The practice of legal SEO entails doing things to optimize your website and server. This helps search engine spiders crawl and index it, increasing organic rankings.

Following the most recent algorithm modifications and how they impact your Law Firms’ organic search engine results page is part of the technical aspect of lawyer SEO marketing.

We’ll go through the most crucial modifications you’ll need to make to your legal company’s website to have the best chances of ranking in today’s competitive organic search market.

Technical SEO for law firms guarantees that your legal firm’s website meets the technical criteria of search engines. Its objective is to improve organic search engine rankings.

When a search engine crawls, indexes, and renders your website, it gathers your pages, executes your code, and analyzes the content to figure out how you structured it. Search engines may crawl, index, and rate your website’s design if your law firm’s SEO services are optimized correctly.
chapter seo for lawyers guide

Chapter 1

SEO For Lawyers

chapter google ranking factors

Chapter 2

Google Ranking Factors

chapter content marketing

Chapter 3

Content Marketing

chapter keyword research

Chapter 4

Keyword Research

chapter on-page seo

Chapter 5

On-page SEO

chapter technical seo

Chapter 6

Technical SEO

chapter link building

Chapter 7

Link Building

chapter site structure

Chapter 8

Site Structure

chapter domain authority 2.0

Chapter 9

Domain Authority 2.0

chapter local seo

Chapter 10

Local SEO

What Is Technical SEO and Why Does It Matter for Lawyers?

Lawyers must be concerned with technical SEO since it makes Google’s access and ranking of your website’s content more accessible.

You may create exciting and valuable content, but if it isn’t technically sound, it won’t produce the organic traffic you want to your site.

On the other hand, if your attorney’s SEO marketing is effective, your lawyer’s website will rank higher in Google search engine results (SERPs), and more prospective clients will click on it.

Google bots can only assess your ranking based on the technical elements of your site. Aside from legal firm keywords, one crucial element is the amount and quality of your backlinks.

Backlinks are the links used from the other websites to yours that are made to promote you. A few backlinks on your website indicate to Google that you are a low-quality source. However, if you have many backlinks, Google will consider you an established and trusted authority.

How Can You Boost Your Law Firm Website, Technical SEO?

how can you boost your law firm website, technical seo
In a nutshell, technical SEO is structuring your website’s data to improve your search engine ranking. There are various law firm SEO techniques for achieving this. A technically optimized website provides a better user experience and improved search engine results. The following are some factors to consider:

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Your attorney’s website must load quickly. The average loading time for a website is 1.3 seconds, according to Dotcom-Tools, released in 2018.

Users are frustrated by a sluggish website and will most likely move to another site. Slow websites are penalized in Google’s search results. Because they know they provide a poor user experience, search engines like Google automatically demote slow websites.

CSS, JavaScript, and HTML (optimize code by removing spaces, commas, and other needless characters) should all be minified, and images are compressed to speed up the loading time of your site.

For this technical procedure, you should hire an SEO firm to assist because a minor error in code might prevent your legal firm’s website from functioning correctly.

  • Don't Forget about the Robots.txt Files

Text file web admins generate Robots.txt files and instruct engine robots to crawl their legal websites. They direct Google’s bots to crawl which sites rather than all of them; as a result, they may cause your website to be overloaded with visits.

They prevent search engines from seeing specific areas of your website, eliminate duplicate content, and provide valuable hints on how to crawl your lawyer’s site efficiently. Crawling many pages lowers the SERP ranking. You may optimize your SEO services for lawyers by instructing Google only to crawl the most helpful pages.

  • Make Your Attorney Website Mobile-Friendly

Technical SEO for lawyers must also include mobile optimization to ensure that users can easily navigate your website if they’re using a smartphone.

By 2021, 63 percent of Google’s US organic traffic will come from mobile devices. As a result, no law firm may afford to overlook or underestimate the importance of mobile presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

The same legal SEO techniques apply. Mobiles have smaller displays and primarily come in use in vertical mode, so your website’s layout and architecture should be looked into. We advise against using pop-ups since they don’t translate well and follow standard SEO for attorney guidelines.

  • Check your lawyer's website for any dead links

Users who click on a broken or dead link are taken to an empty or non-existent external website. When people see a 404 error page, they have a negative user experience and undermine SEO efforts because it restricts the flow of link equity across your attorney’s website.

There are plenty of free tools accessible on the internet to look for dead links, with Google Analytics being the most useful. Dead links can come from anywhere and be resolved by updating or removing them entirely.

  • Make Sure There Isn't Any Content Duplication

Duplicate content frustrates technical SEO for attorneys since it confuses Google and forces search engines to determine which of the identical pages should rank in their results. The original page is rarely the one chosen for top search results.

To eliminate duplicate content, you must define the “correct” version and return the material to its source page.

  • Organize your law firm's website

Websites that rank higher on Google have more conventional, organized site structures. In other words, their pages are only a few links apart from one another.

A flat design has identical URL structures and makes it simple for search engines to crawl the entirety of a website’s pages.

A clear hierarchy tree structure may come in handy to visualize your website’s architecture. Experienced back and front-end developers can assist you in optimizing and organizing your lawyer website to achieve this kind of structure.

  • Schema Markup (Structured Data)

Many search engines, including Google and Microsoft, collaborated to create the Schema.org vocabulary. Structured data is machine-readable, while HTML is only human-readable. Google recommends using JSON-LD, but it also accepts Microdata and RDFa.

Most of the part of the web is made up of unstructured data (words on a website, individual PDF files, and so on). Structured data is used to distinguish the information and make it easier for search engines to understand. We urge you to include structured data on as many relevant pages as feasible.

  • Google Search Console

how to use google search console for seo
Another of Google’s free tools for lawyer SEO is Google Search Console, which allows you to track and optimize your website’s page ranks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and other elements associated with Google Search results. Google Search Console is among all the other tools that allow you to understand and optimize your website by focusing on Google as a search engine, with powerful tools and insights that can help you increase visibility and improve your site’s presence on SERPs.

There’s no better way to increase organic traffic to your website and improve your visibility and exposure than with Search Console.

SEO Red Flags for a Law Firm

Local SEO for lawyers is a substantial investment, but it can pay off handsomely. It’s an inevitable aspect of today’s market. Therefore your legal practice’s website will need to be competitive. However, there are difficulties in attorney search engine optimization.

You may run into a lack of communication and transparency. This is if you hire someone who does not have experience outside the company, as well as failure to deliver accurate results. It’s tough to locate a reputable law firm or SEO firm. If you do your SEO, you may run into the problem of not having enough skilled individuals. Especially those with experience in SEO, local SEO, link building for lawyers, and other aspects crucial for SEO success.

As marketers, we know which law firm’s SEO services aren’t worth their salt. It’s also apparent which ones are attempting to attract clients by offering low rates. This generally provides a minimal (if any) financial return.

Here are a few signals you may be experiencing in the second sort:
  • After six months, you still get most of your leads from PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic. There’s a lot to talk about in the SEO services vs. PPC services debate, and paid advertising may be precisely what you need sometimes, but it shouldn’t be your primary source of leads over time.
  • Your firm produces content on demand. You have a fascinating case study; you call them, and they’ll write it for you. That isn’t going to work. A competent agency actively seeks out and answers commonly asked questions in your field and creates pages designed to answer those queries.
  • A Houston marketing agency with demonstrated SEO expertise can charge a lot more for the same job.
  • You won’t get a straightforward response to your burning question, “What does SEO provide?” Here’s where you can go through all the queries you should ask a digital marketing agency for lawyers before hiring them.

Looking to attract new clients to your law firm website? Request your free SEO audit