“Seeking out a lawyer may be considered a medium to high involvement decision and this where good content can go a long way in establishing trust with the visitor,” he said.

Mr Crough said that a good law firm website includes information about the firm, a video that reflects the firms culture or insights, easy to find content that allows the visitors to understand the area of expertise or services and easily found contact details.

The level of influence the website has on securing clients is hard to measure, according to Mr Crough, as in some cases the visitor is looking with no prior knowledge of the firm, while in other cases the firm has been referred by an existing client and the visitor is just looking to validate the services.

“The need to convert is important and calls to actions are needed for this to happen; however these need to be considered in line with how the firm wants to be perceived.”

Mr Crough stressed that tracking the activity on the website is vital to ensure the website is performing the way the firm wants it to.

“Tracking via Google Analytics or tracking software is important as it allows the firm to understand how the site is being used, how many visitors are landing on the site, what they are doing on the site even down to what percentage of visitors are coming from mobile devices,” he said.

“The information is invaluable and really allows the firms to measure the value they are getting from the internal marketing efforts or measure the ROI of their agency.”

Mr Crough said that while the large top-tier law firms often succeed due to having more resources available to them, some boutiques are also getting it right.

“There are also smaller firms that are very savvy within the digital space and are leveraging the online channels to deliver qualified visitors to their sites,” he said.