SEO best practices are constantly evolving. If you want to keep your website running at optimal performance, you need to regularly evaluate its status through an SEO content audit process. Planning, conducting and evaluating an SEO content audit may sound time-consuming, but it will ultimately pay off when your website continues to perform well — or performs better.
An audit allows you to closely examine your site’s content, design, and the user experience it provides. Not only can you decide what new content and features you need, but you will also have the opportunity to revise or remove content or features that just do not work anymore.
The Parts of an SEO Content Audit
Completing an SEO content audit for your law firm’s website involves a number of critical steps, including:
- Evaluating goals
- Inventorying your website
- Collecting and analyzing data
- Removing or refreshing content
- Planning new content
Evaluate Your Law Firm’s Goals
To perform a comprehensive SEO content audit on your law firm’s website, you need to evaluate your business’s current goals. If you are stuck, start with the basics, including increasing website traffic, improving SEO performance, and boosting conversion rates.
In terms of directing more traffic to your site, consider the types of topics your potential clients may be interested in. Those topics will likely revolve around your clients’ common pain points. You also want to consider creating content that encourages interactions, so it is more likely links to your website are shared.
Inventory Your Site
To enhance your SEO, start by ensuring you are up to date on the current best practices. Consult SEO experts to determine which content on your website could be hurting your rankings. This is also the time to look at your internal and external links. Remember that your internal links should tie content together, and your external links should refer to credibly sourced information.
Improving your conversion rates can be tricky. Start by using a tool like Google Analytics or Ahrefs to determine which content on your site brings in the most traffic. Depending on the topic, you may be able to add supplementary content or related blogs that you can link appropriately. Google Analytics can provide insight into how many visitors interact with your website and its content. At the same time, Ahrefs can help you track your rankings and keep an eye on what competitors are doing.
Collect and Analyze SEO Data
Now it’s time to collect concrete data. With the tools mentioned above, you can map out your website content and begin to organize your content into categories to keep, revise or remove. You might consider exporting your data into a Google sheet or Excel document to organize it by page title, keywords and meta descriptions. Consider including these additional data points:
- Article length
- Bounce rate
- Click-through rate
- Comment totals
- Internal link totals
- Keyword density
- Search position
- Social share totals
- Tags and categories
- Total page views
Once you have organized your content into keep, revise and remove categories, it is time to start making your changes.
Keep, Revise or Remove
If you are not sure what to keep, look at what is performing well, including blogs and practice area pages. Webpages including testimonials, FAQs and attorney biographies may not need to be updated.
In terms of the material you are revising, first, determine why. Is the content outdated or irrelevant? Does it contain inaccurate facts or statistics, or dead links? For content that needs a complete rework, do your research to make the piece as accurate and evergreen as possible. You might consider including new local laws or updated statistics. You may also decide to lengthen shorter blogs and landing pages to boost keyword usage and, hopefully, ranking. It is often advisable to include images or videos to make your website more engaging for visitors.
Finally, it is time to remove the remaining content. Start by getting rid of any content that seems duplicative to newer material. There may be content that cannot be updated because it is related to past events or outdated information about your law firm. If you are removing pages, remember to consider your linking strategy. You do not want to accidentally break or change a link and end up with a bunch of dead pages.
Plan for the Future
When it comes to planning future content, there are few limits to what you may be able to cover. Depending on the area of law you practice, you should be able to publish law-related, relevant content that would benefit your readers.
If you are thinking of adding new practice area pages, you may want to consider the pillar strategy. Pillar content starts with a primary practice area page, like car accidents. From there, you break that down into subsections, like DUIs, distracted driving, motor vehicle laws in your state, and so forth. You can also develop related blogs that can link back to those pages to increase the potential for page views.
With all new content, remember to include a solid call to action. You want to quickly convey how you can help visitors with their legal issues. Always have a contact link so they can quickly and easily learn how to reach out for more information.
As you publish new content, track its performance. If you know how your content is performing as time passes, your next content audit may not need to be as in-depth.
Improve Your Content, Improve Your Website
In running a law practice, you are likely juggling clients, cases and much more. You may not think you have the time to run a full-scale SEO content audit on your website. However, that audit could provide insight into areas you never even thought of improving.
As you conduct the audit, you may learn which content pieces are working and which are not. When you remove outdated or inaccurate content, your new, informative and user-friendly content has the opportunity to shine.
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