For attorneys and law firms, SEO is a crucial strategy that can attract new clients online. Your potential clients are likely using search engines to find law firms, so neglecting SEO means you could be losing business. Don’t make this mistake.
Here are my tips for attorneys and law firms that want to attract more visitors to their websites.
Don’t Neglect Your Mobile Site
With mobile-first indexing, Google is looking at mobile sites over desktop sites for search results. If your primary content and markup are the same across your mobile and desktop sites, then you may not need to make any changes. However, if they’re different, then there are some simple changes you may want to consider.
First, ensure that any high-quality content from your desktop site exists on your mobile site. Second, use the same structured data on both your desktop and mobile sites. Structured data is code that site owners use to help search engines provide more detailed search results. You can verify the existence of structured data on each version of your site using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
The major search engines have joined together to create Schema.org. On this site, you can find structured data markup that search engines recognize. You can copy the specific code that you’re looking for and adapt it to meet your needs. To add structured data to your site, you simply add the code to the backend. If you’re using Schema.org structured data for the first time, and don’t want to mess anything up, there are several website plug-ins that can aid you tremendously. For WordPress users, we recommend using the Schema plug-in. Other options include Schema Pro and All In One Schema Rich Snippets.
Improve Your Site’s E-A-T Scores
E-A-T stands for “expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.” Your E-A-T score is a major factor in how Google determines page rankings, so try to improve all three E-A-T factors to boost your search rankings and page visits. E-A-T scores are especially important for legal websites, which are considered YMYL (your money or your life) sites.
First, ensure that your site’s content reflects your expertise as a legal professional. One way of doing this is by incorporating your past case results into the beginning and ending paragraphs of your content pages. Also, highlight any other experience you have that’s relevant to the topic or practice area.
To establish your site as a source of reliable information, link to high-authority sites, such as the U.S. Department of Justice website.
Google should also see your site as trustworthy. If you don’t have an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, consider getting one. An SSL certificate is a standard security feature that allows encrypted communication between a web browser and a server. You can get an SSL certificate through a certificate authority (CA). Do a Google search to find one that has good user ratings.
A CA will vet your site for the level of encryption that you want to have. After the vetting process is complete, you’ll receive an SSL certificate.
Make Sure Your Site Loads Fast
According to Think With Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a website if it fails to load in under three seconds. This can inevitably cost you clients, considering that more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile these days.
Slow loading speeds can also affect search rankings for your site. Page speed is a ranking factor that Google’s algorithms take into consideration.
There are several ways to help improve your site’s page speed. First, you can compress your CSS, HTML and JavaScript files to reduce their size. To do this, right-click on the file you’re looking to compress, and then select “Compress.” If you’re unsure of how to do this yourself, ask your web developer to tackle it.
Second, look into limiting the overall number of redirects that exist on your site. The more redirects that your site has, the longer it will take for the HTTP request-response cycle to finish. Analyze the redirects that are currently active on your site and remove any that are nonessential.
Third, optimize your website code by eliminating any unnecessary spaces or characters. The process of removing unnecessary spaces or characters is referred to as “minifying.” To manually minify a file, all you have to do is remove unnecessary items from your code. If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, you can also use online tools like CSSMinifier.com or WP Rocket.
Use Content Clustering
Content is a major ranking factor for your site. When Google crawls your site, it uses a search algorithm that relies on keywords. The goal is to use keywords within your content that people often use in their Google searches. If your content contains these keywords and is well-written, then Google will be more likely to view your site as an authority on that particular topic. It will then be more inclined to push your content further up in the search results.
What the content conveys is important, but so is how your site uses the content. One effective strategy to use is content clustering, where existing content on your site serves as a hub that links to content containing information about similar topics.
With this strategy, you can take one high-ranking piece of content and link it to other pages on your site. This could potentially boost the rankings for the content pages linked to the high-ranking hub page. To accomplish this, simply create internal links on each content page that link to the main hub page.
The competition between law firms to attract new clients online is intense. In the current marketplace, it’s often no longer enough to be good at your job. You may also have to be good at the internet. Implementing these tips can help you gain that competitive edge and secure new business.
Zach Thompson is CEO of MediaSmack, a legal marketing firm, where he oversees the strategic vision and growth of the company.