Marketing Tech: Seven Criteria for Evaluating Your Law Firm's SEO

How Can You Make Your Law Firm Website Better?

To make your website better and more effective, start with an SEO assessment, undertaken by either someone in your law firm's marketing department, or a trusted SEO consultant or agency. The SEO assessment should incorporate the following components.

1. Website Traffic

First, make sure you have Google Analytics or a comparable tracking service connected to your website. Assess the goals you have set for your website profile. A goal could be the number of times a Contact Us form is submitted, an attorney biography is downloaded or a time-on-site benchmark is reached. Are these goals still relevant to your overall law firm marketing plan? If not, what new goals should you create?

When evaluating user metrics ' how visitors engage with your site ' look at year-over-year data to remove seasonal factors. Typically, a six- to 12-month data set will give you enough information to safely draw conclusions.

Assess your traffic sources ' where visitors come from. Do they arrive from a search, a link on another website, directly from a bookmarked page or by typing in your website address? How long do visitors spend on your website and how many pages do they visit in that timeframe? What is the bounce rate ' visitors who only go to one page and then leave? Drill down further to understand which pages on your website perform well and which ones do not. What distinguishes engaging pages from non-engaging pages? Make a list of poorly performing pages and determine a strategy for improving them.

Review the percentage of traffic you receive from mobile devices. Do you have a mobile site or mobile-responsive site? Rather than merely shrinking the page size, a responsive site will adjust its layout and interface to make it easier for users to browse when viewing on a mobile device. Something to consider if you're seeing a high number of users viewing your website from a phone or tablet: Internet users have become accustomed to browsing mobile-friendly sites. If you don't have one, they will most likely bounce off to a site that delivers a better mobile experience.

Consider geographic data about your website visitors. Are you reaching your expected audience? Are there market segments that are not visiting your site that you want to engage? Geographic data often indicates strengths and weaknesses in local SEO. (Local searches are phrases people use that contain the name of a city, state, county or country. For example, Someone goes to Google and searches for “top law firms in northern Virginia.”)

2. Indexation

Search engine robots move through the Internet and “crawl” your website. By doing so, they find out which pages you have on your domain and what those pages are about. The robots return their findings to the greater search engine index. When a person searches for something online, the search engine sorts through its index and delivers what it deems are the most relevant results for that search.

For various reasons, search engines cannot always find (index) your web pages. Therefore, you need to make sure that the appropriate pages on a site are being indexed. To see which pages Google is indexing on your site, go to google.com and type the following in the search field, replacing “mydomain” with your firm's domain name: Site: mydomain.com. The search engine will list all the pages on your site that it indexes. Analyze the results. Are pages missing, or are pages being indexed that you would rather hide from search engines?

3. Navigation

I've seen countless sites where the navigation has become cluttered and confusing as pages have been added over time. Pretend you are a first-time visitor to your site. Does the navigation structure make sense? Can you easily find the information you need?

Other factors to consider regarding navigation:

• Does your website have a search field so visitors can easily search by keyword for relevant content?
• Do you duplicate your navigation in the footer? I recommend removing duplicate navigation in the footer and replacing it with location information, social share widgets, disclaimers and copyright information. De-cluttering a mess of links will create a better user experience for your website visitors.

4. Keyword Data

Since Google has eliminated virtually all keyword data form Google Analytics, we need to evaluate keywords from several different angles. I recommend more in-depth, paid keyword ranking tools, such as Moz, Raven Tools, Conductor Searchlight or SEMRush. Questions you should ask yourself include: Am I ranking for relatively high-volume keywords? Are there keywords that I should be ranking for, but am not? Do I have multiple URLs competing for the same terms?

5. On-page Optimization

• Technical SEO elements on your site ' specifically, HTML tags ' may not carry the weight they once did, but they are still important for ranking and driving website traffic.
• URLs are often poorly configured on a site. Best practices are frequently debated among SEO consultants, but generally I advise that clients have a user-friendly structure that makes sense to people ' not a collection of random alpha-numeric text.
• Title tags refer to the bolded title of your page that appears as links in search engine results pages (SERPs). Optimizing these tags with keywords and keeping them under 70 characters is a best practice.
• Meta descriptions are the snippets that appear in the SERPs underneath the title. Your CMS should provide a meta description field that will suggest a description to search engines. Meta descriptions do not affect rank but, when written well, can improve click-through rates in the SERPs.
• H1, H2 and H3 tags for headlines and sub-headers indicate important phrases for search engine robots. Each page should have one H1 tag and multiple H2 and H3 tags in descending importance.
• Alt tags describe images to search engines and are not usually visible to most visitors. These tags should accurately describe your images using relevant keywords.

