If you’re on the pursuit for better search engine visibility for your law firm website, you likely know that SEO – search engine optimization – is what will help you reach your digital marketing goals. For most, it’s understood that to achieve sustained SEO for your website you need to have written content that is high-quality and easy to find on search. But, what about all the technical aspects of SEO that are considered “under the hood” when it comes to having a successful website?
In this blog, we will be outlining the technical website must-haves that contribute to your law firm website’s success with search engine optimization and how, with LawLytics, you can reach your digital marketing goals faster and easier.
Technical Website Must-Have #1: Accessibility
Web accessibility makes your firm’s website content more accessible for your potential clients as well as search engines. By helping search engines better understand your written content, you are helping them deliver it to your potential clients through search and improve the overall searchability of your web pages.
So, what does your website need in order to meet the standards of web accessibility? First, your website needs accessible contact forms. Effective web forms tend to accomplish more than just one objective for your practice. Beyond their basic intention to help potential clients get in touch with you, an optimized web form can keep you more organized, deliver invaluable data points about your leads, and help you to drive more business to your practice. Contact forms for your website should be quick and easy to create, customize, and label so that your potential clients can discern what is being asked for.
Next, your website needs to have adjustable text sizes for better accessibility. Depending on the preference of your web visitor, the text on your website should be easy to resize without diminishing the readability of the content or degrading the function of the page.
Your website also benefits from alt text fields. These fields provide your web visitors and search engines with written information about the images and video on your website. This can help with both the accessibility and the searchability of your web pages.
Another web accessibility feature your website needs is a color contrast tool. Good color contrast allows all web visitors to see your website regardless of their device, the lighting of their surroundings, or any visual impairment.
And finally, your website needs to have semantic HTML. Semantic HTML or semantic markup is HTML that introduces meaning to the web page rather than just presentation.
With LawLytics, your website comes preloaded with the following website accessibility elements:
✔️ Accessible contact forms
✔️ Adjustable text sizes
✔️ Alt text fields
✔️ Color contrast
✔️ Semantic HTML
Technical Website Must-Have #2: Page Speed
Page load speed refers to how fast a page loads once it is requested in a browser. While this can be dependent on your web visitor’s internet speed and quality, there are certain elements on your website that can come into play as well. For better search engine optimization, it’s important that your web pages are fast-loading for all web visitors across all devices.
In order to achieve optimal page load speeds for your website, there are a few necessary elements at play. One is geographic caching. Geographic caching involves temporarily storing your law firm’s website on servers in different geographical locations in order to reduce the time it takes to render it for a web visitor.
Next, image optimization comes into play to aid in faster page load speed. Images often contribute to the overall size of your web pages, and can make some pages load slower than what is ideal. As a rule of thumb, all images on your website should be compressed and optimized to achieve faster page load speeds.
Lastly, your website needs to have a streamlined code base to get faster page load speeds. The HTML code on your website can, if not properly monitored and maintained, become “bloated” with nonessential data that can impact the performance of your page speed. Using code that is as compact as possible can improve rendering performance in web browsers.
With LawLytics, your website meets or exceeds the standard for core page speed elements, including:
✔️ Geographic caching
✔️ Image optimization
✔️ Streamlined code base
Technical Website Must-Have #3: Site Security
Site security refers to the efforts taken to protect a website from predatory actors and breaches such as unauthorized access, data theft, and cyber attacks. Your potential clients and search engines both take website security seriously, and it is an important factor for your website’s SEO.
To have adequate site security, your website will need to have an effective system for detecting and mitigating cyber attacks. A secure website also requires firewall protection. Firewalls protect against outside attackers by intercepting malicious or unnecessary traffic before it reaches the network. This helps to prevent sensitive information that may pertain to your clients from leaving the network as well.
Next, periodic security audits should be performed on your website to ensure the protection and security of your data. It’s imperative that security audits are routinely performed for your website to review infrastructure, data touch points, and development processes.
A security certificate protects the integrity of your website and encrypts any client communications – an important factor of your overall website security. They also work to signal to search engines that your website is trustworthy, and as such, can impact the visibility of your website on search.
For strong site security, it’s also important to have effective spam protection to guard your website from unwanted or malicious form submissions. Finally, your website needs to have strong CORS policies for optimal site security. CORS is a browser mechanism which enables controlled access to resources hosted outside your domain, such as images and videos.
With LawLytics, your website is fully protected:
✔️ Attack detection and mitigation
✔️ Firewall protection
✔️ Periodic security audits
✔️ Security certificate
✔️ Spam protection
✔️ Strong CORS policies
Take the guesswork out of SEO with LawLytics
When attorneys use LawLytics, they discover that SEO is simple, affordable, and sustainable. With features like our SEO Snapshot, members can review their website’s optimization, learn more about what their website needs to succeed, and explore optional optimizations they can make to help their website’s visibility in search.
If you’re currently a member of LawLytics and would like to know more about how your website is equipped for search engine optimization, please reach out to support. If you’re not yet a LawLytics member and would like to know how we can help you increase the visibility of your law firm online and drive more business to your practice, schedule a 20-minute interactive demo with a product expert.
