Why Your Lawyer Website Isn’t Ranking In The Search Engines
Creating an SEO (search engine optimization) strategy for your law firm isn’t as simple as one might think. You may think you’re following all of the latest best practices, but still not seeing the results you want.
That’s why there are digital marketing companies focused specifically on law firm SEO. They understand that it requires both legal and technical knowledge to be able to perform well in the rankings.
If you’re having trouble getting your lawyer website to rank, here are a few culprits:
Table of Contents
Google Isn’t Tracking Your Lawyer Website
For those that are brand new to the digital world of SEO, there is one important factor you need to know before all else: indexing.
For Google to know that your website exists, your site needs to be indexed. A search engine will “crawl” the various pages on your lawyer website to search for relevant keywords and other data needed in their algorithms to find and rank content accordingly.
But first, you have to let Google know that your website exists. If your website is fairly new, don’t stress. It can take the search engine up to four weeks for it to begin actively crawling your site.
There may be another factor in the backend of your website that is blocking the search engine from indexing your site. Talk to your web developer to ensure that all of the noindex meta tags are removed from every page you want to make sure is ranked.
Your Website Is Way Too Slow
For a lawyer’s website to rank high in the search engines, they need to cater to the user experience. A slow-loading site or page will instantly cause someone to bounce right off.
This shows Google that your page isn’t helpful or useful to the user. Instead, it’ll rank another page that offers the same details but at a faster rate.
There are several reasons why your site is loading too slowly. You may have images that are too large or could be a hosting network issue.
You can easily run a speed report through Google PageSpeed Insights. It’ll grade the speed of your website and tell you exactly where the pain points are. Again, you’ll want to address this issue with your web developer or hosting provider to see what can be done to find a solution.
The Mobile Version Of Your Site Is Lacking
Websites usually have two main variations: desktop and mobile. These sites are ranked differently depending on the user. While most people are actively searching online through their mobile devices, only 38% of law firm websites are optimized for both.
Google now uses mobile-first indexing. This means it’ll first crawl the mobile version of your site before the desktop. If your mobile site isn’t optimized, your rankings will inevitably suffer.
A simple solution is to start by running your website through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Just like PageSpeed Insights, it’ll provide you with a diagnosis of the issues your site may have that you can improve upon.
Typically, they’re simple solutions like increasing the size of the text on your page. But other times, you may need to fix some coding issues on the backend.
Your Website Poses Risks To Its Visitors
According to a survey done by Hubspot, 82% of consumers leave a website if they don’t feel it’s secure. Cyber security is at the forefront of everyone’s mind when they’re visiting websites or giving out personal information.
This includes being at the forefront of Google’s algorithm, too. Any time the search engine sees a potential risk on a website, they won’t choose to rank the page to avoid issues visitors may have.
Being that your lawyer website is for a law firm, it’s even more crucial that such sensitive information isn’t compromised.
This is why you’ll want to make sure you’ve properly installed an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. It provides credentials for a website to verify its identity and allow for an encrypted connection.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why your lawyer website might not be ranking as high in the search engines as you might want. This list is only the start.
You may not have quality content on your website or quality keywords throughout your site. This is why it’s best to work with a digital marketing company to ensure your lawyer website has what it needs to get in front of the right people.
