Law Firm SEO Audit Importance & Strategy: A Must-Read Guide 

Why conduct a law firm SEO audit when you can execute a new SEO plan and move on? This could be the idea in most people’s heads. Unfortunately, SEO doesn’t work that way. Every website needs a thorough audit to identify and fix issues that may hinder growth.   

SEO audit will expose you to the untapped growth opportunities your law firm website has. That is why agencies like LawFirmSEOExpert take website audits seriously. You can contact the agency for a professional SEO audit to identify and fix issues preventing your website from  ranking high and getting more organic traffic.  

Here, we’re going to discuss the meaning of SEO audit for law firms, its importance, and valuable tips. Read on!

What Is Legal SEO Audit

Here is a simple question. Where do you go when you feel sick or want to know your health status? You go to the hospital for a checkup. Similarly, if your website isn’t growing as expected, it will require a health check (website audit), too. 

The only difference is that a doctor does the checking at the hospital, while a SEO specialist does the website audit. So, if your website isn’t performing as expected, contact an SEO expert to audit and recommend a solution to the problem. 

The doctor may request you perform a series of tests to know your health issues. Medical doctors will only prescribe a drug or draft a treatment plan after identifying what is causing the illness. 

Similarly, an SEO expert must conduct a thorough website audit before implementing any strategy. This usually involves checking the content, page load speed, mobile-friendliness and other areas. 

Now, what is a law firm SEO audit? It involves a comprehensive examination of a law firm’s website to ascertain the issues hindering the site from ranking high and getting more traffic despite all the SEO efforts invested on it to change its fortune. 

An audit gives the SEO expert a complete knowledge of your website’s performance and exposes strategies that aren’t yielding results. 

It is not advisable to execute an SEO plan when you haven’t conducted a proper website audit. This scenario is similar to treating a patient without conducting the appropriate tests to ascertain the cause of the sickness.  

Your website may be in good shape or terrible shape. It is only possible to tell once you conduct a proper audit. 

How Effective Is Legal SEO Audit?

Having an attractive website is not enough. The question is, are you getting organic traffic (visitors)? Is your search ranking improving? Are you getting clients online? 

If the answer is no, then you certainly need a proper SEO audit. Even websites recording improvement in traffic and ranking need SEO audits occasionally. When you audit a website, you’ll discover more ways to improve its performance. 

The main goal of search engine optimization is to improve search ranking, organic traffic, online reputation, popularity and client base. Of course, any lawyer who is investing in search engine optimization wants positive ROI. 

So, any good SEO strategy should include a comprehensive audit of the law firm’s website. That is the first thing to do before implementing any optimization strategy.  

Most of us like to brush our teeth before eating. The taste buds improve when you brush before eating. Similarly, when you audit your website, the chances of any new SEO strategy yielding results would increase. 

A Handy Tip: Search engine optimization isn’t a one-off effort. Likewise, an SEO audit shouldn’t be a one-off thing. You don’t necessarily need to audit your website daily. Just keep monitoring your website and SEO strategies.

If the website’s ranking or traffic doesn’t improve after putting in effort for a while, conduct an SEO audit to ascertain what the problem is. 

What Makes A Lawyer SEO Audit Important? 

Now that we have explained the meaning of SEO audit for law firms, let’s discuss its benefits. 

1: Audit reveal weaknesses in your SEO strategies:

In this context, the weaknesses refer to issues hindering your law firm’s website from thriving online. These are issues preventing search engines from rewarding you with improvement in search ranking or organic traffic. 

A thorough SEO audit will reveal weaknesses hindering your law firm website’s progress online. It could be slow load speed, broken links, duplicate content, or other issues plaguing your site. 

No matter your SEO strategy, your website won’t make significant progress if these issues or weaknesses persist. You must address the issues before Google or other reputable search engines can start taking you seriously. 

Certain weaknesses can have a massive impact on a website. For instance, a site with a slow load speed can’t deliver a positive user experience, a huge factor in search ranking. 

So, with a comprehensive SEO audit, your law firm expert will be able to identify issues hindering your website from growing online so that you can fix them. This makes website audit a must-do for every website. It doesn’t matter your firm’s size or niche.   

2: Competitive analysis:

When conducting an SEO audit, a professional SEO agency will not concentrate on your website alone. Instead, the individual will analyze your competitors’ websites to understand how yours is  performing. 

Now, you can see why SEO auditing is time-consuming and tedious. You must have an eye for detail and experience to identify lapses in an SEO strategy. 

Auditing is time-consuming and tedious because you’re analyzing your competitors’ websites and yours to understand your website performance. If there are lapses or opportunities, you’ll spot and rectify them. 

An SEO audit will help you spot issues with your website and fix them before they become too big to address. 

