Even though it still remains a legal gray area, and ethically questionable in most jurisdictions across the world, law firms, big and small, along with sole practitioners are going all-out when it comes to standing out, and honing their internet presence
As a result, competition in this niche has intensified substantially over the past few years, forcing marketers and website managers to leave no stone unturned in regards to on-site, and technical ranking factors.
In this article, we cover some rules for technical SEO that stand to add substantial value, especially in competitive niches such as legal services.
SSL Is Indispensable
While primarily aimed at sites that host personal information, in early-2014, Google’s announcement that SSL certifications will impact the search engine positions of all websites led to its popularity across a vast majority of websites on the internet.
Since then, 82.2% of all websites on the internet have implemented a valid SSL certificate, up from just 17% five years ago, and the number continues to improve each passing year.
Almost all blogs and websites witness a boost in search engine traffic immediately after implementing the certificate, and in hyper-competitive niches, this can be a robust catalyst to help leapfrog competing domains with higher authority.
Responsiveness & Mobile-Friendly Is The Way Forward
With 62% of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices, having a responsive website is critical for high-quality user experiences. An unresponsive site often results in visitors abandoning fairly quickly, before moving onto your competitor’s website.
Google is known to track a wide variety of quality metrics such as scroll depth, time spent on site, user behavior to influence ranking decisions, which makes it imperative to provide quality experiences for visitors across all screen sizes, browsers, and formats.
Site Speed & Performance
Another factor that fits into the spectrum of user experience metrics, site speed, and performance have long been known to have an outsized impact on rankings in search results.
Internet users are known for being fickle in general, and if a particular page takes even a little longer than normal, they will likely head back, and visit your competitor. Search engine bots too regularly monitor site speeds, and performance figures, which ultimately influence SERPs.
There are a number of services, and WordPress plugins to help with this, and website managers can also consider enabling AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages to fundamentally enhance speeds for mobile traffic, and visitors.
Make The Most of Your Crawl Budget
The crawl budget is the number of pages of a site that search engines crawl within a certain timeframe. While most sites need not worry about this, it remains essential for sites with plenty of pages, often in excess of 10,000 results with regular changes.
Even if your site doesn’t match this requirement, it is good to keep your crawl stats healthy, and be welcoming to search engine bots. There are a number of steps that can be taken in this regard, starting with the fixing of broken links, followed by cleaning-up duplicate content, and restricting the indexing of pages that fail to offer any SEO value.
Help Search Engines Better Understand Your Content
Google has pioneered extensive measures in recent years to better understand content, and much of this comes from what is fed to it by bloggers, and webmasters, in the form of markups and structured data. Content heavy sites that make the effort to fill-up crucial schema markups, and structured data gain a significant upper-hand against competing results that fail to do so, making it a critical on-site factor.
This is quite simple, with most CMS platforms having fields, plugins, or extensions that allow publishers to fill-up relevant data before being indexed by search engine bots.
Going Further With Your Law Firm’s Online Marketing
We’ve tried to cover all bases when it comes to technical SEO, with the core principles, tips, and practices applicable across different niches, and industries. However, if you’re a legal professional looking to expand your presence on search engines, the marketing resource for lawyers by Rankings.io would be a great place to get started.
In the face of aggressive, and regular algorithm updates, there is one thing that remains constant, the value that visitors derive from your site, and the ever increasing accuracy of the metrics that are used to measure the same.
Also Read: Local SEO Strategies For Law Firms
