Discover how your law firm's online presence stacks up with our Trusted Law Firm Assessment quiz!

9 Hacks to Skyrocket Your Landing Page Conversions

Creating a landing page that drives conversions can feel like a guessing game. According to Wes McDowell, after testing over 120 tweaks during his 15-year career as a website strategist, he discovered that only nine key strategies consistently deliver results. The best part? These tweaks are so simple that you can implement them in an afternoon, even without marketing experience.

Here’s your guide to the nine most effective hacks for boosting landing page conversions, building credibility, and making your calls to action irresistible.

1. Use Social Proof Above the Fold

The area above the fold—what visitors see before they scroll—is prime real estate for building trust. Use this space to showcase social proof, such as:

Customer photos: Show real people who’ve used your product or service to humanize your brand.

Five-star ratings: Pair customer photos with a simple star rating to reinforce credibility.

Testimonials as headlines: Lead with powerful quotes like, “This service saved me hours every week and doubled my leads.”

Impressive stats: Highlight numbers, such as “Trusted by thousands” or “Helping businesses in 30+ countries.”

Client logos: Display recognizable company logos to instantly build trust.

Media logos: Include logos from publications or podcasts where your business has been featured.

Adding real-time social proof notifications, like pop-ups that show recent sign-ups or purchases, creates urgency and builds credibility. Tools like UseProof make this easy to implement, and studies show a 10-15% conversion lift from these notifications.

2. Write “Eyebrow Copy” for Instant Clarity

Visitors need to know immediately that your landing page is relevant to them. Add a line of eyebrow copy above your headline to set the stage. For example:

• Eyebrow Copy: “Struggling with time management?”

• Headline: “Our tool saves you hours every week.”

This small addition builds trust, provides context, and hooks visitors before they even read your main headline.

3. Use Conversational Copy

Your landing page should feel like a conversation, not a sales pitch. Speak directly to your visitors in a relatable tone:

• Use shorter sentences and contractions like “we’ve got your back.”

• Address pain points with empathy: Instead of “Low visibility affects your reach,” say, “People who need your product can’t find it.”

• Break the formal tone to make your copy approachable and engaging.

When your copy feels human, you build trust—and trust drives conversions.

4. Place Testimonials Strategically

Testimonials are powerful, but their placement matters. Use testimonials to:

Support key claims: Pair testimonials with sections of your page that highlight specific benefits.

Match visitor pain points: Feature testimonials from customers in similar situations to your target audience.

Leverage video: Video testimonials add authenticity but may not always be watched. Use compelling quotes from the video as headlines to ensure key messages are seen.

For example: “Our workflows are now faster and easier than ever!”—a quote positioned next to a video can deliver the same impact as the video itself.

5. Add a Comparison Table

Comparison tables help visitors decide quickly by showing why your service is the better choice. Focus on:

Highlighting your differentiators: Show what sets you apart without bashing competitors.

Addressing buyer concerns: Compare features like time savings, efficiency, and pricing to answer key questions.

Guiding hesitant visitors: Show how sticking with the status quo (e.g., doing nothing) won’t solve their problems.

A balanced, educational approach fosters trust while subtly encouraging action.

6. Lead with Benefits, Not Features

Most visitors care more about how your product helps them than its technical details. For example:

• Instead of: “Our food contains fresh spinach,” say, “Improves digestion and energy.”

• Instead of: “Low-fat formula,” say, “Helps maintain ideal weight and control allergies.”

Framing features as benefits creates an emotional connection, making your service more appealing.

7. Include a “Too Long; Didn’t Read” Panel

Some visitors scroll straight to the bottom of the page. Add a concise panel summarizing:

• Your main offer

• Key benefits

• A clear call to action (CTA)

For example: “Get expert legal advice today. Book your free consultation in under 5 minutes.” This final push can convert those who skim the rest of the page.

8. Boost CTAs with Reassurance

Many visitors hesitate to click CTAs due to fear of making the wrong choice. Add a CTA booster—a small reassurance below the button, like:

“No credit card required.”

