Table of Contents
Your law firm website needs a regular inventory, examination and refresh from time to time, and this procedure is called an SEO content audit for your law firm’s website. Conducting a law firm website content audit involves evaluating each page on your website to decide what is working, what could be improved, and what needs to be totally reworked or deleted. The process of scrutinizing all of your website’s material takes time, but a content audit can produce a variety of benefits, including a healthier, higher performing website and greater marketing success.
Why Conduct an SEO Content Audit for Your Law Firm’s Website?
In the desire to improve your website, your first idea may be to write and share new material. However, once seen, this new material eventually becomes old and often buried under additional material that often repeats what was already said and forgotten. Conducting a regular content audit works like a good spring cleaning or a cluttered closet overhaul, trimming out outdated, neglected or duplicated content to make room for more effective material. Throughout the process, you can discover and improve the content which is not attracting visitors, check pages for dead links, and remove any obsolete material. Pruning outdated and untended content that inhibits site performance will keep visitors more engaged and bump up your standing with the search engines. Also – Law Quill now provides SEO Content Audits!
How to Complete an SEO Content Audit for Your Law Firm’s Website
There are a number of key steps in completing an SEO content audit for your law firm’s website, and they include:
- Examining your goals
- Taking a complete inventory of your website content
- Gathering data
- Analyzing data
- Taking action steps
- Planning future content
A total content audit may sound like an intense task, but there are tools to make the process easier. These can help you inspect what you have and decide how to improve it. These online tools include:
- Google Analytics is a prominent tool, used by many to discover how visitors are interacting with your law firm website. Google Analytics uses a variety of helpful metrics, allowing you to examine and improve your content.
- Ahrefs can assist you conduct a site audit, examine content, track rankings, and analyze your competition.
- Screaming Frog will help you discover SEO issues, understand results and target exactly what needs to be uncovered in a content audit. Reported to be novice-friendly.
- Shared Count gathers social data linked with your content and displays the count of your URL views, likes and shares.
- MySiteAuditor allows you to scrutinize your pages individually to determine their SEO results, reading ease and more.
- Marketing Grader uses a review grade to gauge the success of your marketing efforts, compares your site to the competition and offers tips for increased performance.
- DYNO Mapper creates a helpful content sitemap, simplifies your content audit process and enables you to use the data to plan future content.
Consider Your Goals
Although it can be a time-consuming endeavor, a law firm website content audit offers deep advantages for your website and business. It is a wise move to first examine your goals, which may include the following:
Attract More Traffic
- Choose topics that will reach your audience
- Identify content that will assist typical clients
- Create content that encourages social connections
Enhance SEO
- Recognize successful SEO pages
- Diagnose content for improvement or removal
- Examine and improve links
Improve Conversation Rate
- Pinpoint content that draws the most leads
- Determine which pages offer the best user experience
- Guide content for stages of conversion
Gather Data
A good content audit starts by taking a complete inventory of content. Using one of the tools listed above, make a map of your website content, which will help you eventually organize and assess all material. In the end, what is broken will be fixed and what is unnecessary will be removed. Once you have an overview of your website data, export it to an Excel document, where you can organize each page title, meta description and target keywords. Other metrics to examine for each page may include the following:
- Total page views
- Click through rate
- Bounce rate
- Search position
- Article length
- Keyword density
- Internal link totals
- Tags and categories
- Comment totals
- Social share totals
Survey and Evaluate Content
Once the inventory is complete, look over the data provided by the analyzer tool and add it to your Excel spreadsheet. Your content will either be kept, refreshed or removed.
Keep
If content is still relevant and performing well, you can retain it. Client stories, informative articles and FAQ pages may not require updating. Note on your spreadsheet which type of content draws the most traffic and keep this in mind for future material.
Refresh
Perhaps material could be improved to coordinate more fully with your brand, updated according to new local laws, or embedded with current statistics. Maybe an article could simply be lengthened to improve it, or two related articles could be combined. Inserting more effective keywords into existing content can increase traffic, and adding images or video can boost visitor engagement.
Remove
If content is duplicated by newer material, is obsolete, or it cannot be effectively updated, deleting it may be the best option. Remove material that refers to past campaigns and events, or information about your law firm that is no longer accurate. Take care to reroute any links in the material you remove from your website.
