3 Factors That Can Influence A Law Firm’s Online Visibility
Over the years law firms have been getting online and seeing the value of digital marketing solutions like seo and ppc to drive cases to whole new levels. Often the legal vertical has a lot of issues with syncing up all they do online. Sometimes different attorneys at a firm do things they shouldn’t, thinking they understand digital marketing, or simply think they can go at it alone. Many companies in the legal marketing space employ tactics that are less than desirable, and are many times outdated tactics. Law firms are often times dysfunctional. When everyone is doing something for themselves on top of employing a digital marketing company to run campaigns on their behalf it often times chaotic.
Constant Changes of Firm Name
Members of law firms always come and go especially partners. Whenever this is done majority of the time the firm name changes. With the firm name changing often times the firm wants a new domain name to reflect the change. This causes layers and layers of redirects every time a firm changes there name and would like it to reflect accordingly. The firm name also is reflected in the NAP in terms of local search. So as a business you want the firm name, address, and phone number to be consistent throughout the web. If you are a law firm and you constantly change partners I would recommend to go with something generic for your domain. Constant changing creates hours of work for both on and off site efforts.
Content Duplication
Often times websites create duplicate content issues for themselves. Attorneys and lawyers are guilty of this as well. They tend to just copy and paste industry articles or news stories and call it a day. Sometimes doing so for landing pages as well as posts. With blog posts law firms believe posting irrelevant content in volume adds value. Unfortunately, when there is no onsite strategy in mind prior to choosing and creating landing pages, a method of writing anything about a topic and going back and shoving keywords into key places is employed. When content is vague and is duplicated for the purpose of blog posts all it does is create white noise. If you are going to take this position when writing blog posts you should not be blogging at all.
When considering how to build out your onsite strategy in a natural manner, first you need to generate a content calender for your blog posts to build them up over time. In terms of landing pages you need to sit down an figure out what pages make sense for your sitemap, what you are looking to generate business for, what you wish the desired goal to be, and when that is completed build out the site hierarchy. In terms of onsite strategy as a whole you or your firm has to sit down and review historical analytics data, leads data, and do research in terms of search volume for proposed keywords/topics/themes you will be covering. Tools like Adwords Keywords Planner, Ubersuggest, and Keywordtool.io can help you with the research process. Once you are ready to build out your onsite strategy you may also want to look at utilizing synonyms and close variants, be mindful of term frequency inverse document frequency, be aware of co-occurrence and phrase based indexing, semantic distance as well as term relationships, page segmentation, entity salience, and mapping topics by need states in your conversion funnel. These are just a few higher level considerations to apply when doing on site strategy that will give you an edge over your competition.
Website is Not Mobile Friendly
With mobile search share rising year after year, it is very important to have your website mobile compatible. You can incorporate responsive design in order for your website to format correctly on mobile devices. If you are looking to create a totally different experience, you should build a stand alone mobile site or create unique copy on a mobile sub domain. In order to present the right mobile experience you may want to keep in mind form input attributes, setting a mobile friendly preferred width, setting image widths to 100% , among other things. So make sure your not missing out on leads from mobile devices.
These are just a few things to consider for attorneys. These things are applicable to other verticals and just touch on the surface of what mistakes businesses are making online. If you are looking for more information or for digital marketing solutions for your businesses check out some of the online marketing solutions we provide.