“Get started in 5 minutes.”

These lines reduce friction and make taking action feel safer and easier.

9. Incorporate Real-Time Notifications

Real-time social proof, like notifications that show recent sign-ups or purchases, creates urgency. Tools like UseProof make this easy to implement, with results showing a 10-15% conversion increase.

Conclusion: Start Tweaking Today

Landing page optimization doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By focusing on these nine easy-to-implement hacks, you can boost trust, engage visitors, and drive more conversions—no advanced skills required.

Ready to see results? Reach out to us here at ApricotLaw to find out how we can help strategize your social proof, write conversational copy, and implement these strategies on your website today!

Was Penquin and Hummingbird the Death of Lawyer EMD’s?

In dozens of cases I have witnessed the exact match domain getting crushed in the SERPs as a direct result of the most recent Google Update, Penguin 2.1.

Instead of the homepage ranking, a relevant inner page ranks somewhere deep in the Google results pages.

Also worth noting that the best fit inner page is usually not the one ranking highest. For example, let’s say we are trying to rank for Lawyer SEO. The page ranking highest (albeit on page 9) is www.lawyer-seo-firm.com/law-firm-website-design… while http://lawyer-seo-firm.com/lawyer-seo is no where to be found.

Regardless of what is ranking, the homepages of many exact match domains are not ranking on page one anymore. In fact they are not found at all and are now being replaced by the lower ranking of some inner page on the site for the same keyword.

What does this tell us?

Google is moving towards ranking the inner pages of Authority Websites.

Exact Match Domain, or EMD, is a tactic that got over-used and has now been deemed less effective.

What can you do about it?

Stick to the fundamentals.

Never rely on one SEO tactic, diversify. It does not matter if the tactic is considered White Hat or Black Hat. Once it gets abused, you can count on Google discrediting it.

One tactic that comes to mind that Google has warned about is guest posting. Very effective right now but like every other tactic, it won’t be as effective in the future.

What works today may not work tomorrow.

Build an authority website.

On page SEO, and proper website structure, is more important than it used to be… as important as quality of backlinks right now.

https://www.https://www.apricotlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Lawyer-SEO-1.jpg.com/lawyer-seo/law-firm-seo-checklist/

I can here you now, “Nick, you are full of it!” (Maybe you even cursed… I am trying to keep it clean here).

You have a legal website that happens to have a keyword in the name and it’s still on page one?

Yes, there are exceptions to every rule.

So, which EMDs survived Penguin 2.1?

From our research it looks like sites that are properly structured and have a good amount of relevant content on them, were not harmed.

Like I said above, proper website structure is as important as quality of backlinks right now. Furthermore, if your website is properly structured, the fact that the keyword is in the domain, was overlooked.

Penguin 2.1 was more about the structure and usability of your website than anything else.

I should also add that any OVER-optimization will get you nowhere.  And I am not just talking about anchor text.  Everyone knows that anchor text over-optimization will get you slapped.

(Most people see a slap as a severe penalty brought down on their website by the Google Police.  It is much more effective to think of Google as a filter.  Over-optimization of anchor text, as an example, will simply not get you through the filter that the user is entering into the search bar.)

In addition to anchor text, meta titles and meta descriptions (you know the listing information that visitors see in Google results) must also be crafted with care.  Put your target keyword there over and over and that too will get your website caught in the sifter.

How do you pass through the filter to the promised land?

  • Use synonyms
  • Never use the same exact phrase more than once (within reason)
  • Focus on using the words of your target phrase in different order
  • Focus primarily on getting the reader to notice your headline (meta title) and then curious enough to click your listing after reading the description.  Click-through and user behavior is becoming increasingly important to Google.
  • H1 and H2 tags still tell Google what terms are important on your page.  Just keep the previous points in mind when crafting them.

Have you seen your Lawyer Exact Match Domain take a nose dive in the Google rankings?

Tell us about it.

