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Why Does Technical SEO Matter For Law Firms?

lgd — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 21:20:22 +0000

Why Does Technical SEO Matter For Law Firms?

Although technical SEO is often overlooked, it’s an important step in the SEO process that should be done on your law firm’s website. If there are problems with your technical SEO then it is likely that your SEO efforts will not generate the expected results you were hoping for. If done correctly, technical SEO can result in more visitors, more leads and more cases for your law firm. So, it is essential to make sure you understand what technical SEO is and how to implement it on your law firms website.

Here are some tips and basic information to help you understand how to properly implement technical SEO on your law firm’s website.

What is Technical SEO?

To put it simply, technical SEO is the other side to the SEO process in which your website is optimized for search engines. This means that search engines will have an easier time analyzing your website and ensuring it’s displayed to relevant claimants in need.

You may ask, how is technical SEO different from “on-page” SEO? Technical SEO doesn’t care about the content on your site. Its priority is to look for problems within the infrastructure of the website.

Focusing on technical SEO will improve the number of pages that get indexed in search engines and where your website appears in the search results. It’s a critical tool for any law firm’s marketing strategy, especially in the digital age where competition among law firms are at an all time high.

The good news is that you can run an audit of your website to detect any and all technical problems. Once you fix those problems, you won’t have to worry about it for a while, although it’s a good idea to periodically run an audit.

There are many free available SEO tools that allow you to run a technical SEO audit, such as SEO Powersuite, Screaming Frog and SEOptimer. It’s a simple process. All you have to do is submit the web URL you want to conduct an audit on. The rest will be taken care of. You will then receive a full report on any technical errors your site may have.

Website Structure

The structure of a website is a very important SEO factor. The main goal to this is to provide great user experience and to make it easy for people to find what they are looking for. You must consider the structure of the website because if you don’t, you won’t rank very high in search engines. That isn’t ideal if your goal is to generate more leads for your law firm.

Solution: If your law firm’s website has a logical and easy-to-follow navigation, user experience and search rankings should increase and bounce rate should decrease. The better the CTR, the more likely Google will reward you with a higher search ranking.

The best way to implement this method is by creating a pyramid structure on your website. It works like this: the homepage will be at the top of the pyramid, your category pages will be beneath that. You may also divide these categories into subcategories. Beneath this will be your individual pages and posts. Your navigation structure should reflect this.

As an example, if a user is on the homepage of a personal injury attorney website, the first thing they should see is the navigation. The user will then be able to locate what they are looking for, whether it is a general page about car accidents or slip and falls. Within those broader categories, there should be individual pages or posts that have more detailed information, such as specific accident scenarios.

Structured Markup and Indexing

Structured markup is data that is added to the HTML of each page on your site so that it can be properly crawled and indexed on search engines. Search engines use structured data to generate rich snippets, which are small pieces of information that will then appear in search results ahead of your competitors.

Google is good at understanding the content on your pages, but not necessarily the specifics of a page, which is usually the most important information to a searcher. By adding structured markup to your pages, you’re helping Google understand what your website is really about.

For example, let’s say the word “Social Security disability attorney” appears within an article on your blog. The search engine will see this and produce a SERP entry with that phrase. However, if you implement schema markup around that phrase, you will be telling search engines that “Social Security disability attorney” is not just random words within the article. With that information, the search engine will provide results that will better display information for users who search for that phrase.

Solution: Google Search Console has made it very easy to add markup with its Data Highlighter feature. You can highlight nearly any type of content, from something as simple as an article (like a blog post on a recent court victory of yours) or even reviews, events, products, and more. By using structured markup, you may rank significantly better on organic searches.

Broken URLs and Redirects

Your on-page SEO efforts won’t matter if a search bot notices several 4XX/5XX error codes on your website. If there are too many broken links, another law firm may end up ranking higher than you in search engines and your most important pages will be left uncrawled and unindexed. This is why it’s extremely important to find and fix all broken links on your site.

Moreover, if there are an unreasonable number of 301 and 302 redirects on your site, the search bots will eventually stop following the redirects and your page might not even show up on search engines at that point because your page will be restricted from crawling.

Solution: The best (and easiest) way for you to detect and fix broken URLs is to go to Google Search Console and click on “Crawl Errors.” This will give you details as to which pages have broken links and 404 errors. If you do run into any 404 errors, you need to make it a priority to fix this as soon as possible. This will help maintain great user experience.

