Spring cleaning typically entails cleaning out the shed, tackling all those boxes in the attic, decluttering the house, or sprucing up the garden. What usually doesn’t come to mind is cleaning up one of the most important pieces of your business — your website.

Your website is an introduction to who you are and what services you offer. If your site is running slow, has outdated content, or broken links, will it hold the interest of visitors (a.k.a. potential clients)? Or will they find somewhere else to answer their questions and serve their needs?

Don’t let April showers get you down. Below are five ways you can refresh your website this Spring.

Expired. Expired. Expired.

Just like food can expire, so can content. Take a look at your articles and speaking engagements. If they are five or more years old, they should be removed from your website unless the topic is still truly relevant to the current market and your practice. 

While reviewing your articles and blogs, check for outdated numbers, dates, and stats. Updating these figures will make a much bigger impact than leaving numbers from two or more years ago. It will show you are on top of what’s going on in the industry.

Also, take this opportunity to identify content that can be updated and repurposed. This content is known as evergreen — meaning it is relevant at any time. Small tweaks, updates, and additions to those pieces of content can add value and attract potential clients.

If It’s Broke — Fix It.

A broken link is a link on a website that no longer works because the web page has been moved, no longer exists, or an incorrect U.R.L. has been entered. Broken website links can be frustrating for users. It will not only show them your website is not up-to-date, but it may prompt them to leave your site. 

Fixing these broken links is crucial for maintaining a healthy and functional website. It helps improve user experience, search engine optimization (S.E.O.), website reputation, and performance.

Start here. Siteimprove has a useful tool for checking broken links.

Page Speed

No one has the patience to wait for a video, image, or page to load on a website these days. When a website is slow to load, chances are the user gets frustrated and probably more times than not, leaves the site altogether. That is why it is extremely important that your page speed functions at a high level. 

Not only does page speed affect a user’s experience, but it can also impact your search engine rankings. Here are a few ways you can improve your page speed:

• Optimize images: Compress and optimize images on your website to reduce load times. 
• Use a content delivery network (C.D.N.): A C.D.N. can help improve page speed by caching content and serving it from servers that are closer to the user.
• Enable browser caching: Browser caching allows the browser to store files on a user’s device, so they don’t need to be downloaded again on subsequent visits.
• Reduce the number of plugins: Check all the plugins you have installed and delete unnecessary ones.
• Use a faster web host: Consider upgrading to a faster web hosting provider if your current provider is slowing down your website.

PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals Report are tools you can use to check your website’s page speed.

Keyword Updates

If you haven’t updated your keyword strategy for optimizing your website in the last year, it’s time. Every second of every day, people are asking thousands of questions on the internet. The keywords from those questions connect to the content that is provided on search engines.

To serve your website in search engine results pages, Google periodically crawls your website. When it has finished crawling your website, it matches the content on your website to queries that people use in Google searches. Google is indicating that the content on your site is a match for that keyword. With that in mind, you need to be intentional about the content on your website so that your site is served for the keywords that are a match for your firm. A pillar of a good S.E.O strategy is keyword research. To assist in your keyword search, you can use this S.E.O. tool, Ahrefs. 

The main goal of choosing the right keywords and including them in your content, calls to action (C.T.A.s), alternative (ALT) text, etc., is to help your site rank highly enough on search engines to drive organic traffic to it. 

If you need help with your law firm S.E.O., our team of former in-house legal marketers and lawyers are here to help you reach page one on Google.

Content Audit

Determining what content needs to be optimized, reorganized, repurposed, edited, or tossed out can not only be time-consuming but feel overwhelming. The best way to tackle this is by completing a content audit – an inventory of your website. It will help you:

• Identify outdated or irrelevant content that may need to be removed or updated to maintain the quality and relevance of your website.
• Improve S.E.O. by analyzing keywords, meta descriptions, and other elements that impact your search engine rankings.
• Streamline content creation by identifying gaps in content and opportunities to improve the overall quality and relevance of your future content.

A content audit ultimately provides you valuable insight into what is working and what isn’t within your website so that you can identify the issues and correct them if necessary. 

Spring cleaning such as this doesn’t happen overnight. Make a plan. Set it in motion. Before you know it, your website will be squeaky clean!