You don’t have to tell us the domain name. Just let me know I’m not crazy and my eyes are not deceiving me.

Or if you see something different happening and you think I am way off here, please let me know that too.

Have a great day!

The 5 Most Common Website Mistakes Lawyers Make

No one is calling our office… The Internet is not working for us… We’re on page 6 of Google… We’re getting calls but they’re outside of our practice areas… We’ve invested all this time and money and have nothing to show for it…

Willie Vitari, our COO, and Nick Kringas, our President and Co-Founder, were on a zoom call yesterday.

The purpose of this call was to identify the most common website mistakes lawyers make that keep them from succeeding online.

In the end, Nick and Willie boiled them down to the 5 most common and deadly website mistakes.

These mistakes are the cause of so many symptoms we hear about.

Avoid these and more people will find your website, plain and simple.

More importantly, the right people will find your website – those looking for the legal services you provide.

Here are the 5 deadly website mistakes crippling most law firms.

Mistake #1: Failing to take advantage of the most important real estate on any website

It’s been said that most website visitors do not scroll!

That means most of the people that find your website only see the top section.

Regardless of how staggering that is, the Above the Fold area (the ATF) is the one section every visitor sees.

Doesn’t it make sense then to spend most of your time and energy getting the top of your pages dialed in?

Let’s break this down even further.

It’s safe to say your homepage is the most visited page on your site.

And the ATF is the most valuable real estate on any page.

So, if you want more of your visitors to call your office and schedule a consultation, focus 80% of your time on the top of your homepage.

Without getting into the psychology and typical behavior of a website visitor, here’s the bottom line.

Put a call to action (a schedule-a-call button) 1. In the top right corner of your homepage (at the end of your main menu) and 2. In the center or right-center of the ATF (the top section of your homepage).

On mobile, you should have a call to action button at the bottom of your site that stays there no matter where the visitor goes.

We see so many law firms that just don’t ask for the sale. Or if they do, it’s further down where no one sees it.

Make it easy for people to do business with you.

Mistake #2: Not having a good SEO keyword campaign

Some keywords are obvious.

We know you want to rank for location + car accident lawyer and location + personal injury lawyer.

But what about the other dozens of search queries that could bring your firm clients and cases?

More often than not, we meet lawyers that don’t have a clearly defined keyword strategy.

Other times, we meet lawyers that want to rank for keywords that no one is searching for.

Both are mistakes.

You should have a clearly defined list of keywords that you want to rank for. We recommend identifying 20 to 30 terms that have search volume.

If you’re doing this on your own, spend an hour or two using SEMRush or AHREFS.

Plug in keywords you can see your ideal client searching.

Do they have search volume?

Search those terms in Google.

Copy the related searches from the bottom.

Plug those into the tool, too.

Rinse and repeat until you identify your 20 to 30 target terms.

You wouldn’t believe how many lawyers are working on their sites without a clearly defined list of target keywords.

It’s like throwing darts in the dark. If you hit your target, it will be out of sheer luck.

Mistake #3: Having poor on-page SEO

These mistakes tie into one another.

You can’t possibly have a well-optimized site without knowing your target keywords.

Once you have your target keywords, you should have a dedicated landing page (a page on your website) for each of those terms.

Without getting too technical, here’s the bottom line.

Make sure your target keyword is in these critical areas:

  • In the URL of the page
  • In the Title of the page
  • In an H1 (Heading 1) on the page
  • 2 to 3 times in the body text, the first instance as close to the top of the page as possible

With a dedicated landing page for each target keyword, Google now knows what you want to rank for.

Without a dedicated landing page for each target keyword, you’re essentially leaving it up to Google to figure out what your site is about.

Allowing Google to rank your site for what it thinks your site is about is not ideal.

How can you expect your ideal prospect to find and call you in this case? You can’t.

And you’ll be lucky if they do.

Mistake #4: Publishing too much content

This one’s my favorite.

Nearly every attorney we meet believes that content is king and the more content on your site, the better.

