Redesigning your law firm’s website can be time-intensive, expensive and likely frustrating and difficult. It can even leave those within your firm with hard feelings due to different beliefs regarding the future of your firm. Should your firm decide to take the re-design plunge, the SEO firm should be involved right from the get-go. If your firm has a sound SEO strategy in place, it can definitely make a difference in internal firm debates, allowing you to choose the best platform, programming language and layout. Having your SEO firm involved early in the firm’s redesign can also alleviate the possibility of additional development work following the launch of the new site. If your legal firm doesn’t already have an SEO firm, now is the time to choose one—preferably one that can communicate effectively with your website design company.
Optimization vs. Compliance
While most web development firms will extoll their abilities to produce search engine sites, don’t confuse this with SEO. While it is true that web development firms can certainly create an SEO-compliant site, they are likely not going to be conducting true site optimization for your law firm. Although there are exceptions, there are few development firms which have the capabilities to conduct more sophisticated market and keyword research or to find weaknesses through conducting analytics reviews. What your web development firm can do is create a basic SEO compliant site and perform basics which include ensuring search engine compliance by creating web friendly code. On the flip side, your SEO firm should certainly be able to supply a standards manual which will enable SEO compliance.
How to Utilize Your SEO Firm During Redesign
Of course your law firm’s specific SEO budget will dictate their level of involvement in your web redesign, but unless you are using Joomla, Drupal or WordPress, you need to make sure your SEO reviews your content management system to make sure nothing is blocked. A review of your CMS platform by your SEO company is a pretty simple and inexpensive task which can ultimately save your company literally thousands of hours. The SEO firm will also review your finished templates for compliance to the standards manual guidelines. As far as content optimization goes, the SEO firm will want to thoroughly review every one of your law firm’s traffic-driven pages to ensure they have integrated keyword research and are optimally positioned. Most SEO firms will simulate spider crawls and check for broken links before the site goes live, and this final review is really important to the overall success of your website. Oftentimes companies don’t even know there are serious problems with their website until it is late in the game.
Questions to Ask Before Taking the Plunge
Search engine optimization is both an art and a science, and is absolutely essential in positioning your law firm’s website in the search engines with the highest-ranking keywords. There are questions you should discuss prior to re-designing your firm’s website, the most important being to ask what the problems with your current site are. Even if you, or even everyone in your firm is tired of the look of your legal website, that’s not necessarily a reason for a re-design. The more important question is how your clients and potential clients feel about the website. Consider a survey or poll on your website to garner some feedback—even though your clients probably aren’t professional web designers, even the “Average Joe” can usually spot a bad website. Don’t update your site just because you think you should do it once a year, like you do your spring cleaning at home. Consider your goal. Is it to increase traffic, improve conversion rates, or reduce bounce rates? The answers to these questions make a huge difference in not only whether you should redesign your website, but how you should structure the redesign. Make sure you have goals that are measurable, or you will be right back in the same position this time next year.
What Effect Will a Redesign Have on My SEO?
If you have specific problems with your legal website, resist the temptation to overreact. It’s quite possible that the perceived problems can be fixed with optimization rather than a full-blown design. If so, all the better. Certain changes you may decide to make in the design of your legal website can significantly impact your search traffic, so it’s a good idea to have your SEO firm take a good look at the overall picture before you begin. Site redesigns are notoriously long and laborious, so make sure you have some safeguards in place; will you maintain and optimize the old website while building a new one, or will it languish in neglect? Finally, if you are planning drastic changes to the design of your law firm’s website, you need to know that things may get worse before they get better—change is difficult, and clients may be confused by your new layout. As long as your firm considers all aspects of changing your website design before beginning, you should have smooth sailing.
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