Search engine optimization (SEO) encapsulates a lot of different strategies to make your law firm’s website get a better ranking on targeted searches. Among these strategies are filling your site with excellent content that targets specific topics, and actively promoting your site elsewhere on the internet with backlinks.
However, one SEO tactic that often gets overlooked is how your website is structured. Planning and building a website is a deceptively crucial factor, when it comes to your site’s SEO performance. You may execute on all of the tricks of the SEO trade, but still end up with poor results if you’re using a website that has a poor design.
Here are a couple of the basic design elements that can boost or minimize your SEO efforts.
Site Architecture
Search engines gauge how important a page is on your website from how far it is from the home page. The more clicks that someone would have to make in order to access a particular page, the less important search engines consider that page to be.
This is especially important for content-based SEO strategies. Creating a blog and filling it with top-notch content every single day is great, but hosting that blog deep within the bowels of your website will convince search engines that it’s not important on your site, muting its impact.
Creating a website with a “flat” architecture is the best way to prevent this from ever happening. Keeping all of your content as few clicks away from your home page tells search engines that everything on your site is important.
Mobile-Friendliness
More than half of Google searches now happen on a phone. While this is likely not the case for detailed research projects like finding a good law firm and choosing an attorney, Google and other search engines likely don’t make content-based distinctions like this. Instead, they have started lowering results rankings of websites that aren’t friendly to mobile searchers.
To avoid this penalty, make sure that you have the mobile base covered. Many WordPress themes are “responsive,” using horizontally flexible interfaces that respond to the width of a user’s screen, which scores some mobile friendly points.
Google even offers online testing to help you determine if your site is mobile friendly.
Myers Freelance Creates SEO-Enhancing Sites, as Well as Great Content
Myers Freelance might have made its name as a legal blog writing group, but we still deal with all of the technical aspects of SEO. If we didn’t, some of our blogs just wouldn’t deliver for clients with poorly designed websites.
Get in contact with us to start a legal blog for your firm, and follow us on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter to keep up to date.