99 times out of 100, this general belief leads attorneys astray.

First, Google allocates a limited amount of “crawl budget” for scanning your site.

If you have hundreds of news-related or off-topic blog posts on your site, Google will never get to your target keyword landing pages – a.k.a. your money pages.

The next consequence of this mistake is getting traffic you don’t want.

Have you ever gotten a call from someone looking for help in an area of law you don’t practice?

How about from out-of-state, where you’re not licensed?

This is a symptom of the content on your site ranking for the wrong search terms.

If a page or post doesn’t add to your target keyword list, don’t publish it.

WARNING: If your firm is guilty of this, please don’t delete pages blindly. That could make things worse. Contact a professional with experience in bloated sites. Every situation is different and requires analysis and thought before taking action.

Mistake #5: Link issues – not having enough links or having links from weak or irrelevant sites

Most attorneys we meet simply don’t have enough links to rank.

They don’t have enough other sites linking to theirs to tell Google their site is the best.

Google crawls the web by following these links. If your site is not linked to, Google won’t visit very often.

Plug your domain into AHREFS and look at the number of referring domains pointing to your domain (total links to every page on your site).

Next, do the same for a site that you see at the top of Google.

Is there a big difference between the number of referring domains?

Many attorneys that come to us are behind there competition in this area.

On the other end of the spectrum attorney sites with too many weak or irrelevant links.

The two factors Google looks at when valuing links are Relevance and Authority. 

Relevance means it’s better to get a link from a law related site than it is to get one from a dating site.

Authority can be measured by a number of tools. We prefer AHREF’s Domain Rating, or DR.

Anything over 20 is decent. Having too many links from sites with DR’s under 20 is not great. The higher DR/Authority, the better.

Either way, a low number of referring domains or too many weak and irrelevant links, the result is the same – a site that’s not at the top of Google for the best keywords.

For links to your site, start by getting listed on as many legal directories as you can.

Fill out each profile as much as they let you.

Add as many links back to your site as the directory allows.

Spread the links around – point them to your homepage and target keyword landing pages.

P.S. If you’ve made any of these website mistakes and are feeling the effects, let us know.

Book a FREE strategy session and we’ll talk.

No obligation and no strings attached.

Click here to book your FREE strategy session today.

Get Your Free Website Audit Video

Analyze My Site

[VIDEO] The Most Important On-Page SEO Elements


Get Your Free Website Audit Video

Analyze My Site

In this quick 3 minute video you will learn the on-page SEO elements that are most important.

If you want your website to rank in Google, you must get these on-page SEO elements just right.

If you don’t, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle. You’ll be wasting unnecessary time and money.

In SEO, this is what you do as soon as you know which keywords to go after.

P.S. We’d be happy to analyze your site’s on-page SEO for you.

We’ll also show you how you stack up against the top ranking sites in your market.

This way you’ll have a clear game plan to start competing and getting more cases from the Internet.

You’ll get a screen recording video that you can watch at your leisure.

No obligation and no strings attached.

Click here to claim your free website audit video.

Get Your Free Website Audit Video

Analyze My Site

What’s your law firm SEO company really worth?

Converting the people that contact your law firm from prospect into client, is really on you and how good your sales process is.

It doesn’t matter how they came in – via phone, website form submission or online chat. You should first know what your lead to client/case ratio is.

If you’ve spoken with 100 decent prospects and you don’t have any clients to show for it, no amount of traffic in the world is going to help you. After all, anything times zero is still zero.

After you know this ratio, and it’s not horrific, then you can look at the next set of numbers, which happen to be earlier in the sales process.

There are a few metrics your law firm SEO company could be accountable for. They are…

  1. Rankings – either the number of search phrases your website appears in the top 3 or top 10 (of Google) for and/or
  2. The number of leads (all types) that come in through your website – or through the campaign(s) the agency is responsible for
  3. Which they are accountable for is really up to you and the needs of your law firm.

Where to find these law firm SEO metrics, if they are not being provided to you.

