If your website is failing to consistently convert prospects to customers, then it is time to find out what is wrong.

There are a number of things a personal injury attorney's website needs in order to be successful. Here are the top six ways to improve it so you can maximize its performance and boost your law firm's internet marketing efforts:

1. Understand the Problem: Before you consider putting anything on your website, you first need to find out what your prospects are looking for. If you don't understand their issues then you won't be able to provide a solution. And even if you do understand their issues but don't respond to them on your homepage, you risk losing visitors because they weren't able to find what they were looking for. Give visitors a clear indication of how you can help them.

2. Provide the Solution: After addressing your prospect's concerns, it is time for you to offer a solution. Your front page should discuss easy-to-understand benefits that are both tangible and believable. Do not focus on your services; focus on the benefits, value and results you can achieve for your clients.

3. Establish Trust: Beyond addressing the problems your clients have and offering the solutions they need, you must prove yourself to be trustworthy before they'll ever consider contacting you. There are a number of ways you can do this: include testimonials or impressive statistics on the front page, a section that discusses your awards and results, an about us page that is easy to navigate to and from, and a number of resources (such as white papers or blog articles) they can research so they can discover what makes you such a great personal injury lawyer.

Also, don't forget to include links on the bottom of your site to a privacy policy and a terms and conditions page. While people hardly ever read these pages, they play a significant role in establishing credibility.

4. Make it Easy to Navigate: Don't try to be fancy, you need to make your website as easy to navigate as possible. This means you should have a navigation menu either on the top of your page beneath the banner or on the left hand side. Besides that, your pages should load quickly; even with a slow internet connection. The easier your site is to read, the more likely your prospects will stick around and explore.

5. Use a Professional Designer: While some personal injury lawyers don't believe it's necessary to spend money on professional web design, they don't realize what they're missing out on.

In real life, when you meet somebody in person for the first time they judge you based on your appearance. If you show up in ripped blue jeans and a tank top, you won't get the same response as you would have if you were wearing a suit and tie. It's the same with your website.

When people visit your homepage they quickly judge your services based on your presentation. If your site looks like it was developed by a high-schooler in 1995, your prospect will quickly leave without ever finding out that you're the best personal injury attorney in town. However, if you site looks professional and pleasing to the eye, you will instantly improve your image.

6. Test Rigorously: There are so many things you can test on your website, so it might seem like an overwhelming process, but it's not. With free tools such as Google Analytics you can find everything you need to know about your website and visitors. You can find out how people went to your homepage, what city they live in, how long they stayed on each page, what links they clicked and more. When you find a page that isn't performing well, you can make the necessary changes and see your statistics improve.

By understanding what your prospects are looking for and presenting yourself as a personal injury lawyer they can trust, you'll greatly increase your chance of earning new business through your website.

Much like creating a brick and mortar business, establishing an effective online presence takes time. However, if you're willing to put in the effort to consistently improve your reputation and presentation then you will have no problem emerging from the pack of personal injury attorneys and marketing your law firm on the internet.