ARTICLE
Why words still matter W
ith around 90 billion monthly visits to Google1, over 252,000 new websites being developed each day2, almost 4 billion3 active social media users and billions4 of annual voice commands on smart speakers, it can be very easy to become overwhelmed with just how much is happening online. There is an exponential growth in both usage and technology. Then you throw in super smart (and often good looking) confident young people talking about the benefits of democratisation in Web3, extended reality (XR), the qubits of computational power in quantum computers or the newest NFT they are thinking about investing in. All the while you may just be trying to wrap your head around why for love or money you can’t get this AI bot to pass you on to an actual agent that can help you understand the latest invoice. At Conscious, we have been fortunate to have seen a lot of internet trends come and go. Some of those trends had a real impact on how the online world operates, while others were quickly put on the digital dump of oblivion (remember Google+ anybody?). Despite all that technological development words and stories are still at the heart of any website shared with the public, especially one offering clients a service. If you want to bring an audience to your website and convert them into paying clients, you need to have detailed and well-constructed content. This could include discussing your services, doing regular blog posts on relevant news, and answering commonly asked questions. Other ways to develop your website include adding all your staff to your website ‘meet the team’ page, having a detailed ‘about us’ page, listing any awards and accreditations the firm has achieved and most importantly call to actions on every page as well as in the header and footer of your website. All the way back in 2010, Google and Harvard collaborated on a project to determine how many English words there were. They concluded it was just over a million words but perhaps more surprisingly they also shared that each year a couple of thousand words are added to the English language. This includes portmanteaus, neologisms, and malapropisms as well as naming of inventions. So perhaps unsurprisingly as we see this surge in online content, people have more and more questions when trying to make sense of it all. According to Google Trends, internet users have never asked Google more questions than we are asking right now. Those questions are no longer just ‘how’ but questions starting with ‘why’ and ‘what’ have seen a sharp increase.
How can you be keeping up this surge in curiosity and providing considered answers on your digital assets (including your website and social media channels)? One way is to use free services such as Google’s ‘People also ask’ that can be found on the first page of a Google search and another excellent free service is www.answerthepublic.com which will take a topic of your choice and suggest questions which are linked. These sources offer a wealth of inspiration for content ideas. If you want to bring an audience to your website and convert them into paying clients, you need to have detailed content. This could include discussing your services, writing regular blog posts on relevant news and answering commonly asked questions. As previously mentioned, other ways to develop your website include having all your staff on your website, a detailed about us page, listing awards and accreditations the firm has achieved and most importantly call to actions on every single page. Will content bring you more clients? Think about it this way, if your audience goes onto your website to find out how you can help them with their legal problem, only to find no content or any indication as to what your firm can offer them, they’ll go elsewhere, and the likelihood is that it’ll be a competitor that does provide this insight. So, the lesson to be learnt here is if your website is full of detailed information about your services and experience in helping clients navigate life challenges and situations, you will have a higher success rate of converting the website audience into paying clients. On top of the type of copy you include on your website, using keywords throughout is crucial. If you want to find out more about how we can help you craft a content strategy that will drive results, contact our team on 0117 325 0200 or email sales@conscious.co.uk.
Jonathan McGill
Conscious Solutions 1. https://www.similarweb.com/website/google.com/#traffic 2. https://siteefy.com/how-many-websites-are-there/. 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwidesocial-network-users/#:~:text=How%20many%20people%20 use%20social,almost%204.41%20billion%20in%202025. 4. https://review42.com/resources/voice-search-stats/
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