The number of unique visitors can be found in your analytics software, Google Analytics being the most commonly used. In Google Analytics, this number is referred to as Users (not Sessions).

To start, don’t worry about calculating the Key Metrics for each traffic source. Let’s get the basics out of the way first, then you can move on to more granular figures. For now, just get the total number of unique visitors to your website for the past month.

The second Key Metric you’ll need to find is the number of leads you’ve received during the same period.

This one may take a bit more work, especially if you’re not set up properly.

There are usually 3 types of leads that come into most law firm websites.

  1. Form Submissions
  2. Phone Calls
  3. Chat Sessions

Form submissions are the easiest to tally because you can normally look in your website’s dashboard and see how many people filled out forms in the past month.

To count the number of phone calls that came in through your website, you’re going to need two things (well one thing and one criteria).

1. A tracking phone number, or a phone number that provides basic stats, like the number of incoming calls.

2. To make sure that the phone number you are using is unique and only used on that one website.

If you use the same vanity phone number across all platforms, it will be very hard to know where each call came from. Yes, you can ask each caller but that becomes tedious and is not as reliable as a single tracking number tied to each source you want to measure.

I have the Key Metrics, now what?

Now that you have the number of unique visitors and the number of leads that came in last month, we can get to the heart of our marketing, Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Visitor.

we can calculate your Cost Per Click, or how much each visitor is costing you. Just divide what you’re paying the marketing agency by the number of Unique Visitors for the same time period.

For example, if you’re paying the agency

From these numbers you can then easily calculate the Cost Per Click (or Cost Per Unique Visitor) and the Cost Per Lead by dividing what you’re paying the company each month by each.

How the Best Law Firm Companies Win Online 

You’ve noticed them at the top of Google’s search engine results pages. You see their ads online. Their businesses appear in the maps on Google. Each time you are reminded of their success, you wonder what they’re doing right. Your competitors know something you don’t. They know how to win online.

You can learn the keys to their success, and it is possible to beat them. But you need the tools, and perhaps a little help, if you want to reach the level of success your competition has achieved. Online marketing can be a challenge to do well. Here are a few tips to help you compete online.

Win Online by Following These Tips

Winning online is not as great of a mystery as you might think. It can be tough to figure out what is important and what’s not, so we’ve broken down law firm internet marketing into a few basic categories to focus your efforts on. Here they are.

Website Design

Without a doubt, website design plays a crucial role in online success. It’s pretty tough to compete online if you don’t have a beautiful, functional, and highly converting website. Website design has many parts, such as branding, content, interactive features, and more.

You will want to get your website’s design right if you hope to achieve online success.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Having a killer website will do nothing for your business if the website is not optimized for search engines. Google and other search engines scan your website’s content to try to figure out what your website is all about. If you haven’t optimized your content, the search engines will have a tough time figuring out what your website is for.

Make sure your law firm’s website and landing pages are all optimized so you can be found by Google and other search engines.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising

Advertising is important for every business. You simply can’t grow without advertising. Every company is different, and different advertising methods will work better for different types of companies. Because lawyers don’t sell a product, you can’t use YouTube or social media influencers to sell your services like other businesses sell their products.

You will likely have to advertise your law firm online. PPC ads are a smart way to advertise so you can reach the right audience. There are some tricks to doing PPC right, though. It’s a good idea to work with a company that has a PPC specialist on their team.

Get in Touch with a Law Firm Internet Marketing Team

You want your law firm to win online, but internet marketing is too much hassle for you to deal with. Don’t be discouraged. You can hire a marketing team at ApricotLaw for help with achieving the online success you’ve always wanted. 

Your law firm marketing team has web designers, developers, content writers, PPC specialists, social media experts, and other professional team members who are ready to get your law firm to the top. Call 877-203-0751 or complete the form below to get a free website analysis and learn more about how to win online.

Request A Free Website Analysis

Enter your information for a free video website analysis. We’ll uncover what’s holding your site back and let you know how you can rise to the top.