Why Microsites are Perfect Law Firm Marketing Tools

Microsites are an under-used super lawyer marketing technique.

Throughout the “How to get a Great Law Firm Website” series I’ve discussed how building multiple websites is a very advantageous marketing strategy. Our firm presently has 4 websites for 3 practice areas.

What is a microsite?

A second website to your firm’s website(s) (or complementing) is a microsite or minisite. I can’t emphasize enough how advantageous it is to have multiple microsites. This is why having the in-house capability to build websites is important.

Why are microsites for law firms so great?

1. Precision search engine optimization.

Remember that people find websites because they are looking for something. The fact your prospective clients are looking to hire is so perfect if you know what you’re doing. Therefore, if you can create an entire website that is precision-optimized for your prospective clients, you have the bett

2. Awesome conversion as a result of expert perception.

With a microsite you will attract prospective clients looking for a particular legal area. Because your site is all about one practice area, you’ll appear as specialists in that area.

3. Unlimited deep and long tail linking among all your law firm websites.

When you control multiple websites and blogs, you can create articles that write about and link to pages and posts in your other websites and blogs.

For example, website A is your personal injury website. In website A you have 10 key pages setting out the specific injury cases you do and getting your visitors to contact you (i.e. calls-to-action).

Suppose page 1 in website A has the keyword phrases “truck accident personal injury lawyer” and “San Diego injury attorney”. You can link from your website B to website A’s page 1 with those exact keyword phrases in the link text.

The point is the link text into your website is valuable for improving search engine listing results.

Now, think about owning 3, 4 or more websites. You can have every website link to every key page among your websites using your keyword phrases.

4. Unlimited linking to your offsite articles

This is very similar to number 3 above, except with multiple law firm websites you can have multiple links to each of your offsite article published in whichever article directories you use. I create an “Other Articles” page in each of my websites and then list the titles and link to all offsite articles.

Don’t forget to add a unique article or content of some sort to each page you list titles and links. This goes for number 3 above also. If you have the exact same title-listing pages in more than one website, you have duplicate content. You can solve that problem by writing content somewhere on the page that is unique to that page.

When is it not duplicate content? A rough rule-of-thumb is you should have the same number of words being unique content as you do duplicate content. This means if your list of titles is 200 words, your unique content on that page should also be at least 200 words. If your title list grows, so too should your unique content.

4. Creating double listing in Google.

What are double search engine listings? Check out the image below.

I learned from Stompernet the formula for creating this very effective click-through technique. I don’t want to steal Stompernet’s thunder, so check out Stompernet’s “Double Your Traffic” video. The point is that having at least 3 related websites (3 different practice area law websites are related for these purposes because they are all “law”) is one of the tools you need to create the very powerful double listing search engine listing.

Be sure not to create duplicate content when developing microsites

Duplicate content is when two web pages have very similar content. It can happen among different websites and within a website.

You want to avoid duplicate content among your law firm microsites because all but one URL of duplicate content will likely be listed with the search engines. That means the unlisted pages are doing you no good. Every web page should count and benefit your website.

It’s easy to inadvertently create duplicate content. Suppose you have your law firm’s main website setting out all your practice areas. We’ll call this the umbrella site. Within the umbrella site is a page setting out the personal injury practice area.

Then your firm builds a personal injury practice area microsite. If a page or pages on the personal injury microsite is very similar to the personal injury content on your main (umbrella) site, you have duplicate content.

The key is that the content among all your web pages be at least 30 to 35 percent unique. The best way to create varied copy is ensure your titles, headings, and keyword phrases are different.

Should you have a main firm umbrella site or only separate microsites?

I chose to not have a comprehensive firm site setting out all our practice areas. Instead, our law firm has 4 separate microsites, with possibly more in the future. Each microsite is dedicated to one of our practice areas.

My reason for not having a comprehensive law firm website is I believe single practice-area websites have much higher conversion rates. Therefore, if a prospective client found our comprehensive firm site instead of the intended microsite, I believe there’s a smaller chance that prospective client will contact us.

In other words, I view a comprehensive website as a detriment. That said, some prospective clients may prefer a website that presents the firm as a full-service firm. That could work if a firm is truly full service. Since my firm only practices in 3 areas, we don’t declare we’re full service.