How to Use Technical SEO Tactics to Optimize Law Firm Websites
Technical SEO is often viewed as the most difficult aspect of SEO, especially for attorneys. Many lawyers believe that technical SEO requires structured data as well as coding skills, which can be intimidating.
Technical SEO might seem complicated, but it’s actually essential to providing a great experience for your potential customers. Also, did you know that it will assist you in ranking higher on the search results in Google? So let’s have the simple beginning.
Table of Contents
Meaning of the Technical SEO?
Don’t have any doubt. Technical SEO is the term given to enhancing your firm’s website so that google like search engines will have the ability to easily read and find its content. Technical SEO optimization involves such things as handling your website’s architecture , making sure the site loads quickly, linking internally, and similar tactics. A lack of attention to site structure is one of the primary reasons that some websites don’t perform well in organic searches. For example, they might have fake content, lack mobile-friendliness, or be burdened with other technological SEO issues. However, these problems can be resolved
How can you improve the technical SEO of your firm's site?
Here are some key enhancements you can make to your website that will help improve your site’s ranking in search engines, as well as make it more visible to potential local clients. Improvements such as increasing load speed, developing for mobile devices, and securing your domain with an SSL certificate can all play a role in improving your visibility and helping you attract new business.
This is about how the Map Marketing could get into the client’s site ranking according to the main keyword.
Our SEO director, Ms. Anete Lazdina, she has stated that the those factors are key to having a site which search engines reach both crawl and index:
What is Internal linking?
The term ‘internal linking’ prefers when you connect one of your law firm’s web pages to another page on the same website. It’s key to make sure that the site architecture makes sense for search engines. Here, Anete advises linking similar pages as well as the keywords.
While Google’s J. Mueller didn’t explicitly mention internal linking is a reason for the rankings, he did state that it’s a crucial part of the puzzle. By placing links throughout your website in deliberate locations, you’re telling Google which pages – such as contact or blog posts – you want to draw attention to.
Internal Link Types
Your internal linking tactic can be implemented in various ways, which are listed below:
Navigational links
Internal links are not only helpful for your visitors, but they also help with your website's SEO. By internally linking their law firm website, A firm called Wattel & York in Arizona improved their site significantly and that's a great example to learn about the navigational links.
Contextual links
Related links are not only useful for helping potential clients save time but they can also be used to encourage the desired gesture, like appointment scheduling.
By utilizing contextual internal links on their pages, one of our clients named Jesse who maintains a private law firm, has seen success.
Improve your website's security and speed to see better results.
Anete recommends keeping your page speed similar to the other best sites that are in your niche. You should also maintain a mobile site version, and both sites should be secured with https:// domain instead of http://.
If you’re interested in having an SSL to your respective site, contact your web host. Also, GT Metrix like free tools can check your site’s speed regularly. You can also check it on Google Analytics for more insights.
Site structure
If you want search engines to index every page on your website, organization is key. This hierarchy starts with general pages that link to supporting ones–like how a book has chapters and paragraphs.
Our team prefers managing your website as follows:
Home page
Sections
Sub Sections
Individual Posts or Pages
As an example, one of our clients decided to use this strategy: Another way to organize your website is by creating separate pages for each location. This helps with local SEO but it may also help visitors understand your site layout better.
Sitemaps
This is simply a combination of whole pages on your site. It’s important to submit your site’s ‘XML’ to Google. If your site is a larger one, an ‘HTML’ sitemap can be helpful in allowing bots to crawl and then understand both the layout of your site as well as its hierarchy.
Screaming Frog and following Google’s guidelines are both effective methods to make sitemaps. Your sitemap functions as your website’s blueprint by providing a roadmap for the search engines like google to crawl & index every page on your website–making it crucial for SEO purposes.
Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
This text appears after a page’s title on results pages. Title tags can be found at the top of your browser or SERPs.
Although they don’t hold weight in terms of ranking your website, both of these are still important. This is because a well-written description or title has the potential to capture somebody’s attention and persuade them to have a click on the respective link. When writing a meta description, Anete suggests thinking about how it will spur people into action. Additionally, she notes that title tags should be kept concise by including the brand name and main keyword.
Images
In case an image can’t be loaded, Alt tags are pieces of text that will appear instead of an image.
Not only do alt tags improve accessibility for vision-impaired users, but they also help search engines understand a site’s content and index it accurately. You can see a solid example of an image alt tag here.
Top SEO Technical Mistakes Done By Most Firms
After speaking with Anete, we compiled a list of the three most common mistakes law firms have when trying to improve their SEO method. They are as follows:
Duplicate content
Mrs. Anete believes that duplicate content exists when “When you have multiple pages with similar or identical content, it’s called “competing pages.” This occurs when one page is ranking for multiple keywords”. To remedy this problem, Anete employs Ahrefs to help identify instances of fake content.
The Google’s algorithm has to find which page of the relevant site should be at the top place in SERPs when there is fake content. Furthermore, the selected content might not be accurate.
URL structure optimization
Anete explains that website structure is often overlooked, but it can have a big impact on your ranking.
To ensure your law firm’s website appears in search engine results, follow these best practices: organize your site with a clear internal linking as well as ag a good sitemap.
Contextual interlinking
Creating links between the large and important content on your law firm’s website is important for a few reasons. Most importantly, it allows search engine bots to understand your site better and create relationships between different various pages on your site. This helps improve the overall ranking of your website on search engines.
Commonly Asked Questions
What metrics can you use to determine the technical SEO health of your website?
Audits from On The Map Marketing guarantee that your website is free of any technical aspects which could potentially damage SEO rankings.
Our SEO tech team audits your website based on four conditions:
Crucial Level
High Level
Medium Level
Low Level
The crucial phase concludes:
crawling-related phase
indexing-related phase
We can’t do anything else until two of these elements are present.
The example below demonstrates how we utilize various tools for an audit, which is subjected to change.
Can attorneys really benefit from utilizing legal servicing and other similar schemes?
Yes, schema is immensely beneficial for helping internet bots to sense the law firm’s site and what exactly it entails. There are various types of schema which are as follows:
Schema Local business
This is the business information for an attorney or law firm, including, phone number, address, operating hours and etc. Make sure you enter the correct business type when signing up. For example, if you're a law firm or lawyer, be sure to select "Legal Service."
Schema Breadcrumb
Google's definition of a breadcrumb schema is "markup coding on a web page that helps signifying the webpage's position in terms of search results within a site." The main objective of this type of schema is to demonstrate easily where users are on a website, as well as helping them get around a site with fewer difficulties.
FAQ Schema:
FAQ schema is a set of code that allows Google to give the best solution to a problem in the form of a featured snippet. This lets users get their answers faster and with less effort.
Question Examples:
What is the importance of user experience to a law firm's website's technical SEO?
Though we couldn’t find massive improvements in traffic or ranking from bettering the user experience, While other SEO techniques are important, if your content, as well as legal link-building aren’t up to par, they should be a focus for you.
What are Core Web Vitals, and how can they help a law firm's website?
Although Google requires specific standards from websites in order to give a good user experience, Although On The Map Marketing has seen some improvement in rankings, it is not as significant as we would like due to CWV scores.
Conclussion
Technical SEO may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. You can ensure your website is optimized by using simple documentation procedures and other processes that are shared today.
The goal is to have a website to make it easy for your visitors to get around while giving Google’s algorithm an understanding of your content. That’s vital for the local SEO and organic presence as a whole.
