In some cases, law firms and even single attorney’s run multiple websites at the same time. The question here is: is there any good reason for a law firm to have multiple websites?
The answer is both YES and NO depending on the situation. Ultimately, web marketers agree that the decision of running multiple domains at the same time should not be based on emotions like fear or competition, greed or excessive ambition.
Many law firms do the mistake of purchasing and running too many domains at once, thinking that way they’ll get more business but if you just leave your websites sitting here without offering any value and updating the content, these would be a waste of money and effort.
Law firm should have multiple sites if:
- You have offices in different locations across the world. Many incoming searches are location-based e.g. “Law firms in Limassol” or “Law office in Moscow“. If you run offices or have associates in different locations that are not near each other, it would be a good idea to have a separate domain for each, so that you get more targeted traffic for each of your locations.
- You have set of specialties that are different/incompatible with each other. For example, you may specialize in both divorce and medical malfunction cases like injuries and serious illnesses. These medical incidents can be combined in the same domain name, but for divorce cases, you should have a separate site. This makes the message clearer to customers as they will be looking for something specific separately and rarely two things at the same time.
- You wish to target a specific portion of the audience fast: Let’s say for example that the news have announced that there is a dangerous drug circulating the market that could cause serious adverse reactions. In this case, you can launch a website with this at its main topic to attract potential plaintiffs that have used the drug and experienced adverse reactions.
Since running websites come with greater responsibility and work, it would be wise to ask yourself first before proceeding:
- Do I have the time and effort to run more than existing website at the same time?
- Do I have much content to add and update in each?
- Do I have the patience required to see long-term results rather than short-term?
- Am I willing to stick to Google’s guidelines and avoid taking any risky shortcuts?
- Do I have the technical knowledge or a technical team to check for any access, navigation, or security issues like hacking?
Law firm should NOT have multiple sites if:
- You really have no valid reason for having multiple sites at the same time.
- You feel bad firing a team or an individual which can sometimes be a friend or a family member who work on multiple websites.
- Your competition has a lot of websites and you want to copy them.
- You want to change the design of your website instead of improving the design of your existing one.
If your existing website in general doesn’t seem to perform well, it would be wise to work with it and have a plan rather than running new domains to see which work best—they may even perform worse than you’ve expected.
Running multiple domains at once should not be in any case a reckless or emotional decision as this a recipe for disaster. If however, you have valid reasons and you have a well-thought plan in mind, it wouldn’t hurt to have a few other different domains in your arsenal.
