Blog Post

Your website should work more like NYTimes.com

"Suggested content" teasers can keep visitors engaged on your firm’s website. 4 comments

This might seem outlandish, but we believe that law firm websites should function more like the New York Times website, NYTimes.com.

You’re probably asking, “What the heck does NYTimes.com have in common with law firm websites?” Increasingly, the answer is: a lot. This is especially true for firms that have embraced content marketing

Like NYTimes.com, progressive law firms use their website as a platform for disseminating smart, insightful content. Additionally, both types of websites are most effective when their visitors are highly engaged – consuming one article after another.
 


 

However, there is one glaring difference. Sites like NYTimes.com and Bloomberg.com are built to maximize engagement. They use an array of “suggested content” teasers to keep visitors surfing. Consider your own experience when on a website like NYTimes.com: as soon as you finish one article, you’re teased to another.

Although large media sites have been offering visitors “suggested content” for years, law firm websites haven’t traditionally been built with tools that enable the cross-promotion of content. At Great Jakes, we saw this as a major deficiency, so we decided to build some technology to address it.

Introducing Dynamic Sidebars

In an effort to build websites that keep visitors engaged, we created the Dynamic Sidebar Tool. This new tool gives firms tremendous control over their sidebar content, including suggested content teasers. This is a major advancement over traditional sidebars, which are hard-coded onto the page, making them very difficult to modify. Dynamic sidebars, on the other hand, are

  • Easy to deploy – With just a few clicks, you can activate sidebar teasers for any type of related content, including upcoming events, publications, case studies, and even blog posts.
  • Extremely flexible – Any number of sidebar items can be added to a page – and you can easily reorder them using drag-and-drop. Sidebars can contain practically any content format such as photos, text, and videos.
  • Automatic – Select “auto” in the CMS, and the system’s algorithm will automatically select relevant “suggested content” to promote, like blog posts, articles, and press releases.
     

Why is this important?

Firms dedicate considerable resources to creating reputation-enhancing content, like articles and blog posts. However, most of this content is buried. By borrowing the idea of “suggested content” from sites like NYTimes.com, you can maximize the number of eyeballs that see your content. And in turn, you can maximize the ROI of your content.

Some of the Tool's Benefits

The Dynamic Sidebar Tool also provides benefits that will please website visitors and your marketing team. Here are just a few:

  • Keeping your site fresh – Your website can always be configured so that visitors see the newest and best content – regardless of what pages they happen to visit while on your website. This will keep visitors surfing your website and experiencing your brand.
  • Cross-promoting your content – Real estate events can be promoted on your real estate case study pages or on pages that are only tangentially related to real estate, such as your environmental practice. This helps visitors to the site understand the firm's breadth of knowledge.
  • Eliminating dead ends – When a visitor finishes reading an article, the sidebar tool allows you to spoon feed them the next piece of “suggested content.” By eliminating dead ends (which are so common on law firm websites), you can keep visitors engaged with your content and learning about your firm’s capabilities.
  • Enabling calls-to-action – In addition to promoting content, dynamic sidebars allow you to include calls-to-action (CTAs). For example, you can push people to “Subscribe to Alerts,” “Register for a Webinar,” or “Download our Whitepaper.” These actions could allow you to capture the contact information of your visitors (and potentially begin tracking their future visits).
  • Enabling persona-driven marketing – Do you want to promote certain articles, case studies, and events to a certain type of visitor -- and different content to other visitor types? The Dynamic Sidebar tool allows you to do so. (This is actually a feature we have in development now. However, if you’re interested in learning about it, we are happy to discuss.)
  • Facilitating advanced visitor tracking – The newest visitor-tracking tools allow you to know the names and page-visit histories of your website visitors. This can provide actionable insights into a prospective client – as long as you’ve gathered enough page-visit data. The Dynamic Sidebar Tool can help gather such data.
     

If you’re thinking about building a new site for your firm, and your firm is committed to the development of reputation-enhancing content, you should consider incorporating flexible content-teasing tools that make your website act more like NYTimes.com. Contact us if you’d like to see a demo and discuss how our Dynamic Sidebar functionality could help you.

Comments

4 comments... read them below or add one.
  1. amy knapp says:

    Thank you, Dion. Your insights are always so thought-provoking. Here’s what I’d love to hear you comment on: most of us (thanks to Great Jakes) have microsites on our attorney bios and practice area description pages, and relevant content is tucked up under the tabs. You are saying that Great Jakes now has built the technology into your CMS that automagically pulls relevant content out of the tabs and into the sidebar where it is more visible, correct? Can you speak to that interaction? Are we feeling that the tabs “hide” the content too much?

    • Dion Algeri says:

      Hi Amy!
      Thanks for your question.

      The Dynamic sidebar has a much wider use than just on attorney or practice area microsites. It can cross-promote content located anywhere on the site.

      For example, an Events page about Topic X can tease to a Case Study that’s also about Topic X.

      The goal is to promote your most exciting and relevant content in order to keep people surfing your site and experiencing your brand. That said, when the sidebar tools are used on attorney or practice area microsites, it can significantly raise the profile of your newest or best content. Without the sidebar tool, that content could be overlooked because it’s located deep within the website, or on another microsite tab.

      I hope that this answers your questions. If you have more questions, we’re happy to give you a demo anytime you like!

  2. Chris Bugbee says:

    Interesting piece of technology. I’m not convinced it is the right move for a lawyer… Could be offputting for people who are getting sick of the click bait type headlines. Then again, those click bait headlines seem to work. I’ll keep it in mind for the future.
    -Chris

  3. Eve Jones says:

    When one is struggling to get traffic on their website, blog is something which works as boon. Showing related reads and making the most of it are two different things and I loved the way you have shown the tricks to use them wisely.

    It was a great read. I got a great example related to mine.
    🙂

    https://www.fisherinjurylaw.com/practicearea/motorcycle-accidents/

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