Not Terribly Technical Tools for Your Law Firm Website
If your firm has a website, you know that “set it and forget it” will not get you much return for your investment. There are a lot of tools that can help you understand if your website needs a tune-up or if it needs an overhaul to help you put your best foot forward online. Before you seek help from your website designer or marketing agency, here are some tools to help you investigate areas for improvement with little technical knowledge.
Speed Bumps
If your site does not load quickly, you may lose visitors. How quickly should it load? Less than 3 seconds (which may still seem long on a mobile device). The Google PageSpeed Insights is one of many sites that test how fast your site loads and provides suggestions to make the page faster. What causes a webpage to load slowly? The usual culprits include redirects, scripts, scrolling (slide) images, or your webhost. In addition to possibly losing a potential client, slow page load speeds can also negatively affect your search result rankings.
Health Checkup
If you want to get an overall audit of your website, there are a few tools that can help you. Ahrefs measures site health by crawling the site and identifying all the key errors within the site. You can get a trial version for $7. It provides search traffic, backlink profiles, SEO health score with issues flagged, and much more.
A key part of basic website optimization is using good meta tags for title, description, and images. HeyMetadata can show you quickly where you are missing opportunities to let search engines and social media sites know more about your website. It even gives you copy and paste code to add to your header code (or have your site designer do so for you).
The Website Grader shows a score for your website, divided by performance, SEO, mobile and security. It breaks down each section into specific elements like “permission to index” “responsiveness” and secured HTTPS. You can get free 15-minute lessons on how to improve these issues. Website Grader is a HubSpot tool.
While most website owners know to run (and review) Google Analytics, Google also offers the Google Search Console. The Google Search Console provides tools and reports to measure your site’s search traffic, fix issues and optimize your site for Google search results. You can see which queries bring users to your site, submit your site map and individual page URLs for Google’s search engine crawler, and receive email alerts when Google identifies issues on your website. There is a URL inspection tool that shows you how Google indexes your pages. There is plenty of free training on how to use the Search Console. Google has even more free tools to help you get the most exposure on Google.
Know Your Keywords
Content and keyword are how people find your website. Surfer SEO is a content auditing and creation tool. With this tool, you can audit specific pages of your website in relation to target keywords and it will tell you exactly what you need to add to your content to maximize your ranking. There is 30-day free trial; then pricing starts at $59 per month.
Ahrefs has a tool called Keywords Explorer. You can search words like “adoption lawyer Raleigh” and see what else people are searching and develop a list of target keywords for your pages.
Want to see what is buzzworthy on the web? Looking for a la moment ideas for a blog post that gets people’s attention? Try Google Trends. For instance, type in “covid vaccine mandate” to see interest in those keywords by state or region, related topics, related queries, and overall how those keywords are trending. Then you can target your content to be responsive to those trends. You can filter results by date, category, and type of search.
Traffic Patterns
Want to see how people navigate your site? What do they click on when they land on your home page? An inner page? Tools that provide heatmaps help you understand how users behave on your website, where their eyes are drawn, which links get the most activity and more. Then you can alter your page design to make it easier for people to get to the information they are looking for on the site. You can also create A/B tests to see if moving a link or button to a different location makes a difference in the user experience. If you are using Google Analytics and have the GA code installed on your site pages you can use the Page Analytics heatmap extension for Chrome to see your heatmap. Or checkout Crazyegg with a free 30-day trial.
Any search engine marketer or web developer will tell you how important backlinks are to your search engine rankings. Backlinks are links from external sites (referring domains) to your website. Google and other search engines use backlinks to establish a “vote” of confidence for the content on your website. The more authoritative the referring domain the more the search engines view your site as reliable. Backlink building takes time and simply going out and requesting links will not get you too far. Start building great content now if you want more backlinks. In the meantime, you can see where your site stands in terms of backlinks. Not all backlinks are good. If you have spammy backlinks or those coming from countries like Russia or Brazil, you can disavow those links through the Google Search Console. Want to quickly check your backlinks? Try the Moz Link Explorer for free (you will need to create an account and there is a limit to the free search).
Editing Tools
Everyone needs editing help. Webpages, blog posts and content that contain spelling errors, erroneous capitalizations, lengthy sentences, poor syntax, undefined acronyms, and more make a poor impression. While there is no substitute for good human editing and a second pair of eyes, there are some free and low-cost tools that can help with a first pass.
If you are using WordPress for your website, you can install the Yoast plugin. The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin helps identify dead links, suggests keywords for SEO optimization, gives previews for sharing on Twitter and Facebook, and scores your content based on sentence length, grammatical structure, and more. The plugin is $89 for 1 site for a year for premium, although if you want to see how it works there is a free version with fewer features.
Grammarly is a browser extension that checks for spelling, grammar, and punctuation for free. However, the Premium version also suggests tone adjustment, sentence rewrites, word choice, and more for $12 per month. You can try it for a month or two and see if it helps improve your writing.
If you tend to write your copy in MS Word before you post it online, check out WordRake. While intended as a style editor for briefs and other legal documents, WordRake undoubtedly can assist in making your website content clean and clear.
WordRake for MS Word on Mac or Windows is $129 for one year.
If you are a Microsoft 365 user, there is the new “Editor” tool. Editor goes beyond grammar and spell check to review your document for clarity, conciseness, formality, and punctuation conventions. Once you have finished checking the document, you will receive a score, which includes ratings for the Flesch Reading Ease and Grade Levels.
If you want to see some artificial intelligence in the mix, check out Word Rewrite. You can add Editor to your web browser through an extension so it makes suggestions for content improvement you write in WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace or any website editing tool.
Writing for the web may be a very different type of writing for many attorneys. Follow blogger Bob Ambrogi’s suggestions for writing better blog posts, which applies to any copy you may have on your website.
Accessible
You want to make sure that at the least your site uses <alt> tags to describe graphics so they are available to screen readers for accessibility. If you are not sure if your site is using these tags you can test with the Chrome extension Announcify (screen reader).
You can also check your website’s accessibility with the WAVE (web accessibility evaluation tool). You want to make sure that your website is accessible to all your visitors. Lainey Feingold, a disability rights lawyer, has written here and here about why you need an accessible site, and how to work with your designer to accomplish this.
Conclusion
The more you can do to optimize your site, the more authoritative your site is, the higher ranked it is, the more likely you will get potential clients on your website – where you control the content and experience, versus having potential clients get distracted by other listings and ads in directories and online referral sources. While it is certainly worth the expense to hire an expert to help, you can get some insight into your site with some free and low-cost tools to be an educated customer.
Catherine Sanders Reach is director of the NCBA Center for Practice Management.