The reality of law firm marketing is that it takes months of effort to start generating leads. That said, you can make small changes in your law firm website that can produce significant benefits in the long run.
Check on your Code
You don’t need to be a computer science major to tweak the basics of your code – more precisely, your HTML code. Many free tutorials on HTML basics are available online. HTML is a simple programming language that plays a significant role in your SEO results, and it only take around an hour to learn the basics. When Google is ranking your website, it reads your text, images, videos, and more through HTML. When you have images or headers without the right keywords, the absence can harm your SEO score. Meta titles and descriptions – which are the blue links with short text blurbs underneath that show up on Google – are also determined by HTML.
Launch Your Sitemap
A sitemap (or XML file) is a type of page that Google uses to “crawl” through each page on your website. Without a sitemap, Google is more likely to miss or ignore pages that may be essential for your law firm SEO efforts. If you’re not sure how to build a sitemap, you can do so with the help of free tools. WordPress websites have many plugins available that build sitemaps with the click of a button, and non-WordPress sites can create maps with xml generating software. Once you have your sitemap file you can submit it to Google to help slightly improve your SEO and making it easier for search engines to detect when you add content to your pages. A sitemap also makes it simple for Google to inform you of any linking or loading errors it finds in your website.
Fix Your Page Speed
When your website is loading slow, you are punishing potential clients by wasting their time. The Google page ranking software places high value in page loading times, as it is one of the most noticeable things that can impact user experience. Luckily, page speed insights can tell you just how fast your website is and gives advice on how to improve. Most of the time, the fixes are as simple as reducing the file size of your images. Once you apply the improvements, you can request Google to re-crawl your website.
These quick fixes alone won’t take your law firm website to the top of search results, but they can complement your long-term marketing efforts.