6. Link Profile

Perhaps one of the most important SEO factors is a site's link profile, which can make or break a website. What is a link profile? It's the collection of links that exist on the Internet that point to your website. When high-quality, relevant sites link to your website, it tells search engines that your content is valuable. Open Site Explorer provides a helpful tool that lists all the links pointing to your website ' and your competitors' sites. Look at where the links are coming from and evaluate the importance and relevance of those linking sites.

Do your competitors have linking domains that are missing from your profile? Determine how you can gain links from these domains ' perhaps a PR push or blogging outreach. Always conduct your outreach personally and professionally ' and never agree to link-trading schemes.

7. Social Presence

Social media plays a crucial role in SEO. The most obvious impact is that social shares send traffic to your website. Social media sites are like online distribution tools for your content. When the online community shares your content exponentially, search engines interpret this as a sign of popularity. Many studies have shown that sending positive social indicators to search engines improves website ranking (see Searchmetrics 2013 Ranking Factors). Think of it as a popularity contest ' the more popular your content in social media, the higher it will rank.

Use Google Analytics Social reports to assess the number of visits landing on your site from social media. Follow the visitor path to better understand how visitors behave when on your website. What is the bounce rate? How many other pages do they visit? Do they complete goals?

Conclusion

Following these SEO assessment steps will provide valuable insight into your law firm SEO standing. Once you understand where your website weaknesses are, you can begin to make improvements. Even though SEO is a highly technical aspect of your law firm marketing strategy, it shouldn't be ignored.

Melanie Trudeau is the digital strategist at Jaffe PR with a background in online marketing and SEO. She advises law firms on their Internet marketing strategies. Connect with her on Google+ or LinkedIn.

Why should your firm care about search engine optimization (SEO)? Is it really all that important to law firm marketing? For years, law firms have perceived SEO as a “black art” with a questionable ROI, resulting in a foggy understanding of how it fits into a firm's overall marketing strategy.

From my experience, this uncertainty has arisen because people find SEO difficult to get their arms around. It is a complicated and technical field of digital marketing that is constantly changing as technology evolves. It is also a long-term strategy that requires patience, and there are not always guarantees that your efforts will achieve the results you're looking for.

When I first talk with clients about SEO, I usually encounter hesitation and skepticism. But I can always persuade law firm marketers to agree that their websites play prominent roles in their marketing plans. By extension, if a website is crucial to your firm's marketing picture, then isn't the ability for clients and prospects to find your website online also important? Simply put, if your website is important, then SEO should be important.

How Can You Make Your Law Firm Website Better?

To make your website better and more effective, start with an SEO assessment, undertaken by either someone in your law firm's marketing department, or a trusted SEO consultant or agency. The SEO assessment should incorporate the following components.

1. Website Traffic

First, make sure you have Google Analytics or a comparable tracking service connected to your website. Assess the goals you have set for your website profile. A goal could be the number of times a Contact Us form is submitted, an attorney biography is downloaded or a time-on-site benchmark is reached. Are these goals still relevant to your overall law firm marketing plan? If not, what new goals should you create?

When evaluating user metrics ' how visitors engage with your site ' look at year-over-year data to remove seasonal factors. Typically, a six- to 12-month data set will give you enough information to safely draw conclusions.

Assess your traffic sources ' where visitors come from. Do they arrive from a search, a link on another website, directly from a bookmarked page or by typing in your website address? How long do visitors spend on your website and how many pages do they visit in that timeframe? What is the bounce rate ' visitors who only go to one page and then leave? Drill down further to understand which pages on your website perform well and which ones do not. What distinguishes engaging pages from non-engaging pages? Make a list of poorly performing pages and determine a strategy for improving them.

Review the percentage of traffic you receive from mobile devices. Do you have a mobile site or mobile-responsive site? Rather than merely shrinking the page size, a responsive site will adjust its layout and interface to make it easier for users to browse when viewing on a mobile device. Something to consider if you're seeing a high number of users viewing your website from a phone or tablet: Internet users have become accustomed to browsing mobile-friendly sites. If you don't have one, they will most likely bounce off to a site that delivers a better mobile experience.

Consider geographic data about your website visitors. Are you reaching your expected audience? Are there market segments that are not visiting your site that you want to engage? Geographic data often indicates strengths and weaknesses in local SEO. (Local searches are phrases people use that contain the name of a city, state, county or country. For example, Someone goes to Google and searches for “top law firms in northern Virginia.”)