Competitive analysis involves checking different components of your competitors’ website. Of course, you can’t check the backend of your competitors’ websites. You can only check the keywords they are targeting and ranking for, backlinks (number of backlinks, sources of backlinks, etc), average length of content, quality of content, style, image usage, and others.

The idea is to identify the things your competitors are doing differently so that you can implement them together with the strategies you’re already using. This will give you a better chance to outrank your competitors and improve your website’s organic traffic. 

3: SEO audit help your website stay updated:

Google’s algorithm is constantly rolling out updates. So, an SEO strategy that worked yesterday might not have the same impact today. 

Many websites are displaced from their positions on SERPs when Google rolls out its algorithm updates. However, those not adhering to SEO best practices get hit the hardest. 

The constant algorithm changes Google rolls out occasionally is one reason website owners must request SEO audits occasionally. Reports show that Google made over 5000 changes to its search algorithm in 2021. 

While some search algorithm changes aren’t a cause for alarm, some are significant. You’ll find website owners running helter-skelter when some algorithm changes hit their websites and displace them from SERPs. 

Besides seeking an SEO audit from a trustworthy provider, law firms must ensure the agency they hire to handle their SEO project adheres strictly to SEO best practices. Ensure the agency uses white hat SEO strategies so that when Google algorithm changes strikes, you won’t suffer massively. 

A regular SEO audit will show you the impact each Google search algorithm change has on your website. Then you can map out a plan to reclaim your position in the search engine from the audit report.

4: Improve user experience:

Search engine optimization isn’t all about making a website search engine-friendly. It is risky to think and treat it that way. Your content and everything about your website should please users and search engines. You can’t please one and not do the same to the other. 

Improving your website’s load speed, mobile-friendliness, page layout, navigation, and others will help improve user experience on your website. Google and other reputable search engines don’t joke with user experience. They won’t hesitate to reward a website with a positive user experience. 

Through SEO audit, you’ll be able to identify areas of your website you can improve to deliver a positive user experience. Occasional audits will also ensure you consistently have a positive user experience. 

SEO Audit For Law Firms: Key Strategies To Improve Law Firm Website 

The main focus of an SEO audit, or the reason why agencies conduct it, is to ascertain issues hindering a website from growing. Once those issues are gone, your website’s chance of getting more organic traffic and improving search ranking increases. 

Here, we will discuss what to expect in a law firm’s SEO audit. 

1: On-page SEO Audits:

On-site SEO audit involves ensuring that your content and web page are well-optimized. Here are ways to conduct an on-page SEO audit:

• Audit title tags to align with SEO best practices and improve the site’s conversion potential

• Audit the meta descriptions to improve clickability

• Analyze internal linking for gaps, proper clustering, and anchor text

• Audit images for alt text to align with SEO best practices

• Check keyword usage. These include the placement, density, and search intent

• Analyze outbound linking for descriptive anchor text and the right frequency 

• Check for header tag issues such as keyword richness, aesthetic tagging, and proper nesting

• Recommend redirects where idea

• Check web pages for URL optimization opportunities

 2: Backlink audit:

Backlinks are one of Google’s primary ranking factors. They give Google the idea that your content is valuable. 

What matters most in link-building is quality rather than quantity. Note that five or less high-quality and niche-relevant backlinks will have more impact than one thousand poor-quality backlinks. 

The source of your backlinks matters a great deal. Google considers it when rating the quality of your content and link profile. And keep in mind that backlinks sourced from spammy websites will harm a website. 

Backlink audit is crucial to maximize the benefits of your link building campaign. Auditing will give you an idea of the type of links you have and let you know if they are worth disavowing. 

Here are the processes involved in backlink audit. 

• Audit the anchor text of your backlinks to ensure keyword richness and balance between do-follow and no-follow links.

• Evaluate referring domains for authority, relevance, and spamminess

• Evaluate backlinks to spot gaps based on your competitors’ backlink profile

• Recommend poor-quality backlinks to be disavowed

• Create a list of backlink opportunities you need to take advantage of

Lawyer SEO experts conduct backlink audits to ensure that clients get maximum benefits from the link-building campaign. Link building is a tedious task. So, it’s unnecessary to waste time building poor-quality links that won’t significantly impact your website. 

Through backlink audit, an experienced SEO agency will help your law firm draw up a robust backlink-building plan. 

Also, remember, you’ll conduct backlink audits on your competitors’ websites, too. The idea is to understand the sources, and quality of their backlinks, and how you can make yours even better. 

3: Technical SEO Audit

While a lawyer may conduct most of the audit without assistance, technical SEO is a different ball game.It is a different procedure that can confuse a person without knowledge or experience of technical search engine optimization. 

Technical SEO audit is essential for any law firm that wants to thrive online. The audit required will improve user experience and make the website search engine friendly. 

