Top 10 ways to improve your firm’s biography page

Top 10 ways to improve your firm’s biography page.

The average law firm website’s attorney bio pages will be responsible for over 60% of the website's total traffic, an eye-catching percentage that means you should really pay attention to that one page more than any other one on your legal website. While it’s obvious that the writing of your bio is professional and well-written and grammatically correct, the layout of the biography page and some of its usability-based bells and whistles have a huge effect on its user-friendliness.

Because everyone loves top ten lists, we are listing our top 10 ways to improve your firm’s biography page.

10. If you have a niche, don’t be afraid to highlight it

If your paid work is 10% litigation and 90% real estate transactions, the likelihood that a potential client, or an existing client looking over your page, will be interested in reading about your real estate practice is very high.  While it’s certainly ok to include information about other areas of law you’d LIKE to practice in, make sure you are not overlooking your meat YOU’RE YOUR potatoes when writing the experience section of your biography.

9. Try to avoid too much legal terminology

Think of some of the best attorneys you've listened to cable television; the best ones tend to be quite good at explaining legal jargon in stimulating yet common terms, the gift to adjust the way they describe their work depending on the level of audience. Not to encourage you to dumb-down the description of their work accomplishments, but keep in mind that while many lawyers will be reading your biography, most of your readers will be people who may understand some lawyer lingo, but would benefit from a more casual business-oriented description of your abilities.

8. Provide something personal of yourself

When you get right down to it, client hire a person; they are not buying equipment or leasing a building, so adding something to your biography that will humanize you will help more than most people care to admit. While no one needs to know your grooming habits or golf handicap or your favorite restaurants, perhaps include a tidbit on the sports you love to watch or play, an unusual collection, or a charity you strongly believe in. If you include something you believe inn, say WHY you believe in it.

7. Begin with a short elevator pitch, then keep it short

One of the saddest aspects of a long-winded attorney bio is that, alas, most people would rather drive a stake into their eye before reading the entire thing. While a good layout will often alleviate the suffering caused by a long-winded biography, your next client is likely a busy person who desires an executive summary of everything from dinner menus to meeting agendas. Keep it short up on top, and after the overview you can then provide more details below the fold to amuse those who have all the time in the word to read more.

6. Keep search engines in mind when writing your biography

Your biography will probably be read by more robots than people, but this is good news. The search engine robots like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, read your bio at least once a week and will determine from its content its relevance and topical importance in relation to billions of other pages. So while you write your biography, don't be afraid to include the location you practice in; try to include town, county, and state. Then try to incorporate words that define your practice and are likely to be searched by clients, including things like "Stamford personal injury lawyer", or "New Jersey insurance law" into the biography.
 

5. List clients, or client testimonials, in your bio

Your experience, your achievements, your published articles and your awards: what else is more important to an attorney and therefore his/her client than these things? Don't be shy about including any and all of your experiences, including client testimonials. Adding one or two testimonials shows new clients proof that you've made previous clients very happy with your work.

4. Look professional in your photo

Clients tend to hire attorneys for their knowledge AND their personality, so while it's important to detail your legal experience, you should also spend some time thinking about your image before your biography photo is taken. A good photographer will help you ahead of time with clothing and grooming, and sometimes a makeup artist will be involved. A not very godo photographer, or an office person with a camera and a enough talent to be dangerous, will NOT make you look professional.  Nothing beats a well-dressed, smiling, professionally confident biography photograph.

3. Try to avoid making it difficult to contact you

If someone wants to contact you, make sure your website does NOT require a web form to be filled out just to send a simple email to you. There are plenty of ways of protecting your email from spammers that do not require resorting to this antiquated method of contact. V-cards should be in a clear and obvious place on your biography page. If you insist on a web form to contact you, make it a sidebar and don't expect people to include every detail of their case; for privacy reasons you don't want them to anyway. Require minimal information: name, phone, and email.

2. Link, link, link, link.

Including external website sources on your bio page is nice way of telling search engines that you want to provide impartial and independent information to your clients. These independent links can include legal associations, government sites, and so forth. But don't forget links to your OWN news articles and publications too, not to mention your Linkedin page, or even the website of any charities you're associated with.

1. Hire a professional

There are hundreds of professional writers out there with experience writing attorney biographies. They will interview you, usually on the phone, get a sense of the style of writing your firm prefers, and submit the first draft of your biography to you if you wish to edit it. Usually after a few run-throughs of this, you will in the end have something that you would not have been able to write on your own.


Matt DeLucia is president of Business Edge Internet Design, a website design agency with locations in New York City and Connecticut with over 100 law firm clients and hundreds of sites built over 17 years. Call 212-931-8538 or contact us here.