Preparing Your Firm For Web3
Web 3.0 is already charging towards us and the question that arises is: how can your firm’s website get ahead of the design curve?
Every few decades, the Internet evolves. The original Web 1.0 was coined by Tim Berners Lee, the Web’s original inventor. He first coined Web 1.0 as the world wide web, and it was all about sharing information. Soon after, archives became databases, and information like legal manuals and public court documents were transferred onto digital platforms. As the masses gained access to this information, the information age began, and Web 2.0 was born. Web 2.0 is currently about interactivity. Here, people can create content and share it, e.g., add reviews and personal stories. Now, a new player is entering the game: Web 3.0.
Web 3.0 integrates automation, live tools, and AI management into the digital culture. This new powerful shift focuses on people using adaptive automated systems. Together with Web 3.0, there’s also the rise in AI – artificial intelligence. For businesses providing services like firms, the big takeaway is that customers are no longer numbers in a system; they’re unique personalized, actualized, and targetable data. This is the case because Web 3.0 focuses on interactive and live data and tools to help make that data come alive. Searching information and reaching conclusions will become more accessible thanks to intelligent algorithms backing our will-driven research.
With all that said, we can go back to square one – how can a legal website prepare for the Web 3.0 innovations today? Let’s start by saying that interactivity, automation, personalized experiences, and live data are the new focuses as we wait and see what developing technology will soon have in store.
Integrating a Scheduling Tool
The first step in developing your law firm’s website to Web 3.0 is to become automatable. Web 3.0 focuses on AI tools that often compile information and functions into one dashboard for users, like Google’s ever-more-comprehensive search results page. Therefore, it’s helpful to look at AI through the business lens and find ways AI can support and make your firm’s business process the easiest yet greatest it can be.
When keeping this in mind, the best addition is to prepare a consultation scheduling tool. This is especially the case for medium to larger-sized firms. Why? Because at the end of the day, your firm’s goal is to get the most calls and cases while maintaining a functioning employee schedule. Additionally, your time is precious – it’s money. As a result, optimizing a consultation scheduling tool is a win-win for both the firm and its customers. To give you an example, tools like Celayix offer an AI-driven scheduling system.
Turning Data Into Live and Interactive Graphic Charts
Visuals are the most powerful way to sell. However, some visuals are more appealing to the eyes than others. For example, take an infographic page from Microsoft. Instead of quoting stats or adding a list of numbers, you’re able to turn the data into live graphic displays with interactive visuals. In the case of personal injury firms looking to leverage this, they’re able to animate graphs of, e.g., annual traffic injuries or convicted felons by category.
Overall, interactive data visualization is powerful because it’s one of the easiest ways our brains process information. To give you quick statistics that back up this claim, 90% of the data transmitted to the brain is visual. By adding live data, you’re increasing your chances of retaining the user’s attention and embodying the basic principles of Web 3.0: interactivity, personalization, and optimizing the user’s overall experience.
Integrating Your Chatbot with an AI Website Search
Some of the new “characters” in Web 3.0 are the AI chatbots – an interactive customer-service model. Currently, chatterbots have two purposes: to simplify the user request analysis and return an automated response.
- User request analysis: Here, chatterbots analyze the user’s request, identify their search intent and extract relevant entities.
- Returning a response: After identifying the user’s search intent, the chatbot provides appropriate answers such as text retrieved from a knowledge base or predefined texts.
As a whole, think of this as having your site robot concierge guiding users through your website. For a legal website with vast depths of blogs, tips, and service pages – this add-on might help new leads find what they need.
Organizing your Firm’s Blog Section into a Knowledge Base
Along similar lines, organizing your blog section into tagged categories can help reduce your bounce rate. What’s more, it will transform your unstructured narrative content into a structured and searchable knowledge base.
By adding definition and structure to your blog section, you can transform all that work into an AI-ready information center, prepared to be searched by new clients or referenced by interactive search engine dashboards. Furthermore, AI-powered content is already here. Tools like Frase.io or Rytr are powered by AI and simplify the entire process of blogging. Tools like the ones mentioned above have features like:
- Intelligently brainstorming related blog topics.
- Automatically improving the overall grammar.
- Automatically improving and suggesting content quality.
- Automatically writing in seconds.
- Maximizing your content’s ROI.
Adding Behavioral Advertising and Capture More Leads
Behavioral ads (aka online behavioral advertising or OBA) allow advertisers to display highly relevant and personalized marketing messages based on their browsing behavior. Firms can leverage this because you can show ads that your users find interesting and laterally useful.
By way of illustration, a personal injury shop can create clever associations by partnering with local auto body shops and physical therapy providers and advertising their injury sites with those businesses. What behavioral ads does is, instead of disrupting the lead’s page experience with irrelevant ads, you can enhance it with relevancy. This is a sample of how OBA reflects well on both businesses and is the exact type of intelligent, interactive advertising we expect to see more of with Web 3.0
Developing a Legal Services Mobile App
Last but certainly not least, expect to develop a mobile application – aka apps. Nowadays, apps are already making the world go round, and in the future? As the number of hours we spend on the Internet continues to rise, mobile devices are gaining more popularity than desktops. What’s more, 90% of mobile internet time is spent on apps.
So, what can a law firm do with a mobile app, you may ask? For starters, you can integrate your consultation booking (and rescheduling) tools through it. You can provide access to online client accounts and incorporate virtual document sharing and signing – to name a few basic things already available. You can also have a custom mobile app designed with features unique to your legal services and client experience. Integrate the mobile app with a web portal, and you have expanded the depth of your website in preparation for Web 3.0. Overall, users have high standards with an app’s functionality and performance – therefore, any additions such as a firm app should be like a supplement to their user experience.
What Does Web 3.0 Mean for Your Law Firm’s Website?
Legal sites have long been among the most searched and referenced because your body of work touches lives every day. Your ideal clients and current clients need immediate answers, and they should be able to arm themselves with more educated information before they have their consultation with you. With that said, having add ons such as live and interactive data, more empowering virtual tools, and AI-assisted services can equip your users and your firm as we enter Web 3.0.
By building authority through search engines, you can gain digital referrals, leads, and conversions. Not to mention that by having highly useful and interactive data through your web design, you provide your leads with an incredibly high-quality experience, online resources, and then they’ll be more inclined to sign with your firm when it comes time to book a consultation.
While we have been able to provide the first actionable steps your firm can take today and stay ahead of the Web 3.0 curve, if you’d like to know more about the ins and outs in Web 3.0 or better yet, start implementing such efforts – let’s have a chat.
