You’ve created your law firm website and you’ve perform some basic search engine optimization with Yoast or similar tools. However, your legal website is still not ranking well.
If this sounds like you, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will explain the five most common reasons law firm websites do not rank well in search engines, and provide you with potential solutions.
In case you need help with on-page SEO, we advise that you check out our detailed guide on free SEO, before you continue reading this article.
Now, let’s break down the five reasons behind your website’s low rankings.
By far the most common reason law firm websites do not rank well lies in the quality of their content. In fact, this is true for all types of websites.
According to online statistics, there are more than 1.5 billion websites on the Internet, covering each and every imaginable subject. Naturally, the number is expected to continue growing at a rapid rate in the coming years. This represents an astounding level of competition within each specific niche, including law firms and practices. In other words, it’s becoming increasingly hard to rank in search engines.
If you’re not ranking well, your first thought should be to improve your content. In most cases, you can easily do this by expanding your articles and supplementing them with additional resources.
Similarly, you can try making the texts more readable and understandable to the average reader. Avoid using highly specialized terms and assume your reader has no legal training.
If you’ve ensured that your content is high in quality and you’re still struggling to break into the top pages of search results, you may need to redo your keyword research, as explained in this article.
The most common mistake attorneys make is targeting high-volume, high-competition keywords too early. You may think that you will be able to snatch the attention of at least 1% of 10,000 people that search for a specific term each month. However, that’s rarely the case. Most likely, you will end up invisible on page 39 of the search engine results.
On average, you will be better off targeting low-volume and low-competition keywords. Once you start ranking for long-tail keywords, you can gradually transition to keywords with higher volumes and competition.
Another reason why you’re law website isn’t as faring as well as it can lies in outreach. Or better said, in the lack of outreach.
It’s not enough to write a quality piece, target the correct keywords and perform on-page SEO. If you want your website to fulfill its true potential, you will also need to perform some off-page SEO in the form of outreach.
Now, it’s true that outreach can be incredibly time-consuming, but it’s a long-term investment, and it does pay off. If you have never done any outreach or you need help revising your skills, we suggest that you check out this article for more details.
Consistency is one of the main reasons why more than 80% of websites are considered inactive.
Once you start posting regularly, it can be hard to maintain a schedule, especially if the results take a while to show. However, you should not lose faith.
If you put in consistent effort, your website will gradually climb the rankings. However, keep in mind that this may require a year, or even two or three. A successful website can’t be made overnight.
When you build up a knowledge base of 20-30 articles on your law website, you should aim to post once or twice a week. Anything more and you risk burning out early. Of course, the more the better, but it’s smarter to keep a consistent pace than release all of your content at once.
Most people are casual readers and they do not need daily updates, unless they’re truly important. In addition, the more posts you publish within any given time frame, the lower their quality will likely be. Instead, you should focus on fewer, more detailed articles instead of many shorter articles..
The last reason that may be slowing down your website’s growth is the lack of reader engagement. Your posts need to encourage your visitors and readers to engage with the content.
This is arguably the easiest problem to fix: you can usually improve reader engagement by introducing questions or requesting feedback from your visitors. Similarly, you should always reply to each comment that you get.
Taking things even further, you should consider inviting some of your regular readers and commenters to publish a guest post. It will help you build a more lasting relationship with your audience and encourage others to participate in the discussions.
In the end, don’t forget to set up a newsletter that will send email notifications whenever you publish a new post to people who opt in. Many people follow tens and even hundreds of websites on a weekly basis and it’s easy to forget about a website or two.
Naturally, you don’t want to a single reader to forget about you and that’s why newsletters can be essential for establishing a readership. While we’re on the subject of newsletters, feel free to join our newsletter to stay up to date with the latest posts on Small Firm Legal Marketing.
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