Personal injury and RAF
Websites for personal injury and RAF attorneys.
The person who lands on a personal injury website is in pain, out of time, and has usually been told something by somebody with an interest in the answer. They are not sitting at a desk comparing firms. They want to know whether they have a claim, how long it takes, what reaches their account at the end, and how to get hold of a person — and they want it before the page has finished being clever.
The example website
- Firm
- Volenti Attorneys
- Practice
- Personal injury and RAF
- Pages, all of them working
- 7 pages
The example site
Volenti Attorneys
Personal injury and RAF · Sunnyside, Pretoria · 7 pages
A two-attorney Road Accident Fund and personal injury practice in Sunnyside, Pretoria. Seven pages, all of them working.
The firm is invented — the name comes out of a law textbook — and every page of the site says so at the top. Everything else on it is real: every link goes somewhere, and every page is written.
What a personal injury website has to do
Put the telephone number where it cannot be lost
Every other decision on the site follows from this one. If a reader has to scroll, or open a menu, or find a contact page to reach you, some of them do not. On a phone the number should be on the screen at every point in the page, and it should dial.
Say how long it takes, honestly
These claims run for years, and everyone in this market knows somebody whose claim ran for years. A site that avoids the subject is read as avoiding it. A site that publishes the stages, with which ones you control and which ones you do not, is read as the only honest one in the search results.
Do the contingency arithmetic in public
A quarter including VAT is the number that matters, and a reader who has heard it second-hand does not know what it is a quarter of. A worked example — the award, the fee, the specialists, the costs recovered, and what lands in the account — settles in ten seconds a question that otherwise takes a meeting.
Be reachable by somebody who cannot get to an office
Some of these readers are in a ward, some are at a relative’s house, some have no transport. The site has to make it obvious that you come to them, and it has to work on a slow connection and an old phone, because that is where it will be opened.
Three decisions, and why
Each picture below is a screenshot of a real page on that site, not a drawing of one.
Four doors, by how long ago it happened
It just happened. It happened a while ago. Somebody already has my file. It was not me, it was my mother. Each goes to its own answer. The third exists because a good share of the people who arrive at a personal injury site already have an attorney they cannot reach, and nobody writes a page for them.
Every stage is labelled with who is holding it up
Us, the hospitals and the police, the specialists, the Fund — and the longest stage is labelled as the Fund’s and nobody’s to hurry. A firm that says out loud which parts it cannot speed up is more credible about the parts it can.
The fee is shown as subtraction, not as a percentage
An award of R1,200,000, less the quarter including VAT, less the specialists and the actuary, plus the costs recovered from the Fund, equals what reaches the account. Marked as an illustration, because it is an example rather than a real firm. It answers the only question this reader has about money.
What it costs
Rebuilding the site you have is R8,500. A new one is R12,500 for a sole practitioner and R18,000 for two to five attorneys. Looking after it afterwards is from R1,950 a month. Every figure is published, so you can hold it against anybody else’s quote without asking us first.
Questions
- Will a site like this bring work, or does it all come from referrals?
- Both, and the site changes the referrals too. Somebody who has been given your name looks you up before they telephone, and what they find decides whether they telephone. That search is the one most firms never think about and the cheapest one to win.
- We do not want to look like a claims factory. Can it still be direct?
- Direct is not the same as loud. There is no countdown and no stock photograph of a wrecked car on the example site. The number is always there and the writing is plain, which reads as competence rather than as advertising.
- Can published figures get us into trouble?
- The figures on the example site are marked as illustrations. On a real site you would publish your own, and we would put the date on the page — which is the point. A number with a date on it is a claim you can stand behind.
- Who owns it?
- You do. The domain is registered in your firm’s name from the first day, the content and photographs are yours, and so is the data the site collects. Twelve months, then month to month on sixty days’ notice.
Read next
Send us your firm’s web address.
We go through it against a written list of 69 checks and email you the six problems worth fixing first, each in one sentence, with what we measured. It costs nothing and we do not telephone you afterwards.