2. Indexation

Search engine robots move through the Internet and “crawl” your website. By doing so, they find out which pages you have on your domain and what those pages are about. The robots return their findings to the greater search engine index. When a person searches for something online, the search engine sorts through its index and delivers what it deems are the most relevant results for that search.

For various reasons, search engines cannot always find (index) your web pages. Therefore, you need to make sure that the appropriate pages on a site are being indexed. To see which pages Google is indexing on your site, go to google.com and type the following in the search field, replacing “mydomain” with your firm's domain name: Site: mydomain.com. The search engine will list all the pages on your site that it indexes. Analyze the results. Are pages missing, or are pages being indexed that you would rather hide from search engines?

3. Navigation

I've seen countless sites where the navigation has become cluttered and confusing as pages have been added over time. Pretend you are a first-time visitor to your site. Does the navigation structure make sense? Can you easily find the information you need?

Other factors to consider regarding navigation:

• Does your website have a search field so visitors can easily search by keyword for relevant content?
• Do you duplicate your navigation in the footer? I recommend removing duplicate navigation in the footer and replacing it with location information, social share widgets, disclaimers and copyright information. De-cluttering a mess of links will create a better user experience for your website visitors.

4. Keyword Data

Since Google has eliminated virtually all keyword data form Google Analytics, we need to evaluate keywords from several different angles. I recommend more in-depth, paid keyword ranking tools, such as Moz, Raven Tools, Conductor Searchlight or SEMRush. Questions you should ask yourself include: Am I ranking for relatively high-volume keywords? Are there keywords that I should be ranking for, but am not? Do I have multiple URLs competing for the same terms?

5. On-page Optimization

• Technical SEO elements on your site ' specifically, HTML tags ' may not carry the weight they once did, but they are still important for ranking and driving website traffic.
• URLs are often poorly configured on a site. Best practices are frequently debated among SEO consultants, but generally I advise that clients have a user-friendly structure that makes sense to people ' not a collection of random alpha-numeric text.
• Title tags refer to the bolded title of your page that appears as links in search engine results pages (SERPs). Optimizing these tags with keywords and keeping them under 70 characters is a best practice.
• Meta descriptions are the snippets that appear in the SERPs underneath the title. Your CMS should provide a meta description field that will suggest a description to search engines. Meta descriptions do not affect rank but, when written well, can improve click-through rates in the SERPs.
• H1, H2 and H3 tags for headlines and sub-headers indicate important phrases for search engine robots. Each page should have one H1 tag and multiple H2 and H3 tags in descending importance.
• Alt tags describe images to search engines and are not usually visible to most visitors. These tags should accurately describe your images using relevant keywords.

6. Link Profile

Perhaps one of the most important SEO factors is a site's link profile, which can make or break a website. What is a link profile? It's the collection of links that exist on the Internet that point to your website. When high-quality, relevant sites link to your website, it tells search engines that your content is valuable. Open Site Explorer provides a helpful tool that lists all the links pointing to your website ' and your competitors' sites. Look at where the links are coming from and evaluate the importance and relevance of those linking sites.

Do your competitors have linking domains that are missing from your profile? Determine how you can gain links from these domains ' perhaps a PR push or blogging outreach. Always conduct your outreach personally and professionally ' and never agree to link-trading schemes.

7. Social Presence

Social media plays a crucial role in SEO. The most obvious impact is that social shares send traffic to your website. Social media sites are like online distribution tools for your content. When the online community shares your content exponentially, search engines interpret this as a sign of popularity. Many studies have shown that sending positive social indicators to search engines improves website ranking (see Searchmetrics 2013 Ranking Factors). Think of it as a popularity contest ' the more popular your content in social media, the higher it will rank.

Use Google Analytics Social reports to assess the number of visits landing on your site from social media. Follow the visitor path to better understand how visitors behave when on your website. What is the bounce rate? How many other pages do they visit? Do they complete goals?

Conclusion

Following these SEO assessment steps will provide valuable insight into your law firm SEO standing. Once you understand where your website weaknesses are, you can begin to make improvements. Even though SEO is a highly technical aspect of your law firm marketing strategy, it shouldn't be ignored.

Melanie Trudeau is the digital strategist at Jaffe PR with a background in online marketing and SEO. She advises law firms on their Internet marketing strategies. Connect with her on Google+ or LinkedIn.