A/B Testing for Law Firms: Benefits and Resources

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is the process of creating a copy of an existing webpage, allowing you to modify specific features (like a button or sign-up form). Now you can test the two versions of the same webpage and see which one obtains a better result in clicks, conversions, or traffic.

Many law firms find this process daunting because they are confused about what it needs testing and what website features should be prioritized. The idea is to take an element of your website that would improve traffic if slightly modified and test it against the previous version. We do admit it is not an easy process, but there are tools that make a/b testing easier.

When to conduct A/B testing?

If your law firm is unhappy with the number of leads received through the website, it is a sign that your website is not performing as well as it should or there are features that can be improved to increase the traffic and performance of your online presence. The solution, in this case, is to perform A/B testing to achieve the desired performance in the number of visitors, traffic or reduced bounce rate.

• Improve Website Traffic

When someone visits your website it is because they want to solve a specific pain point. That can contact your firm, find more information regarding your services or simply browsing for information your law firm has on a specific topic. Whatever their goal is, it visitor on your website are not able to find quickly what they want they will most certainly leave. When doing A/B testing you can use heatmaps, Google Analytics or website surveys to analyse your visitor’s pain points and improve your conversion rate.

• Improve ROI from Existing Traffic

As marketers, we understand how expensive can be acquiring quality traffic and all the effort put into attracting new visitors. Therefore we want to make the most of our client’s website and convert the already existing traffic. A/B testing is a measure that can improve your ROI and with minor changes, you can experience an increase in conversions.

• Reduce Bounce Rate

To know whether your website is accomplishing your visitors’ goals a very important metric is the bounce rate. When using Google Analytics you can easily track how high your bounce rate is. The higher the bounce rate the lower the performance of your website. Therefore the website is not matching the expectations of your visitors. To improve that you can create multiple variations of your website and with A/B tests you can see which one performs better.

• Reduce Spending on Website Modifications

Make incremental changes to your website without spending a lot on redesign tasks. When the traffic of your website drops or you are not attracting the right type of visitor the solution is not changing completely the website. By making minor changes to your website and testing them you can easily evaluate what small changes are needed to improve conversion rates.

• Achieve Significant Improvements

A/B tests are data-driven, therefore there is no much room for guessing if a modification or assumption you have made is correct or wrong. Relying on data has become easier than ever and with A/B testing you can produce quality modifications to your website without spending lots of resources

How to create A/B tests for your law firm website?

To start A/B testing, you need to install tracking tools to analyze how your visitors are interacting with your website and observe where that interaction stops and what features could cause it. Let’s say on your website you have a form and the form is not being reached by visitors. It might be its position or the form has too many fields and that pushes back the users to spend time filling it. To make sure your assumptions are correct there is no better way to solve this but A/B testing. You start by creating two versions of the same webpage and run both versions for a period of 30 days. At the end of those 30 days, you measure which version has obtained more engagement.

A common mistakes website owner does is to start tracking randomly webpages features. To avoid this misstep, you should install tools like heatmaps that show how users engage with specific parts of your website. Heatmaps basically indicate what features of a webpage, users interact most with and what features users just don’t click on them.

Once you have detected what is not working on your site you can use a website editor and modify those aspects that cause low engagement rates. An additional benefit of a heatmap is that it allows you to know how much engagement the new version has received compared to the old version.

Common features of a website that need A/B testing

A website is like a business card and often is the front door to your business. For that reason, you must optimize every piece of content, design and call to actions to reach to your website’s maximum potential. The features being tested more often are as follows:

Copy

• Header

The header is the first part of the website a visitor see, therefore it is imperative that you define in your headline a message that catches your visitor’s attention and makes them stay on the website.

• Body

As visitors continue reading the content of your website it is important to match the messaging style with your target audience and break the information into small and easy to read paragraphs. With A/B test you can run variations of headers and paragraphs to assess which one performs better

Design and Layout

Design plays an important role on your website as ti need to provide clear information, highlight reviews or customer testimonials and have a simple format. When the design is very crowded and not clear, users tend to leave the website. For that reason, you should use a simple colour palette matching with the design of your website and try to identify what elements of your website distract your users.

Navigation

Another element that can be optimized is the navigations. When the navigation is not clear and visitors struggle to find information on your website their expectations are not fulfilled. This will most likely make them abandon the website. Make sure you have a clear website structure in mind and the navigation bar is easy to find and intuitive for the user.

Forms

Depending on the size of your business and the purpose of your website your forms might differ. For instance, small companies want to collect quickly information about the user, therefore a small form easily available to visitors is a better option. Nevertheless, bigger companies use their website as a way to collect qualified leads and to do that they require their visitors to fill in more details. Through A/B test you can analyze what type of form is more suitable for your law firm

CTA

The Calls to Action are extremely important and you want to make sure visitors reach them and visitors are taking action. For that reason, you can A/B test different colours, sizes and copies of your CTA to find the winning variation.

Social Proof

Recommendations and reviews from clients are highly relevant in the legal industry. Therefore you want to determine how many social proofs should be added in what format and what type of format is more suitable. By testing different variations you can implement the most successful option.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, we have equipped you with the very basics of A/B testing and you can use it as a resource to improve the performance of your website and increase the conversion rate. It is now time for you to take action and implement a system where A/B testing becomes a process integrated into your website development and it is continuously tracked and analyzed.