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!