How a Law Firm SEO Audit Helps Your Growth

An SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of your law firm's website and online presence that identifies areas for improvement to enhance search engine optimization. This can include anything from technical problems like loading speed and broken links to content deficiencies, missing or redundant pages, and more.

For a thorough, expertly conducted audit by an established SEO provider, turn to Grow Law Firm. We leverage cutting-edge SEO tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to gather and analyze data, ensuring that our recommendations are backed by concrete evidence and industry best practices. Furthermore, we don't just provide a one-time audit report. We help our clients effectively implement our recommendations, providing transparent reporting and personalized guidance along the way.

Not convinced yet? Let's go more in-depth on SEO audits.

Does Your Law Firm Need an SEO Audit?

The answer is yes for any law firm looking to boost search visibility and attract more clients online. An audit will uncover any issues that may be preventing your site and pages from ranking well organically. An SEO audit:

• Assesses your online visibility and competition. It analyzes how well your most important legal service and location pages currently rank for targeted keywords. It also identifies your top competitors for those terms and how their SEO strategies differ. This competitive research helps you find white-space keywords to target and leverage strategies used by others in the legal industry.
• Establishes an SEO baseline and benchmarks. Once complete, an SEO audit provides metrics like page speeds, backlink profiles, keyword rankings, and more as a baseline for your law firm's SEO effectiveness. You'll understand where you stand currently so future SEO strategy can be accurately measured against that baseline. Benchmarks help ensure your efforts are pushing progress in the right direction.
• Ensures technical SEO best practices are followed. An audit checks that your law firm website meets best practices for on-page SEO and off-page factors so that search engines like Google and Bing can properly understand and index your site.

5 Things a Law Firm SEO Audit Checks

Building online visibility through SEO for law firms requires assessing a few key metrics. The assessment data allows you to better understand what's helping and hurting your online visibility. You can get data about your law firm's:

• Metadata
• Website performance
• Rankings
• Content
• Links

— Bad Metadata

The metadata of a law firm's web pages provides information to search engines to understand and index the page content properly. This includes the title tags, description meta tags, heading tags, and alt text on images. Badly optimized or missing metadata makes it difficult for search engines to analyze what the page is truly about. As a result, the page may not rank well for relevant legal terms or get passed over entirely.

For instance, if the title tag is too long, vague, or lacks targeting keywords, searchers will have little indication on the search results page if that listing is relevant to their legal query. 

Part of our SEO audit process involves meticulously analyzing every web page's metadata for compliance with best practices. We will identify any issues like missing or vague tags, provide recommendations, and then work with your team to implement the necessary updates.

— Poor Website Performance

Users have very low tolerances for waiting, so search engines consider page speed an important ranking signal. If your page loads too slow, prospective clients are more likely to abandon your website before ever taking a real look through it. Even a second or two of delay can compromise valuable user engagement and form submission conversions. Slow sites also tend to see increased bounce rates as visitors click away in frustration.

For search engines, crawling and indexing sluggish pages is an inefficient use of resources. They may opt to skip over slow pages. Speed has also become a direct ranking factor. This penalty can hurt a law firm's attempts to rank for its location, practice areas, and critical legal terms.

In our comprehensive law firm website audit, we analyze your site to pinpoint the specific technical issues slowing things down, such as image resize bottlenecks, large JavaScript files, inefficient hosting, or lacking browser caching configurations. Then, we work to implement the necessary fixes like lazy loading, minification, asset optimization, caching setups, and infrastructure changes. 

— Low Rankings

Low rankings are understandably concerning for any law firm hoping to attract potential clients through organic search engine traffic. When relevant legal terms, practice areas, location pages, and case studies fail to achieve top results, potential qualified leads become missed opportunities.

There are several reasons why your Google rankings may be lackluster. 

• You have outdated content that isn't regularly refreshed or lacks target keywords in the actual text. 
• Technical SEO issues like slow page speeds and duplicate pages spreading thin link equity. 
• Over-optimized pages or weak backlink profiles.

Our SEO audit dives into keyword research, backlinks, technical issues - anything that could be holding positions back. We'll identify the specific weak points through local SEO, on-page, off-page, and competitive analysis. Then, our dedicated SEO strategists use the data to execute fixes, whether through new relevant blog posts, link outreach, technical optimizations, or campaign-level changes.

— Content Duplicates

When search engines detect substantial portions of reused text on a law firm's website, they may consider some pages unnecessary and less valuable to users. As a result, the site's overall authority and rankings can suffer. Content duplicates split your site's semantic "weight" and capabilities to rank across relevant keywords. They make your messaging less focused and prevent pages from carving out clear niches. 

Duplicate content also risks algorithmic penalties if various pages compete in ranking for the same keywords. Google may choose to rank a single unique version and ignore repetitions.

Our auditors thoroughly scan all pages to detect duplicated or highly similar text passages. We analyze related groups to advise you on the best organization of topics and the most unique value propositions per page. Then, we work with you to merge duplicate pages or rewrite sections to differentiate content offerings. 

— Toxic Links and Poor Interlinking

These two technical aspects deserve close attention during an SEO audit. When search engines detect heavily low-quality, unnatural, or automated links in a site's backlink profile, it can raise red flags and potentially trigger the penalties of search engine algorithms. 

Toxic links from domains with negative site-wide issues like spam, malware risks, and unanswered complaints indicate a suspicious association. Over time, these links may unintentionally contribute to lower rankings due to a low-quality reputation transfer.

Furthermore, a law firm's internal linking structure provides clues about topics and how pages relate. If the navigation lacks logical in-content links between case studies, practice area pages, location details, and more, then it creates an unnecessary separation that search engines interpret as distinct micro-topics rather than facets of a cohesive legal website. This wastes opportunities to redistribute topical link authority more widely.

We carefully analyze your backlink profile, and remove any low-quality, irrelevant, or unnatural-looking links to improve your online reputation. We then provide a full linkage audit report with insights and a strategic plan to optimize internal links, creating a more natural information architecture that benefits searchability and rankings.

SEO Audit Opens a Growth Roadmap for Law Firms

While technical checks are important on their own, the audit process really serves as the first step in developing a more comprehensive strategic roadmap. As we gain a deep understanding of a law firm's online presence, Grow Law Firm can then leverage our proprietary marketing assessment tool to analyze opportunities across additional dimensions that expand the benefits of SEO. This includes evaluating paid media performance, review generation, site experiences, and messaging/branding effectiveness - providing actionable insights into untapped potential.

We work with law firms to craft multifaceted strategies incorporating SEO, paid search, local listing optimization, and web design to streamline campaigns. This integrative approach to SEO work ensures every dollar of your budget goes toward promoting your legal services, lead generation, new case acquisition, and revenue growth over the long term.

Schedule Your Grow Law Firm SEO Audit

As we've discussed, conducting regular SEO audits should be a core part of any online legal marketing process. They not only reveal technical issues holding your site back but also lay the foundation for strategic growth plans.

When you partner with our SEO agency, Grow Law Firm, you gain a team of experts fully dedicated to your long-term SEO success. We've helped countless attorneys and firms optimize their online presence, guiding them toward measurable increases in leads, cases, and revenue. 

Contact us today to get a solid SEO strategy that brings in organic traffic.