Like every other business in the current world, law firms too need to focus on their SEO if they want to get more clients and not lose the old ones. Search engine optimization has more potential to bring business than any other form of marketing these days.
Considering this importance, you should be careful of the common and simple SEO mistakes that can destroy all your efforts in optimizing your site. Read on to find out if you are making any of these.
Common SEO Mistakes Law Firms Make
SEO mistakes make you fall behind in rankings. So, you must identify and fix them right now. Here are some of the most common SEO mistakes to look out for.
Slow Loading Speed
One of the most effective ways to repel valuable organic traffic is having a slow page. If your page takes an annoying amount of time to load then the would-be client will probably look for the service of another law firm on their search results. Eventually, the algorithms will push you behind in rankings.
Google’s Page Speed Insights can give you an idea about your page’s performance. Usually, lower speeds result from improper image size and formats.
Also, JavaScript and CSS codes that are too long will slow your page down. You will also want to fix the redirects to your best efforts.
Location-Specific Optimization
Optimizing your page specifically for your location is very important when you are running a law firm. Because unlike retail businesses a law firm deals with mainly local clients and doesn’t sell their service to a global client base.
Therefore, you have to make sure your target audience sees you in that ‘Near me’ list on Google. And the best way to do that is to rank for location-specific legal keywords that your clients use to search the web.
Also, maintain a single established location for your business and maintain fully-optimized location-specific pages.
Broken Images And Alt text
The images and Alt texts on your page play an important role in on-page SEO. The Google crawlers or the search-engine robots evaluate your pages based on these.
And it’s often common to have broken images and missing ALT text on a page. When Google Bots see this, they deem your page unfit for their Users.
Fixing these issues is less about technical knowledge and more about being careful. Wrong extensions, improper filename, file paths usually lead to broken images.
As Alt texts are important for the visually impaired Google users to view your websites, you must take care to make them adequate.
Mobile-friendliness
One of the common law firm SEO mistakes is having a site or pages that are not optimized for mobile devices. These days more people view a web page on their mobile screen compared to a computer. So, if your pages are unfit for mobile viewing, Google search results on mobile won’t show you at the top.
So, if you don’t want to lose further customers who are looking for legal help on the internet from their mobile, optimize your pages for mobile viewing as soon as possible. This will also greatly improve your website’s speed and overall format.
You can check if your site is fit for mobile use, by using Mobile-Friendly Test tools on the internet. If you find that your site’s performance on mobile devices is unsatisfactory, then you might want to change your web host. Enabling AMP and redesigning pop-ups can also help.
404-Errors
A few broken links on your site can pour water on all the hard work you are doing for your law business. Firstly, visitors hate it when they have to deal with 404 errors on a site. And they are likely to get the impression that your company is not competent enough.
Secondly, Google crawlers will leave a web page and not index it if they encounter too many broken links. This will prevent that page from appearing on Google search results altogether.
You can use the Google Search Console to identify broken links and fix them. Web searches can also yield some widely used tools for this purpose.
Not Indexing Properly
Before you can rank on Google, first you need to get your law firm’s web pages to exist on search results. And the first condition of having your page appear on Google results is to have it indexed by the search bots. But there are several reasons which might prevent that from happening.
As mentioned already, having too many broken links is a reason for crawlers avoiding your page. Other reasons include, not updating sitemaps, copy-pasted content, lack of authority on that niche, etc. So, you might want to fix these things at the shortest notice.
How To Fix Common Law Firm SEO Mistakes?
With the advancement of time and technology, SEO is getting more complicated. And if you are a practicing lawyer, you probably won’t have the necessary time that needs to be invested behind it.
Even with sound technical knowledge, it is difficult to properly do SEO for your site. Especially when you are not a professional on this matter. Because the demands and parameters of SEO are ever-changing. And only SEO professionals are driven enough to keep up with these.
So, it is best to leave this in the capable hands of a company that specializes in Law Firm SEO. This will ultimately save you more time and bring better results and more money.
Conclusion
Without search engine optimization it is impossible to make it in the current market. Remember that, no matter how good of a law firm you have, you can easily lose clients to a newer and inexperienced law company that invested properly in their law firm SEO.