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Digital marketing begins with search engine optimization, and optimization begins with on-page and technical SEO.

In other words, if you create a law firm website and decide to start marketing and offering your services online, you will need to fully optimize your website to see any tangible results. Now, we have already explained how you can perform SEO to make your law firm’s website more search engine friendly in our previous blog posts.

Today, we will cover the technical part of optimization and explain how you can better structure your website to allow search engine algorithms to access and rank it more easily.

If this sounds complicated to you, it’s because it is a bit complicated. Proper technical optimization often requires a developer working alongside marketing experts. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t do the technical SEO on your own without any outside help.

It’s possible to technically optimize your website without spending a dime. But it will require a lot of time and effort. We suggest employing a full-time marketing expert to deal with technical SEO if you want to get the best results in the shortest amount of time.

If you’re not in a hurry, you can play around and perform your own technical SEO. This article will explain how to perform free technical SEO for law firms and optimize your firm’s website for search engine algorithms.

Specify your domain name

Now, you might be thinking: what’s this all about? I’ve already select my domain name, this doesn’t apply to me.

If you’ve created a new website for your law firm and set your domain, chances are your website actually occupies two variations of your domain name. Namely, the https:// and the https://www versions. While it’s useful to redirect users to your domain in both cases, you should select one of them and make it your primary domain name.

By default, Google assumes that these are two different websites. By selecting a primary domain, you’re telling Google and its algorithms that these are actually not two separate websites.

Luckily for you, this process is pretty straightforward. Simply log into the Google Webmasters with your account and enter your domain variations. Then, select the one you prefer under Site Settings.

Bear in mind that there is no significant difference between the two variations. It’s all a matter of personal preference.

Make your law firm’s website fully responsive

Website responsiveness is no longer optional.

Your law firm’s site must be adaptive and function well across all platforms. Especially on mobile phones and devices.

Nowadays, nearly 60% of Google searches come from mobile devices.

With that in mind, Google is introducing a mobile-first ranking index, which means your law firm’s website will slide down the rankings unless you follow their updates and make your site fully responsive.

Make sure that everything looks good on mobile phones and that all content is displayed properly. You can use any number of browser extensions and add ons to check out how your website looks on other devices.

Then, simply change your firm’s website and its content so that it looks better on mobile devices, even if it means having a slightly poorer desktop view.

Optimize your URLs

Another way to technically optimize your websites includes URLs. This step isn’t hard either; all you have to do is edit the permalink under the page or post title to make it more SEO friendly.

For the best results, try to implement the following advice:

• Keep your URLs short and to the point
• Remove dates from URLs
• Avoid stop words, e.g. to, at, on
• Use your target keywords
• Do not overuse your keywords
• Stick with lower-case letters

Activate SSL on your law firm’s website

This is another simple step that you can make to optimize your legal firm website. However, it may require a small investment on your part.

When you add SSL to your website, your domain switches to HTTPS (instead of HTTP), which signals its security and improves its ranking power to Google algorithms. Moreover, it tells your visitors that you encrypt all data.

To install an SSL certificate on your website, contact your hosting provider with a request. This process is similar to site migration and it may cause temporary downtimes.

Implement Schema tags

The final step is arguably the hardest and the most time-consuming. However, it’s usually a one-time process and it pays huge dividends in the future.

To help search engines analyze your law firm’s website, you should introduce structured data and implement Schema tags on your websites.  This means you will need to delve into the code, but the coding changes that you need to make are relatively simple.

Here is how you can optimize your website using structured data:

• Go through the Schema list of tags
• Open a page or a post
• Enter the code of the page/post
• Introduce the tags to relevant places (e.g. titles, headings, images etc.)

Luckily, you can implement Schema tags once and forget about it. Unless you make significant changes to your website structure, you will continue to reap the benefits of structured data for as long as your website exists.

Of course, there are other ways you can improve your technical SEO, but most other methods may only be advanced users, and we will leave that for another blog posts. For now, you can optimize your law firm’s website by simply following the five steps outlined here.

If you’re looking to perform on-page website optimization as well, don’t forget to check out our article on the best free SEO techniques.  And if you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO company to handle your firm’s digital marketing, check out our review of BluShark Digital.