8 Ways To Make Your Law Firm Website SEO-Friendly: A Quick Guide

Keywords, meta descriptions, backlinks…these terms can be confusing to someone not versed in the world of search engine optimization (SEO). For lawyers and law firms, they might think, “I don’t need that!” However, SEO directly impacts how potential clients can find law firms. The most successful law firms leverage digital marketing strategies to increase their visibility and credibility. It’s not like the old days when you could throw up a billboard or put an ad in the phonebook. 

 

At MyLegalSoftware, it’s our mission to help law firms optimize their digital presence. We want to share some actionable tips with you on how to do so, but first, let’s go through the details of SEO. This is just a quick guide – visit our website for a more in-depth look at how to improve your SEO. 

 

What is SEO, and why is it essential to your law firm’s online presence? 

 

SEO is all about boosting your site’s visibility in organic search results. When someone heads to a search engine (Google, Bing, or others) and types in a query, the results on that coveted first page of Google are optimized and rank highly for those keywords. With less than 1% of searchers clicking on the second page of Google results, you can see how important this is. It’s worth noting that the top traffic source for all websites is organic search. 

 

Suppose someone is searching for “law firm New York”. In that case, the results will be sites with that keyword – “law firm New York” – on their pages, meta descriptions, and high-quality content that reflects that. 

 

There are a few different ways you can optimize for search engines. On-page SEO is about the content on your website, from the copy to elements like image alt text, keyword usages, meta descriptions, H1 tags, URL naming, and internal linking. You have the most control here because it’s all on your website. 

 

Off-page SEO is different, focusing on showing search engines how reputable your page is by earning votes of confidence from other websites, usually in the form of backlinks. A backlink is a link on another website to yours. It’s like a thumbs up that the content you provide on your website is useful and valuable, and others are referencing it. It means your website and content are authoritative, which is what you want. 

 

Technical SEO takes it a step further, referring to a set of strategies and actions designed to optimize your website’s structure and elements, thus making it accessible to search engines to crawl and index. Technical SEO is still under your control, like On-page SEO, but it’s more complex. It includes factors like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and structured data. These factors play a pivotal role in organic traffic to your website. 

 

Even the most engagingly written, informative, and valuable content can be hidden unless search engines can effectively crawl and index it. It’s about speaking the language of search engines to ensure your content is discoverable and accessible to the people searching for it. 

 

Action 1: Optimize your URL configuration

 

Your website domain is a critical piece of the SEO puzzle. It helps determine how easily people can discover your site through search engines and is a part of your overall branding strategy. 

Designating your preference for your domain can go one of two ways – you choose either the www prefix or no www prefix to appear in search results. 

 

For example, you might choose www.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com. What does this mean? Search engines prioritize your preference and automatically redirect all users to that specific URL. If you don’t designate, search engines treat these two URLs as separate entities, which can fragment your SEO and make it less impactful. 

 

Action 2: Enforce SSL Encryption

 

Doesn’t this sound like something a 90s hacker would say? We’ll break it down for you. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, a crucial security feature that establishes a protective barrier between your web server and a user’s browser. When users transmit payments, contact details, or other sensitive information, SSL encryption reduces the risk of this data being intercepted or hacked. Search engines prefer secure websites, with the “https://” indicator as a positive ranking factor for search results. 

 

Action 3: Speed Up Loading

 

Slow-loading pages are the worst, with most users expecting a webpage to load within six seconds or less. If it doesn’t? The user is out of there faster than a dropped Wi-Fi connection. Your page load speed also plays a role in your search engine ranking. 

 

What can you do to make your website fast? 

• Compress files: images, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
• Redirect auditing: accumulated redirects are slow 
• Optimize your code: clean and efficient is where it’s at
• Implement a Content Distribution Network (CDN): store copies of your website on servers across the world, making your site load faster for users based on location 
• Manage plugins: Get rid of outdated and inessential plugins and cache them to store a static version on your site for returning visitors
• Load asynchronously: Using async code allows the server to process HTML and scripts simultaneously, reducing delays

 

Action 4: Optimize for Crawlability

 

Search engines use bots to explore and gather data from the internet. When these bots encounter obstacles that prevent them from crawling and indexing your site, it negatively affects your page rank. 

