5 SEO Issues All Law Firms Should Watch
SEO for lawyers is a highly competitive field, thanks to the many attorneys who are vying to bring in cases. Anyone interested in SEO for law firms should pay attention to the following 5 issues.
Producing Authoritative Content
One upside to lawyer SEO is that the field offers many opportunities to produce authoritative content. You can produce short snippets for use on social media feeds, and then route traffic to your site. Also, you can produce longer blog articles that will establish you as an authority on the specific challenges clients face.
Authoritative content is important for more than attracting clients. The quality of your writing, and the topics it covers, are both metrics that drive search results. Search engine firms like Google place a lot of value on the sites that create clearly written and authoritative content, so put in the work to impress the bots, too.
Latent Semantic Meaning"
The days when you could just jam the word "lawyer" and your city's name a hundred times onto a page, and expect to rank well, are decades behind us. However, words still matter. Search engines evaluate content based on latent semantic meaning. Using machine learning techniques, a search engine company ranks pages based on what they're broadly about.
Mobile Friendliness
It can seem a little weird to the uninitiated that SEO for lawyers is driven by something as simple as whether the site looks good on a cellphone. However, another ranking factor that search engine companies use is whether a site will display well on a user's device. They don't want the user to have a bad experience with an ugly design or a difficult interface, and that means search engines highly rank sites that are mobile-friendly.
Page Structure
Simple elements on the page serve to tell search bots indexing it which ideas are important. Headers, for example, tend to be strong indicators that the words within them are valuable. A handful of well-written headers spaced out across a page can make a huge difference in search engine results.
Website Speed
Slow-loading websites face similar penalties as sites that aren't mobile-friendly. The search engine companies want to know that a user will be off and running within a few seconds when they land on your website. If your site has tons of images that take 10 seconds to load, don't expect to rank well. Likewise, a slow server can induce lots of trouble on the SEO front. Try to run your law firm's website as leanly as possible.
For more information about SEO for lawyers, reach out to a local online marketing company.