Spring is the season of renewal. It is the time when most companies start looking at their digital properties and their offices and start sprucing them up. For digital marketing specialists, this is also a great opportunity to analyze your law firm website and make any necessary changes and improvements.
This is an ongoing process and spring is a great time to schedule it. After all, if everyone is spring cleaning their home, why not do the same to your law firm website? You want to make sure that your law firm website meets the latest ranking rules set by Google, as well as the current web design best practices.
Why Is Spring Cleaning Necessary for a Law Firm Website?
Your website is not a static entity. It keeps changing, growing and even getting rebranded or redesigned. This is something normal because your law firm evolves constantly and its brand image must reflect its new mission, goals, and status.
However, this means that a lot of elements within the website become useless or broken when these changes occur. Imagine that you are completely renovating and redecorating a house. You break a separating wall to create a bigger living room. But, somehow, the unnecessary door frame remains in place.
This is why you must have an annual checkup of the entire law firm website – both the visible part and the back end. Our digital marketing specialists know exactly what to look for and how to fix any problems.
The Most Important Steps in Spring Cleaning for Your Site
We approach this important task in an orderly manner. We use a checklist that covers the most important problems which may impact:
- Your SEO ranking
- The way users interact with your law firm website
- The full functionality of every part of the website.
This involves the following.
1. Eliminating Broken Links
A broken link appears when you change the URL of a web page, but the link used on other pages remains the old one. For example, you realize that a blog post does not have the main keyword in the URL. So, you change the URL.
However, you added a link to the blog post on another page of your law firm website. It could be another blog post, the About Us page or a lawyer bio page. If anyone tried to access the link from any of those sources, they would get an error message.
As part of the spring cleaning, digital marketing specialists will identify all these broken links and update them with the correct URL.
2. Removing Obsolete Information
Obsolete information is not only useless, but it can even have a negative impact on the trustworthiness of your law firm website. A simple example, in this case, is a blog post or news article discussing:
- A law that has since been repealed
- A bill that did not pass
- A legal topic that is no longer relevant due to legislative changes.
You may not be aware, but your field of activity is under special supervision by Google. The search engine company is paying specific attention to the content posted on websites dealing with:
- Health
- Finances
- Justice
- Employment
- Sales.
Formerly known as the “Your Money or Your Life” category, it includes law firm websites. Google is actively looking for false or misleading information and penalizes websites that publish untrue or obsolete content.
After removing the obsolete page from your site, our digital marketing specialists will use Google’s removed outdated content tool to remove the cached version – which Google may store for months otherwise.
3. Clearing Out the Clutter That Slows Down the Website
What kind of clutter can there be on a law firm website? The answer is – a lot. Here are some examples:
- Old web pages with obsolete content (see above)
- Large files – photos and videos
- Cumbersome code
- Unnecessary widgets.
Also, there are websites using more than two fonts for texts. This is not only confusing for the readers, but it also adds up to the clutter in the back end of the website.
Digital marketing specialists know that every pointless element will slow down the loading speed of your site. And this is already one of the issues that will reduce the SEO ranking of the site. Google is looking for sites that load fast, offer accurate information, and a great browsing experience to all users.
You can use this free Google tool to check how fast your site loads.
4. Sprucing Up Content
The content itself must not remain static. One of the first things digital marketing specialists will do is to categorize the content on your site into three groups:
- Evergreen content – topics that will always be of interest to potential clients
- Time-sensitive content – statistical data, special events, or news
- High-performing content – pages with a lot of visits from users.
Evergreen and high-performing content should receive updates on an ongoing basis. You can add new developments, new statistical data, or any other relevant and current information.
This is preferable to deleting the page to publish a new article because your law firm website will continue to enjoy the SEO equity of the original page.
5. Checking That the Website Is Mobile Ready
A mobile-ready website has several key characteristics:
- Responsive design – the layout of the site adapts to the size of the user’s screen
- Compressed images that load fast
- Large, legible text
- Simple navigation structure
- Links in contrasting colors to avoid tapping on them by mistake.
Our digital marketing specialists will use different tools to check if your site offers an optimal browsing experience on the most popular devices.
6. Updating Images to Reflect Your Brand Image
Finally, spring cleaning your law firm websites involves checking all images and replacing those that are no longer in line with your brand image. From the kind of message they convey to the color palette of the photos, we will make sure that everything on your site is consistent with the message you want to send to potential clients.
Let Our Specialists Make Your Law Firm Website Reflect Your Brand Values!
When you consider all the steps presented above, you realize that you do not have the time and even the know-how to handle them. But you do not have to worry about any of these aspects. The EverConvert team will do all the work.
We are experienced specialists in various disciplines, such as web design, web development, SEO, and digital marketing strategies. We will make sure that our spring cleaning work does not impact the usability of your law firm website at any time when potential clients are likely to browse it.
Don’t let your site look dated. Turn it into a source of continuous profits with the assistance of the digital marketing specialists at EverConvert!
