Morgul Marketing

    Designing an immigration firm site for people who moved here last year

    The site is doing a job most firms never name. Somebody who arrived in Middle Tennessee recently has no cousin to call and no coworker with a lawyer to recommend, so the website is standing in for a referral. It gets opened one handed, on a phone, during a break, often by a relative rather than the person whose case it is. In that setting it has to answer three things fast: do you take this kind of matter, what does it cost to start, and who exactly will call me back. Design that serves those three questions beats design that wins awards.

    Talk to us

    Publishing what a consultation costs changes who fills in the form

    Money on the page filters before your staff have to, and reads as confidence to a reader who has been quoted vaguely elsewhere.

    Most firms leave fees off the site out of fear of scaring people away. What actually happens is that price-sensitive inquiries still arrive, only later, after twenty minutes of somebody's time.

    A number does the sorting for free. It also separates you from the firms that will not say, which is a real distinction to a reader who cannot tell any of you apart yet.

    You do not need a full schedule. A consultation fee, a sentence about how flat fees are structured for the matters you take, and a plain note that government filing fees are set by the government and change from time to time will cover most of it.

    Attorney advertising rules apply to how fees and services are described. Worth confirming the exact wording with your own counsel before publishing.

    The chat widget and the tracking scripts are slowing you more than the photography

    Weight is usually third-party code rather than images, and the reader on a weak signal does not wait.

    The standard load is a chat widget, two analytics tags, a review carousel, a hosted font pack and a booking embed. Each is individually defensible. Together they push the page past the point where somebody on cellular data gives up.

    Cut to what earns its place. One booking tool. One analytics tag. Fonts served from your own domain. Images sized and compressed for phones. A chat widget only if a human is behind it during the hours it appears.

    Test on a real phone on cellular data, sitting in a parking lot in Bellevue or Donelson, not on a desktop connected to office fiber. The gap between those two experiences is where inquiries disappear.

    Speed here is not a ranking trick. It is the difference between somebody waiting for your page and somebody returning to the results to try the next firm.

    The form should ask for the date printed on the document

    One field sorts your week better than the rest of the form combined.

    Immigration inquiries divide into matters with a clock and matters without one. A notice carrying a date changes your staffing immediately. A general question about bringing a spouse over does not.

    Ask it plainly: if you have received a letter or notice, what date is on it. Follow with a field for who is asking, because a large share of inquiries come from a relative, a spouse or an employer rather than the person whose matter it is.

    Keep everything else short. Name, phone, email, county, one open box, and an honest line about what happens next. Every additional field costs completions.

    Do not collect status, case numbers or other sensitive detail in a public web form. It creates a data handling obligation you may not want, and a nervous reader will abandon the page rather than type it.

    The attorney bio outsells the home page, so write it as a credential

    Somebody handed your name will look you up before calling, and the bio is where they decide.

    What they want is short and specific: where you are admitted, how long you have practiced this work, which matter types you handle, which languages the office works in, and whether you have handled something resembling their situation.

    Put the credentials in the first screen. Bar admissions, professional association membership, years in the practice area. Move the personal material to the bottom or leave it out.

    A photograph that looks like the person who will actually walk into the room does more than a stock conference room shot. Readers are checking whether you are real.

    Client stories are constrained by confidentiality and by advertising rules, so build the credibility case out of credentials, process and a plain description of how you work. Worth confirming any client-related wording with your own counsel.

    Name the page after the problem, the way a family in Donelson would say it

    Menus written in category names lose to menus written in the words people use.

    Family based immigration is a filing category. Bringing my husband or wife to the United States is what somebody types and what somebody scans a menu for at nine at night.

    Keep the formal term inside the page for the reader who knows it, and lead with the plain one. Doing both costs nothing.

    Navigation should be readable in a glance on a phone. Five practice items, contact, about. A dropdown with fourteen entries is organized for the firm rather than the client.

    Name the counties you serve in the footer and on the contact page. Readers in Sumner and Wilson do not know whether a firm with a downtown address will take them, and the ones in Murfreesboro want to know before they commit to the drive.

    The screen after the submit button decides how many people show up

    The confirmation is undesigned at most firms and it is a direct cause of no-shows.

    The typical experience is a form, then one line of thanks. The reader is left not knowing whether anyone saw it, when they will hear back, or what to do in the meantime.

    Say the true thing on that screen: who will call, from what number, roughly when, and what to have ready. Include the office number so somebody who cannot wait can call you first.

    Send identical content by email and text within the minute. A client who does not recognize an incoming number will often not answer it, and a text with your firm name attached solves that quietly.

    For booked consultations, confirm what to bring, how to move the time if something changes, and whether the meeting can happen by video. Winter here brings ice often enough that a video option in the confirmation saves appointments every year.

    Questions we get

    Should we put our fees on the website?
    At minimum the consultation fee. It filters price-sensitive inquiries before they consume staff time and reads as straightforwardness to somebody who has been given vague answers elsewhere. Full matter pricing is harder because immigration work varies, so describe how flat fees are structured and note that government filing fees are set by the government. Confirm the wording against attorney advertising rules with your own counsel.
    Do we need the whole site in a second language?
    Only if the phone is answered in that language during the hours your pages invite people to call. A translated page that produces a call nobody can take is worse than no page. Start with the fee and process pages, have a human write them, and name who answers.
    Is a chat widget worth it?
    Only when a human is behind it during the hours it appears. An automated bot that collects a name and promises a callback adds page weight and delay without adding anything the form does not already do. If you cannot staff it, remove it and put the phone number somewhere obvious instead.
    What platform should we build on?
    Whichever one loads quickly and your staff can edit without calling anyone. The platform is rarely the constraint; third-party scripts, uncompressed images and a bloated theme usually are. Rebuilding a functioning site for platform reasons alone tends to cost months and change nothing a client would notice.
    How many practice area pages should we have?
    As many as you staff, written properly, plus short honest pages for anything you refer out. Eight thin pages covering everything perform worse than three thorough ones, because depth is what gets read and what gets found. Say plainly which matters you do not take.

    Rules that affect your marketing

    Immigration is federal practice, so a firm's reachable market is far wider than its county, and paid social and professional-network targeting tends to matter more here than local search alone. Two local realities still shape the work: the immigration court and field office a client is routed through, and a client base that frequently searches in a language other than English. Bar advertising rules still apply, and the field is unusually exposed to unauthorized-practice operators, which raises the bar on how a real firm signals legitimacy.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

    Talk to us about web design for immigration law firms in Nashville

    Tell us about your business and where your marketing stands. We'll tell you what we'd do first, and what we'd leave alone.

    We won't add you to a mailing list. A person will reply.