10 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid on Your Law Firm Website

When you’re just starting out with attorney SEO marketing, there’s a very steep learning curve.

There are thousands and thousands of possible strategies you can implement to improve your rankings and conversions.

Before you start on your law firm’s SEO strategy, you want to make sure understand these most common SEO mistakes to avoid:

1. Your website can’t be crawled or indexed

One of the biggest SEO marketing mistakes is not allowing Google’s web crawler bots to index your business’s website.

This means that Google can’t gather any information about your business, and therefore won’t display your business listing when potential customers search for what you offer.

2. Disregarding local SEO for attorneys

For small to midsize operations, especially those with just a single location, placing an emphasis on your local search strategy is key.

Local search optimization means ensuring your law firm appears in a search for law offices in your specific area.

3. Slow site speed

Having a slow site speed can be the death of an organic session.

If your site is taking too long to load (even a few seconds is too long), then a large portion of your users will leave without interacting or even seeing your site.

Be sure to conduct tests often to make sure your site is optimized for speed.

4. Targeting the wrong keywords

When it comes to your keyword strategy, you have to focus on quality keywords more than even the quantity of keywords.

Let’s dive into this a little further.

Our team has recently been providing law firm SEO services for bar associations across the country.

Many of their sites are ranking for plenty of keywords already. That’s great, right?

Well, not so fast.

When we dove deeper into what keywords they were actually ranking for, many of the keywords had to do with “bars and pubs” instead of “bar associations.”

A New York bar association isn’t going to want to rank for “New York pub” or even “New York bar.”

Instead “New York bar associations” will be a much better keyword to target.

When putting together a keyword list, it’s crucial that you’re only going after keywords that are super relevant to your services and will bring you results.

5. Writing lackluster content

Content writing strategies are actually quite simple.

If your content isn’t better than your competitor’s page is going to rank higher.

Google looks at many different metrics to determine which page users like more (including time on page, bounce rate, and backlinks).

If you want your page to rank higher than your competitor’s pages, you need to make sure your content is awesome, useful, and unique.

You can do this by adding a section that another page doesn’t have, including helpful resources, or even creating a unique example that aids in understanding the page’s topic.

6. Broken images and forgetting alt text

If you notice that an image on your site is broken (or if you receive a broken image error on a crawl report), be sure to investigate why the image isn’t loading properly. If necessary, remove the image or replace it with a new one.

Similarly, if you see that an image is missing its alt text, you’ll want to quickly add one. This is especially important for ADA compliance.

7. Not optimizing for mobile users

It’s estimated that more than half of internet searches are done on mobile devices, so often (depending on your demographic), it’s more important to optimize for mobile than it even is for the desktop version of your site.

Google has a really easy-to-use mobile-friendliness test that is very helpful in determining if your site meets modern standards.

8. Not keeping your business information up to date online

When a potential customer finds your business, they need to be able to get in contact with you.

To do that, your business’s contact information must be up to date – if you’ve recently moved or changed your phone number, that needs to be reflected immediately on local search.

9. Having a poor web design

Imagine this: you’ve been targeting great keywords, have optimized all your awesome content, and you’ve made sure search engines are able to easily crawl all of your pages.

But you have a bad website design.

You’ve done all of this work to get people to your site, and now you’re potentially losing users because your site is outdated and not designed properly.

If you’re doing all of the hard work to get people to your site, it’s crucial that you have a great website design to convince those users to stay and interact longer.