SEO For Lawyers – How Good UX Leads To Better Rankings
In the good old days of the internet, getting your website to rise to the top of search engine rankings was simply a competition between websites. It was about who can inject their site with the highest number of keywords and tags. The complexity and sophistication of search engines today make it very hard to rise to the top without actually proving to be useful to the traffic. While not all industries jumped on the bandwagon of optimizing their ranking on search engines. All fields and professions started becoming very interested in SEO and ranking over time. Law firms see the great opportunity offered by integrating SEO services into their online presence. After all, SEO for lawyers can mean a lot more business than what simple word-of-mouth advertising can offer.
User experience is one of the strongest metrics used to calculate rankings on search engines. The more positive a user experience is, the fewer people would leave after a short duration. That makes it attractive to customers who are looking for something the website offers. No matter how a website is great. If the user experience is terrible, it will make visiting the website more of an unpleasant experience that will negatively impact its overall ranking.
Even if SEO manages to direct a lot of traffic to the website, a bad UX would only waste that traffic without any impressive results. It’s very important for users to interact with your law firm’s website to yield clients. Here is how good user experience can positively affect SEO for lawyers.
SEO For Lawyers – Loading Speed
Law-related websites contain a lot of information and media. It’s very important that people not only easily find what they’re looking for in the right place. But the loading speed of the page is also of equal importance. The competition between different attorney-based websites makes it quite crucial to streamline visitors into becoming potential clients in the shortest possible duration.
As SEO professionals at www.lawfirmseo.com believe, your page loading speed is a major factor in determining your ranking. No one is going to wait for several seconds for your website to load. Not only will that negatively impact your user experience. Also, the search engine’s ranking algorithm will devalue your total ranking score if pages are too slow to load.
Site Structure
Google algorithms look for certain criteria or points on any webpage. The website structure containing pages, posts, links, and other data helps algorithms identify how well you present your content to your website visitors. SEO for lawyers primarily depends on quality rather than quantity. The content and navigation of your website are of vital importance.
Search engines ‘crawl’ your websites for information, which means automatically mining it for data. The site structure helps crawlers identify which content is the most important. This is why a lot of websites put it on the homepage. It’s the most valuable page on a website according to the algorithm.
SEO For Lawyers – Good Content
When lawyer websites write content, it’s usually directed to their potential clients. It’s recommended that the majority of the content written on the websites is from lawyers or supervised by lawyers. Legal information can sometimes be complex and very specific.
An attorney would know the best content to provide to new prospective clients. The user experience is also affected by the quality of content. Even if the navigation of the website is easy and intuitive, if the content can’t hold its own, it would damage the ranking of the page.
SEO For Lawyers – Engagement
In an age where the visual aspect of websites, apps, and many other digital forms have a focus on, leaving your user experience bland would be a mistake. Most people respond better to visual information rather than by text alone. When the user experience is taken into consideration, SEO for lawyers becomes more effective.
The most common visual information lawyers use are images, videos, and infographics. The law field has important information digested with problems by potential clients and people with no legal background. This is why visual mediums can easily translate important information while keeping the viewer engaged. The more engaging your website is the higher its search engine ranking.
Utilizing Videos and Infographics Correctly
Videos can be considered a double-edged sword in relation to user experience. Good videos can help SEO for lawyers and help them rank higher. Botched or unprofessional videos can negatively affect their ranking. It’s important to gather resources and put effort into making the video because potential clients will judge you based on your video. A poorly-lit video and monotonic or incoherent audio can make the best content look bad. Videos can keep your visitors on your website for the longest duration if they’re professionally made.
In a fast-paced age, infographics are 30 times more appealing to viewers than text-only content. Similar to videos, the condensation of statistics and information requires raising the bar of quality. The information you choose to present in the form of infographics should be more quality-oriented rather than amassing high numbers of links. The presentation of data plays an important role in how it will be perceived as well.
SEO For Lawyers – User Intention
Google and other search engines use very complicated algorithms to try and predict what kind of results would suit the user. Searching for the price of something can mean that the user is more inclined to purchase it. Mentioning many brands could mean that the user is looking for comparisons. For the user experience to positively affect the ranking of your SEO for the lawyers’ campaign. User intent will be an important factor.