A search-engine-friendly website is a site Google search engine can easily crawl and index.

Here are the processes technical SEO audit entails:

• Identify 404 errors and provide solutions

• Check Google Analytics to ensure the right setup and data collection

• Check the site’s mobile-friendliness and fix it (if necessary)

• Check for crawlability and indexability problems with the website and fix them

• Evaluate page load speed and Core Web Vitals

• Check schema for errors and develop appropriate schema to implement   

• Find out the 5xx errors and proffer solutions

• Examine the site’s technical architecture 

• Conduct log file analysis 

• Analyze the site’s meta robots, XML sitemap, robots.txt, and hreflang for issues and fix them.  

• Audit site for proper canonicals

4: Content audit:

Content is king in the digital world. You cannot optimize your website without content. 

Law firms looking to thrive online need quality content. Google and other reputable search engines will push valuable content to the top position in SERPs over poorly written content. 

Google can detect poor-quality content via different means, including bounce rate. A high bounce rate indicates that the content on your website is valuable. Search engines know visitors won’t spend much time-consuming content or navigating from one page to another if the quality of the content on a website is below par. 

So, a content audit is vital for law firms that want to thrive online. Through the audit, SEO experts can learn about a website’s non-indexed pages, the performance of all web pages, and others. 

Here are the steps involved in the content audit. 

• Audit content for E-E-A-T signals

• Evaluate the organic performance of each web page

• Update web pages based on findings from the audit

• Identify non-indexed web pages

A Handy Tip: Content audit can have a massive impact on your website’s performance online. Through the audit, you would know if there is a need to conduct fresh keyword research, develop a keyword strategy, strategically place the keywords in the content, and incorporate internal links. 

You can change a lot in your website to improve search ranking and organic traffic. But first, you must conduct a thorough audit of your website to ascertain the issues hindering your website’s progress.

If you know the problems holding back your website, you can create a targeted SEO strategy that would address the issue and positively impact your website. 

5: Local SEO analysis

If your law firm boasts a physical location, local SEO should be one of your most important strategies. As a law firm, you need an office. Legal matters require face-to-face meetings between a lawyer and a client. So, your clients will visit your office to discuss their issues and know if there is any substance in their cases. 

Now, here is the simple fact. The majority of your clients would come from your domain. They’ll come from your city, community, or state. Only on rare occasions will you find a lawyer from California being flown to represent a client in another state. 

People who can pull this type of thing off this are rare. Most people would instead hire a lawyer from their community, city, or state. 

So, local SEO is essential if you have a physical location, which is vital for a law firm. 

Optimizing your website for local search will ensure you appear in the SERPs of local clients. This may lead to more phone calls from potential clients and online and foot visits to your law firm. 

Another way to do local SEO is to add your business to Google Business Profile. Set up your GB profile professionally and incorporate your keyword correctly. 

A Handy Tip: Don’t add any keyword to your business name. Google is against that. Instead, write your business name correctly. It should be the same as on other platforms.

A local SEO audit involves checking your Google Business Profile and other online directories where you listed your business. The aim is to ensure the details provided are accurate and that your profile is well-optimized. 

If the information on your law firm’s GB profile doesn’t tally with what is on other platforms, Google will decide against ranking your law firm. So, ensure your details are accurate. These include your name, address, phone number, and other information on your profile.  

What are the benefits of registering your law firm with Google Business? The benefits are numerous. For instance, adding your law firm to Google Business automatically allows your business to be featured on Google Maps. 

You can add your hours of operation, images of your business, and other information on your Google Business Profile. Include information to help potential clients learn more about your company and quickly contact you.

You can also solicit reviews on your Google Business account. Ask your satisfied clients to review your law firm to showcase your services to prospects who need an assurance before hiring you.

Reviews are an excellent tool for law firms or businesses to build strong social proof. Many people have reported that they read reviews before patronizing a brand. 

Every legal client wants the best lawyer on their case. No one wants to hire a lawyer they have doubts about. Legal issues cost money and time. So, anyone hiring a lawyer with their hard-earned money would want the best person for the job. 

That’s why your law firm must appear on search engine result pages of potential clients so that they can find and contact you. Most people prefer to search for lawyers online. So, if you want potential clients to find your law firm online, invest in SEO. 

Conclusion

Law firm SEO audit should be an integral part of any optimization strategy. It should come before you implement any new SEO strategy. 

An SEO audit will help expose you and the SEO agency handling the project to the challenges hindering the website’s ranking and traffic from improving. It will also help in the creation of an effective SEO plan, and you’ll discover strategies you’re using that aren’t yielding the best results. 

So, hire a proven legal SEO expert to audit your website and recommend strategies that will enable you to succeed online. A thorough website audit will help improve user experience, a de-facto ranking factor important in search engine optimization.