Technical SEO has a huge impact on law firm websites and their performance in search engines. If technical elements of your website are not in line, then Google is not able to access your pages, and thus will not be able to rank them. This results in a loss of traffic and in the end lost leads and clients.
However, technical SEO is not a mystery.. There are steps law firms can take to improve their technical SEO and ensure that their pages will be ranked by Google.
What Is a Technical SEO Strategy?
A technical SEO strategy refers to anything you do to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your web pages. Technical SEO works in tandem with other strategies such as content creation and link building to ensure your website will rank highly in Google’s search engine pages.
How to Check Your Technical SEO
In order to check your technical SEO, it is recommended that law firms perform audits of their website every 6 months. In this audit, you should check for these items:
- Ensure your site is crawlable
- Ensure your site is indexable
- Review your sitemap
- Ensure your site is mobile-friendly
- Check page load times
- Check for duplicate content
You can do this by leveraging an audit tool or by using Google Search Console.
Ways to Improve Technical SEO
- Ensure Your Site is Mobile Friendly
The vast majority of traffic comes from mobile devices nowadays. You must ensure your site is mobile-friendly. How can you check if your site is mobile friendly?
- Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Tool
- Use HubSpot’s Website Grader Tool
- View your site on different sized mobile devices
You can do these tasks to improve mobile-friendliness:
- Minimize pop-ups
- Use a responsive layout
- Compress images
- Leverage a large and readable font
- Edit button size and placements
- Focus on website speed
- Optimize Your XML Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that has information about your law firm website’s pages and the relationships between them. It’s like a map that informs search engines about the organization of your site content, ensuring accurate readability. Check your sitemap for any errors that might compromise your website’s ranking. You can do this by submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console. Do this by going to your account and navigate to Sitemap> Add a new sitemap. And make sure to follow these sitemap best practices:
- If a page is blocked in robot.txt, then do not include it in your XML sitemap
- Prioritize high-quality pages in your sitemap
- If you have a large site with over 50,000 URLs, then use a dynamic sitemap, meaning the sitemap is created every time it’s generated
- Focus on Website Speed
A slow loading website affects user experience and makes it harder to crawl. You can use Google’s Page Speed Insights to check your web pages’ speed. Focus on increasing load times by doing these tasks:
- Use a hosting solution that’s optimized for performance
- Compress images
- Limit your redirects
- Cache web pages
- Enable browser caching
- Understand the difference between asynchronous and synchronous loading
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Get Rid of Unneeded Plugins
- Optimize Internal Links
Review all of your internal links. Broken links can have a negative impact on your site’s SEO and usability. Also pay attention to click depth – ideally any page is no more than 3 clicks away from the home page. And always makes sure links are contextual and add value to the topic being discussed.
- Review Alt Text
The alt text of your images should be descriptive and should include keywords. Google cannot see what is in an image, so it uses the alt text to determine an image’s content and relevance.
- Avoid Duplicate Content
Use an SEO tool like Semrush to scan your website and see if there are any duplicate pages. Any duplicates should be deleted.
- Use an SSL Certificate
Google confirmed that SSL certificates are now a ranking factor. An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates and validates a site’s identity. You can get one using a site like Namecheap.
- Fix Crawl Errors
Identify crawl errors using Google Search Console about once a week. You can see which pages are prevented from being indexed. You’ll want to check for orphan pages, which are those that exist on your site but aren’t linked to internally. Orphan pages aren’t indexed by search engines and don’t allow visitors to continue navigating through your website. Orphan pages can hurt your bounce rate and lead to missed opportunities of engagement and retention.
- Fix Broken Links
Broken links refers to when a user clicks on a page and gets a 404 error. There is a broken link checker plugin that you can install in WordPress.
Takeaway:
Technical SEO is an important part of any SEO strategy. These technical elements affect both user experience and how search engines are able to crawl your site. Running technical SEO audits is essential and should be done on a regular basis.
