Establishing Credibility on Your Pay Per Click Landing Page
When people visit your law firm website, they start by asking themselves: Can I trust the information on this site? Can I trust in the services this site describes? So a winning landing page or website has a lot to do with establishing credibility with your visitors. And this is even more important when it comes to legal services because lawyers already start with a strike against them in the minds of most consumers.
So, what’s the most important aspect to gaining credibility? A fairly recent study by found that only 1% of respondents thought a privacy policy was important in terms of establishing trust. People didn’t care about sponsorships. Or the identity of the site owner. They found that when people assessed a real website’s credibility they did not use rigorous criteria. Amazingly, the overwhelming credibility determinant was site design – layout, typography, font size and color schemes!
The study showed that nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) paid far more attention to the superficial visual aspects (such as layout, typography, font size and color schemes) of a site than to its content or what it said.
This seems to agree with the experience I have had with my own law firm’s website. When we updated our site we noticed an immediate increase in online conversions at our landing page from our Pay-Per-Click campaigns.
However, we also know from our website and our Client’s sites that additional trust factors will continue to raise this rate higher. Things such as video, good testimonials, case studies, being a published author, memberships, awards, etc. can all have a positive effect on your conversion rate.
So if you get someone to click on one of your ads, you don’t want to lose them because your site is outdated and not visually appealing or not professional looking. This study seems to tell us that no matter what other credibility factors you have on your site, you better make sure the site is up to date and visually appealing.
This may be the most important aspect to establishing trust and getting your visitor to contact you. But it’s also true that none of these factors should be used to the exclusion of any others. They should all be considered, tested and continually improved. Especially when it comes to legal services, you must use as many credibility factors as possible to overcome the built in fear and distrust that the general public has when it comes to hiring a lawyer. And when using PPC advertising, this is vital because the more people that contact you once they reach your landing page, the higher your conversion rate and the lower your cost per email or call!
