your SEO agency should be able to identify where the problem is. There's sophisticated tools to help uh agencies view websites in different formats. Uh now, again, sometimes that just comes down to a hardware problem. And it's not necessarily anything that your website is doing wrong, but you ask yourself, how many of your users have that hardware problem as well? Uh, if it's an old version of the iPhone, what percentage of your client base is using older phones? And if it's large enough, you may want to make sure that your website's compatible with uh the older phones as well as something that's just come out. Also, you want to beta test your website with people with disabilities, uh like those who are visually impaired, as a prime example. You know, does your content show up well against the background that you've decided on? Is it easy to read for somebody that has visual impairments? And if uh you're not yourself visually impaired, how would you know this? If you live your entire life looking out through glasses or contact lenses, you probably have a better grasp of what your website looks like to a visually impaired person. But that doesn't guarantee that your degree of impairment is going to tally with someone else who has it much more severely. We're not going to get into a uh a kind of a the a pity party here about who's got it worse. What we're trying to be is as inclusive as possible and as accessible as possible to the maximum number of people, which of course, this is what you need. And a lot of uh people that might be visually impaired, they'll rely on text-to-voice translation and dictation software that actually reads the screen for you. This makes it all the more important that your content is clear, well written, and designed to tell a logical, natural story. So as you can see, user experience involves uh filling a lot of different buckets and making sure that they're all balanced. But nothing will tank your website faster than poor user experience. If your website takes a second and uh under one to load, that doesn't sound like much. But we're used to instant gratification. We're used to websites loading before we can even say, oh, I'm pulling out this website. Uh it should be there almost immediately. So if you want speed, you want responsiveness, you also want ease of navigation, and you want accessibility. If your website's missing any of these, you're cutting yourself out of the market for a lot of people, um, perhaps a significant number, and that could be impacting your firm's growth because those people are going to look at your website and they're going to bounce, or they'll look at it and say, hey, this website wasn't built with people like me in mind, which tells me that this attorney is not thinking about uh people like myself as their ideal client. So what are they going to do? They're going to call a competitor uh or jump to another site. And that's why you look at bounce rate, and that's why bounce rate's so important. Uh, and you want to see where your visitors are going when they leave your site. Uh but go through this checklist, make to sure that your website uh ticks all those boxes because they are going to make a difference uh in your uh overall SEO, in your placement, and in how your users actually convert. And it's going to make a difference instinctively, reflexively. Uh, and users will unconsciously notice uh when they can tell that from your website that you're thinking about their interests and that their needs right off the bat. That's what you want when a client comes into your firm. Whether they're walking in the door uh or using a wheelchair or rolling in through the door, your website needs to reflect that exact same ethos and the exact same concern for their needs, even though this may or may not be somebody you're ever going to meet in real life. But they will absolutely remember the experience they had on your website and they'll say, Oh yeah, that site was great. It was easy to navigate. Perhaps they'll say this subconsciously. Um uh and if they can find everything that they've needed and they have the information that they were looking for, that's gonna play a huge role in getting them to proceed uh with your firm as opposed to a competitor. They might say, hey, I can find everything I needed and I got the information that I was looking for, and I didn't have to spend half my day doing this. Uh if they're lip curls and they say, Oh, I visited that site, and the results, they weren't great. That's obviously a bad sign. So you want to audit your firm's website as often as possible and make sure you're not the only one that's doing it. Make sure that you're outsourcing some of that work, at least to a point, to people within your firm and having them look at it and say, what do you see? How do you feel about this? Does this site and the user experience it offers project the image that we want our firm to have? The more inclusive you are, the better off you're going to be, and the more smoothly and quickly your website loads and functions, the happier your visitors are going to be, which of course means a higher chance of converting them into paying clients. While user experience doesn't sound like all that big of a deal in a vacuum, it can make or break your website before the person ever bothers to read the content. So be aware of that and consider that. Make sure that your website sends the message that you want your ideal client to receive because you're not worried about the thousand. Of people that click on your site and then bounce because it wasn't what they were looking for, you're concerned with your ideal client and making sure that your website says we're here and we're ready to serve you. Again, I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any updates from this channel. And don't forget to share with your friends, other attorneys, and colleagues who may find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today, and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and ideas for growing your firm's digital presence, making it stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you all next week. Thank you.