Website redesigns are fundamentally different from building a law firm or accounting website from scratch.
Most of your traffic (60-70% in our professional services firm benchmarking) comes from search (SEO for lawyers and accountants is vital and threaded through everything we do at Magnifirm). And every page on your old website has a ranking.
Yet many website redesigns are carried out as if the current website didn’t exist. And consequently most website revamps see a net decline in visitors after a redesign (and the few that don’t see less of an increase in traffic than they should).
Even the decision about what content you migrate from the old website (“let’s move the last 6 month’s articles”) to the new website has a big impact on visits after relaunch – we often find law firms that we advise on revamps are surprised when we tell them that over 20% of their current visits are going straight to articles that are several years old.
Our experience running professional services pay per click campaigns (see more in our search engine marketing section) and having the largest regulatory keyword set also enables us to put together the best keyword research for your individual practice groups (keyphrases, their frequency of use and competitiveness) and with our SEO background we’ll then help you use that research in the optimum way across the key structural elements of your site as well as body copy and even in LinkedIn profiles.
The structure of pages that matter (for professional service firms typically fee earner biographies, practice group descriptions and articles or newsletter templates) is often over-determined by visual appeal rather than on keyword research and on what core functionality works best (there really is a ‘best law firm website design’ out there and we can help you make yours better). Your website designer is focused naturally on what you and your partners or attorneys can see onscreen (which is what you will sign off on) and how they as a designer can best achieve client lock-in post launch.
And most website redesigns aren’t structured in a way that will give you the ability to track which online marketing activities are generating high value results for you and which aren’t.
We’ve advised professional services firms on dozens of website redesigns and because we don’t do web development ourselves, we can be objective not only about different content management systems (WordPress versus Drupal versus .NET etc) but also about onshore and offshore development options and how they will determine your total cost of ownership of the site.