 

To improve crawlability, you should: 

• Generate an XML Sitemap 
• Maximize your crawl budget so search engines focus on the most important pages
• Enhance website structural organization with a logical hierarchy of categories and subcategories for your pages
• Establish (and stick to!) a clean and logical URL structure that has descriptive keywords and follows a consistent pattern
• Become friends with the robots by implementing robots.txt, which gives instructions to search engine bots on which parts of your site should be crawled or indexed
• Incorporate breadcrumb navigation menus that show users the path they took to reach a specific page
• Employ pagination techniques that split long content into multiple pages, such as articles or product listings
• Examine SEO log files to detect and identify crawl errors

 

Action 5: Optimize for Indexability

 

After crawling, bots need to be able to index your web pages. 

 

To improve indexability, you should: 

• Eliminate duplicate content 
• Conduct a comprehensive redirect audit, making sure your redirects are functioning as intended 
• Verify mobile-responsiveness, ensuring a clean and efficient site on mobile
• Rectify any HTTP errors, like the dreaded 404 error

 

Action 5: Optimize for Renderability

 

Rendering is the process of turning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript codes into what the user sees – an interactive, well-designed website. Like crawlability and indexability, this greatly impacts how search engines index your website. 

 

To improve renderability, you should: 

• Optimize server performance through response time and reliability with efficient hosting and load balancing
• Manage HTTP status codes that communicate critical information to both search engines and browsers
• Minimize page size by compressing images and other assets
• Defer non-essential JavaScripts by using asynchronous loading
• Address orphan pages that lack internal links, integrating them into your website’s navigation and structure
• Control page depth – how long it takes to access a page from the home page
• Manage redirect chains, where one URL redirects to another

 

Action 6: Optimize for Rankability

 

You might notice a trend here – many optimizations we suggest overlap with similar fixes and solutions. 

You will want to focus on strategic linking structure and content clusters to optimize for rankability. 

 

Strategic linking structures consist of internal and external linking (backlink quality). In internal linking, strategically placing links between your web pages, removing orphan pages, and restricting page depth will help bots more efficiently crawl and index your website, thus enhancing your potential to rank highly on search engines. 

 

External linking and backlink quality are crucial to your site’s authority and rankability. As mentioned earlier, high-quality backlinks serve as endorsements, like a digital thumbs-up. 

 

Strategic content clusters are an advanced SEO strategy, so strap in. It organizes related content around a central pillar topic, bolstering the rankability of your content by signaling topical relevance to search engines. Pillar content is the cornerstone of a primary topic. In contrast, cluster content is narrower, interconnected articles that dive into the nitty gritty topics. It’s all in the details. 

 

Action 8: Optimize for Clickability

 

One of the indicators of your SEO effectiveness is the click-through rate (CTR). This is when a user sees your website in their search results and clicks on it. Meta-descriptions and keyword-rich page titles can influence CTR. Still, some technical SEO elements can affect it too. 

 

Many actions taken above, like leveraging structured data, will help clickability. By implementing structured data markup, you can provide search engines with details about your web page and content, enabling them to display rich snippets or interactive elements in search results. 

 

Have you ever noticed that a star rating, product price, or event date pops up in the otherwise orderly search result when searching for something? Well, that’s the snippet you want. The more optimized your website is, the more likely Google or other search engines will feature your content (think about the “Frequently Asked Questions” or “People Also Ask” sections).

 

You can optimize for this by structuring your content to position it as the ideal answer to a user’s query. For example, the query “how to tie a shoelace” could be answered on your web page using copy like “How to tie your shoelace a standard knot” and then include a numbered list of instructions. Search engines really like numbered lists and bullet points for enhanced readability and clickability – who doesn’t?

 

Key Takeaways

 

Mastering technical SEO is a game of patience. Optimizing your website from page to page can take time, and it can sometimes seem like no progress is being made. Staying diligent, keeping an eye on emerging trends and topics, and understanding the keywords you want your law firm to rank for will help your website reach its full potential. 

If you need a helping hand, MyLegalSoftware is only a click away. We can design a website from the ground up or optimize SEO on an existing one so you can grow your business.