Brian Craig, Guest Blogger | Legal Marketing
The Contact Us page on your website is likely your number one lead generator. But it’s possible you never get some of those contacts because your website has been hacked.
It could be happening right now, and you don’t even know it.
This direct impact on your firm’s potential revenue can come in the form of missed contacts from clients. In addition to the hacker having access to any potential clients that go to your firm’s contact us page and submit their information, they may also have access to the information of previous prospects and clients who submitted information on that page.
The combination of this breach of information, along with the missed revenue from all the submitted forms that don’t get to you while the site is hacked, is a double impact to your firm’s bottom line and image in the community.
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The Real Risk Of Website Security Breaches
Maintaining, updating and monitoring your website is vital to its success, especially since we’re seeing more hacking attempts as software becomes more complex and the result of hacking sites is more lucrative.
When your law firm’s website is breached, it can go unnoticed for days, weeks, or months, and that’s what the hacker relies on. The longer that a site is compromised, the longer the hacker can make money from injected links on the site, and even from compromising potential client information.
More often than not, when your website is breached, it’s a potential client that informs you this has happened to your site. We don’t need to tell you that this is bad for your law firm’s reputation and can lose you significant amounts of money and image.
Hosting Alone Isn’t Enough
Odds are, you’re purchasing web hosting from your web guy or a mass provider like Bluehost, GoDaddy or a ton of others. And maybe it’s even worked out so far for your firm.
The risk of these providers is they’re generally on (or reselling) a lower-end shared hosting platform, with limited backup and restore capability (if any), and no legitimate security and uptime monitoring/alerting for your site. This can hurt you when something actually does happen to your site without you finding out until it’s too late.
The Solution
The solution law firms have to fight this risk, and to generally manage their marketing, is a security-conscious marketing expert. A competent partner – one who can help with your digital marketing and manage your site from a security perspective – will have:
- Established systems and processes for project management, support (dedicated ticket tracking system), billing and account management, which ensure you get a consistent experience.
- Proven capability to alert on (into an alert management system), report, and manage your website’s security and uptime.
- Proven, tested backups of your firm’s website, so you can restore it to a clean version if something happens to your web host, or your site is compromised.
- Fast responses, often guaranteed by a SLA (service level agreement).
- Domain expertise (only works with law firms) when launching a new website or project.
- Monitoring, management and reporting on your website and advertising campaign performance.
- Scalable service so you can only pay for what you need, and the ability to grow with your firm as your needs grow.
Monthly prices for this advanced security management, plus high end hosting, site backups, updates, and more is less than you might think at under $150/month….far less than the cost of missing out on a potential client through your Contact Us link.
Think of this protection like the kind of insurance no business dares to be to without.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Craig is the founder and CEO of LegalScapes, a full-service digital marketing agency that works solely with law firms. With over 15 years of experience in online marketing, Brian helps lawyers across the United States get more clients through the Internet. When not working with clients, you’ll find him playing basketball, going to Carolina games, and planning the next adventure with his wife and two daughters. Drop Brian a line at brian@legalscapes.com, call (919) 646-8707, or visit us on the web at www.legalscapes.com.