A lot of searches start with words like “how to” and “tips,” which helps clarify the intent of the users while giving you a chance to create search engine optimization of your blog to suit what clients want. The more your website is relevant to search queries of visitors, the higher the rank. A lot of people use vague keywords, which makes the search engine unable to ascertain, with a high degree of accuracy, what kind of services they are looking for, so it provides a mix of different websites. It’s better to specify the type of service you provide to get traffic from such vague searches.
It’s important to be able to use the right metrics to identify different user intentions. A lot of attorney websites add a toll-free mobile number clearly in the background since a lot of people might as well use the phone to call the firm if they like what they see. The navigation menu on a mobile phone should be more accessible on a mobile screen than a computer screen. Google Analytics should provide you with some information that you can use to extrapolate the difference of intent between mobile and desktop users. You can use this information to your advantage in your SEO campaign.
Mobile-Friendliness Means Better SEO for Lawyers
The number of mobile devices connecting to the internet has changed drastically when compared to computers in the last decade. Most search engine results are on a smartphone screen nowadays. Google is using a mobile-first index that bases the ranking on the website for mobile users.
You can use Google Analytics to get an idea of the number of mobile users that visit the website. A huge part of good user experience is compatibility and making sure that anyone, anywhere can easily navigate your website and look for the intended information. A simple visit to your website can show you what it’s like when one views it from a small screen. You may feel a surprise at the difference if you haven’t paid attention to it before.
One of the most common practices used to improve UX is by optimizing media to be smoother on mobile screens. Page loading speed has a heavy influence on the size of images and videos on it. You can keep your images small in size yet high in quality; just compress and resize them by using HTML tags. A large image can look good on a desktop while flashing on mobile screens. Videos are a major deal-breaker, so you may need to reduce the quality of some large videos while ensuring that it doesn’t impact the viewing experience on other devices for the best user experience. The more individualized the experience, the more people can relate to it.
Design and Navigation
The first thing your potential client is going to see is the site’s design or aesthetic element. Even if you have the most trustworthy content, if it’s not properly presented, it will only look complicated. Your SEO ranking has an impact on metrics like bounce rate and session duration.
This is why a lot of websites are becoming more minimalistic to focus on all the right information a visitor needs in the least time. Unpopular or odd fonts and complex site trees distract the user from their main goal. They may cause a loss of prospective clients. Your website visitors will probably be interested in concise answers. So, it’s better to make headings compelling by providing interesting questions and answers in the headings.
Your website ranking isn’t only based on the homepage; a lot of visitors may find your website through different pages on it when they’re searching online. The navigation of the website improves the user experience. It makes your prospective clients able to extract not only the information they came looking for, but also find other important, relevant information.
Fixed headers make navigation much faster. They don’t require scrolling through text to visit different pages. Menus shouldn’t overlap the content to avoid misclicks and frustration. Not to mention that ads shouldn’t be too intrusive by being displayed constantly on top of the content. A search box can also make your website more relevant. People start spending more time on it. That will help them stay longer once they’re done with a topic.
SEO For Lawyers – Attorney Profile
When people are visiting a law firm’s website, they’re expecting to see faces and identities. They’re looking for professional consultancy and representation. Providing lawyer profiles with detailed information like education, experience, history, and specialization is a great example of how user experience can influence SEO for lawyers.
Profiles can include things like won cases, rate of success, high-profile cases, pro bono cases, and other valuable information that can help prospective clients get more personal with the company before even contacting them. Lawyer profile pages, when existent, are usually one of the most popular pages on the website in comparison to other pages. Better user experience, in this case, translates into more professionalism, which will help search engines rank your website higher.
Understanding Visitors
While understanding the mechanics and calculations behind search engine ranking is important, making it the only focus is going to net you a lot of losses. You don’t want to attract your clients by tricking them into seeing your website whenever they search for something.
Good user experience tactics should help customize your website to fit the pattern that most of the visitors would be comfortable with. Collecting reviews and different feedbacks can translate into changes that improve the user experience while ensuring the rankings increase with them. This is the most natural approach to SEO ranking, focusing on user experience first, and then popular SEO tactics.
User experience can influence the accessibility of your website, its usefulness to SEO strategies, findability, credibility, desirability, and overall value of the website to your prospective clients. Ignoring the user experience in your SEO strategies and tactics is always a bad idea. Investing in developing a more convenient and suitable user experience for your potential clients will translate into more conversions and higher rankings on search engines.