Take Action
After collecting data, and asking key questions, it is time to take action. Designate which pages should be optimized, fixed or banished. Make plans to add future relevant content where there are information gaps. Focus on these quick action steps for each page of your website:
- Give each piece of content a solid call to action — one that goes beyond asking for shares or comments.
- Include more images, video clips and subtitles, making your pages more compelling and giving an improved user experience.
- Decide how you will add regular content in the future that targets new topics, and if you will hire help to do this.
- Enhance stale titles and bland meta descriptions, and confirm that they reflect the actual material on the page. If not, improve these.
- Fix all spelling and grammatical errors.
- After publishing your revamped content, track user engagement and evaluate.
- Trim off content with care. Removing excess content can improve rankings, as long as you do not leave broken links in your wake. Make sure to redirect links appropriately to prevent 404 errors.
How Do You Conduct a Website Content Audit?
To conduct a website content audit, consider the following steps.
State Your Content Goals
Since completing an SEO content audit is a complex and lengthy process, setting clear content goals is essential for it to succeed. Start by thinking about your law firm’s goals. Then, think about how an audit can help your firm achieve these.
Create an Inventory
To complete your inventory, consider these steps:
- Collate the URLs. Create a list of all the URLs of the content you want to consider for the website content audit.
- Categorize the content. After gathering the URLs, use a spreadsheet to sort the URLs. You can categorize the content in various ways, including the content type, content format, content length, publication or modification dates, or author. Once you have done this, make sure you leave space to insert your metrics so you can then add data for each URL.
Collect the Data
The next step involves collecting and analyzing your content data. Typically, this involves using multiple sources, such as Google Analytics, to gather the data and then manually inserting it into a spreadsheet. Following this, analyze your collected data. For instance, from your analysis, you may determine that a web page is gaining lots of traffic but its bounce rate is very high. In this scenario, your web visitors likely want to read about the topic discussed but felt that your content did not address it adequately. From this, you can think about why this is the case.
Plan and Adjust
Once you have analyzed the data surrounding your content, create an effective plan for improving it. A good plan refers to your content goals and uses the conclusions from the data analysis. Start by looking at your goals and then prioritizing each content piece. Following this, craft a plan for each bit of content. Here are some examples of what you might include in your plan:
- Repurpose, rewrite, or update content.
- Add more to existing content.
- Restructure your content.
- Add videos or images.
- Adjust your metadata and update the CTAs.
- Change internal links.
Once you have decided on the steps to implement, make the necessary adjustments to your marketing strategy. Then, monitor these changes to see how effective they are. Due to constant changes in the legal industry, it is good practice to carry out content audits periodically.
What Should Be Included in a Content Audit?
According to MarTech, an SEO content audit is essential for determining the relevancy of your online content, whether it is accurate and search-optimized, and if it adopts the appropriate style and voice. To carry out an effective website content audit, ensure you include the following:
- Outline the content’s goals. This might involve gaining more traffic to your law firm’s website or improving your site’s conversion rates.
- Determine the focus of your content. For example, your site might focus primarily on blogs, infographics, videos, or other content.
- Group your content together. Use specific parameters to do this, such as authors, publication dates, or types of content.
- Collect your data. Using your goals and various metrics, collect relevant data and put it in your audit spreadsheet.
- Carry out data analysis. Look at your collected data and analyze it to determine the effectiveness of each piece of content.
- Plan improvements. Finally, make sure you include the steps you plan to take to improve your content after reviewing the results of your data analysis. Then, adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.
Law Quill can help you complete an effective SEO content audit and craft a great SEO strategy that can help you get closer to a number one Google ranking.
How Law Quill Can Help
Law Quill now provides on-site SEO audits! <– Click there to learn about everything you receive and pricing!
A law firm website content audit may seem like an overwhelming chore, but it carries serious advantages for your business. In addition to using analyzer tools, do not be reluctant to hire an expert to help you navigate the process, examine your results and plan for the future. The benefits of a law firm website content audit include improved website performance, enhanced user engagement, and hearty approval from the search engines. In turn, this leads to attaining the ultimate goal of increased website traffic, more leads and future clients.
We are here to help and would welcome the opportunity to visit with you for free regarding your website content! Schedule a free visit with us by scheduling a quick phone or zoom call at your convenience on our calendar today. You can also email us at support@lawquill.com