Fixing any technical problems “under the hood” of your website is essential for your law firm to rank above your competition on search engines. Using the methods above, you will have a stronger foundation to support the rest of your SEO efforts!

lgd Thu, 01/17/2019 - 16:20

What is Google Search Console and How Can You Use it to Increase Organic Searches and Profitability?

lgd — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 15:00:02 +0000

What is Google Search Console and How Can You Use it to Increase Organic Searches and Profitability?

When someone searches for “attorneys in Florida,” do you ever wonder why some firms show up on the first page of Google, but you don’t? What do you need to do so that your law firm appears on there too?

Potential claimants are looking for information about legal services in their area, but how are they going to find your site if you aren’t using all the tools Google provides you to help you rank in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)?

This is where Google Search Console (GSC) comes in. GSC offers powerful SEO tools that will help your website rise in the ranks on its search engine (and it’s 100% free to use!)

GSC will provide you with information that will help you understand whether your current marketing tactics are working for your site.

Consider questions such as: Does Google perceive your content as originally intended? Do you have broken links on your website you weren’t aware of? How about 404 errors or 301 redirects? Are your keywords ranking well, or do you need to make adjustments?

Using this fundamental SEO tool means that you will have better control over efforts to optimize your site. Here are just a few ways you can increase your organic search presence with GSC:

Improving Your Click Through Rate

Under the performance report in GSC, you’ll have access to how many times your firm’s website is displayed for a specific query, and how often people are clicking through to your site. As long as you provide users with high-quality content, you will notice a higher click through rate (CTR) and visibility on the search engine.

If you’re looking to generate more leads from potential clients, this is a great way to do so. You can also pinpoint inefficient pages on your website by using the performance report.

For example, let’s say you have 100,000 impressions (potential views) per month for the keyword “personal injury attorney Georgia,” but your CTR is just 0.1%. This means just 1 out of every 1,000 users are clicking on your website when they’re seeking Georgia PI attorneys! Once you’ve used GSC to identify ineffective pages or queries, you can work on optimizing your pages, whether it be changing the meta description or title tags.

Identifying Problems On Your Site

Your website appearance will also strongly depend on a number of code snippets, such as rich cards, HTML corrections, and frameworks. GSC will immediately notify you if there is a serious issue on your site.

It provides you with the tools to make these corrections without having to go to the backend of your website! Unless you’re an SEO wizard, this is one of the easiest ways to optimize your site to help increase your organic traffic.

GSC will also tell you when your website has been hit by a manual Google algorithm update penalty. If you invest any time in SEO, you’ll be aware of all the potential for seach penalities and the potential of your site being removed from Google’s search results entirely. The sooner you know something’s wrong, the faster you can get your firm’s site up and running.

Ranking for Rich Snippets With the Data Highlighter

This is one of the best tools GSC has to offer. It makes it incredibly easy to implement structured data. It’s also really simple to use.

All you have to do is enter the URL of any page or post on your website and then select the category of your page (ie. “article,” “service,” “event,” “product,” and others). Google then analyzes that specific page and allows you to “highlight” various elements, such as title tags, images, authors, dates, and categories.

If you aren’t familiar with adding structured markup or schemas on the backend of your site, this is a great alternative. It gets the job done quickly and easily. Below is an example of what the data highlighter would look like once the URL is submitted.

Why is highlighting your data important? Once Google can better understand your content, you’ll have a higher chance of showing up in different types of search results, like rich snippets.

The Value of Rich Snippets

Similar to data highlighting, Google has created a new way to present previews of your website on the search results page. Now, you have the opportunity to attract more users to your page. As an example, we searched for attorneys in Florida. Google showed results list with normal snippets and rich snippets.

A normal snippet on Google is a common search engine result, featuring only a title and a meta description. But, a rich snippet adds extra information, such as star ratings and reviews, which can be useful and draw attention to users.

Sometimes rich snippets also include images and prices, depending on your services or what your content is about. Because of the extra information rich snippets provide users, it’s known to produce higher CTRs.

HTML Improvement

There’s always room to improve your site’s performance. From identifying duplicate meta descriptions to missing title tags, GSC is a great tool to use to fix errors on your site. GSC will send you notifications about issues such as 404 errors and 301 redirects. Take advantage of this section on GSC to make sure your pages are fully optimized to enhance user experience.

If you care about showing up on Google’s search engine, you should take advantage of this impressive free SEO tool. The data provided on GSC will make it easy for you to create an action plan to improve your organic traffic moving forward.

If you can’t afford to wait 6+ months for your organic search to improve and need cases now, consider working with a lead provider and supplementing your SEO efforts. To learn more about eGeneration’s Social Security disability, personal injury, workers’ comp, and employment law leads, just give us a call today at 617.800.0089.

lgd Fri, 10/12/2018 - 11:00