So you’ve had your website for a few years now and it’s starting to get the number of visits that you had hoped for, but you’re STILL not generating any leads.

You get 2,000 monthly visitors, but your bounce rate is 85% (yes, THIS IS BAD!) and nobody ever clicks through your site.

This is normal for attorney websites who do a lot of blogging or adding content just for the sake of adding it. Just so they can wake up and say “well I did that yesterday it can wait another week or so”. It’s not just about adding content, it’s about adding informative, USEFUL content.

You can blog about as many auto accidents and other accident-related news in your area as you want, it can’t hurt. But don’t be surprised when, after you spent the last 3 months recapping news stories and sharing your views on accidents, that you’re not generating any leads. After all, are people really searching for an attorney’s view on an auto accident or news story?

Adding informative content that is relevant to your practice area is key to SEO for attorney sites. Open your Google analytics, go back six months, and see what keywords have resulted in a decent number of visits and low bounce rate. Track what keywords potential clients are using when searching for and contacting you. And then focus on these a bit more.

But when you’re getting the traffic, your bounce rate has gone down, and people are clicking through your site and visiting 4 and 5 pages per visit, why are they STILL not contacting you? Well, take a look in the mirror.

What are YOU TELLING THEM to do?

What is your call to action?

You have a contact form buried somewhere on your site, probably in the “Contact Us” page that nobody ever visits (you can tell how many views through Google analytics…go look at the traffic counts for that contact us page, I’ll bet it’s low).

This is what separates the men from the boys. You can pay any of a million “SEO GURUS” or experts to get you to page 1 of Google, or to get a few extra visits to your site, but are you

a) reaching your target audience?

b)capturing contact info or leads from visitors?

There are a million ways to improve your website’s conversion and generate more leads, but we’re not going to share them here (or else you’d know all of our and clients’ secrets).

We recently started a site showcasing attorney website designs, and are taking nominations for the Best Attorney and Law Firms Web Sites. This is for

a) attorneys who don’t currently have websites who would like to look around at what web design companies have done for their clients

b) attorneys with websites who could use an opinion

c) web design companies who would like to show off work for clients that they are proud of

The submission is free and results in a link back to your site from a site which ranks well with search engines and gets a high amount of monthly views.

We usually only comment on the site’s design, amount of content/development, and other aspects. But between now and the rest of the week, anyone who submits a site will not only be listed on the front page, but we will also e-mail you one way that you can easily improve your call-to-action and generate more leads from your current website.

So here is a quick example of how an attorney that is active on Twitter was able to find a potential client pretty easily.

Jennifer Cohen, who does some social media marketing for some of our clients from time to time, was recently loading groceries into her car near where she lives on a busy street.

Somebody came by and his her car door while it was open. The insurance company ruled it to be her fault (let’s not turn this into a debate please ), and she had to pay the deductible to get her car fixed.

She was upset and started looking more into it. Here is one message that she tweeted:

This resulted in a direct message from a local attorney who is obviously familiar with Twitter:

I’ll share that attorney’s profile after I publish this post and contact him/her to see if it’s okay.

Anyways, how did this attorney know that Jennifer tweeted that, and how was he able to find her?

Pretty simple. This attorney might not have even had to be on Twitter, Tweetdeck, or anything else, they just had to have e-mail access.

There are Twitter alert services out there like TweetBeep (which just came back up after about a month on hiatus) and Twilert that allow you to setup email alerts based on specified keywords that are relevant to your practice. So this attorney could have had “car accident”, “insurance”, etc. set up as his or her alerts which is how he found Jennifer (who is likely going to hire them by the way, she was impressed that the attorney took the initiative and is tech-savvy enough to find her).

He/she also used the advanced settings feature on either TweetBeep or Twilert to only alert him if these keywords are tweeted by a Twitter user within a certain number of miles from the zip code where he/she practices law.

Then, it’s as easy as sending her an @ message, or going the extra mile to follow her and send her a Direct Message.

It’s obviously worth the time to sit down and create a number of these alerts. Think of anything that someone might tweet about that relates to your practice, set up how often you would like to be alerted, hit save, and wait for the leads to come “flying” in.

Okay maybe not, but even if you only get one lead a year by doing this, it took you a half an hour to set it all up, if that’s not proving Twitter’s potential ROI I don’t know what is.

Oh, and remember to PLEASE build value on your Twitter profile. The idea is to share, not continuously self-promote and only tweet when you have a new blog post.

-Murph ( http://twitter.com/george_murphy )