Your website or blog is critical to your online legal marketing efforts. It’s got to be clean, well-organized and accessible. Take the time to do some housekeeping to maximize your search engine results.
In order to engage in online legal marketing you need to understand search engine optimization, that nebulous field that deals with maximizing your search engine placement and visibility. Without at least a minimal grasp of search engine optimization, your online legal marketing will never be as effective as it can be. Period. After all, how can you do something really well unless you know how to do it?
Remember that online legal marketing means attracting people to your content, keeping them involved, and educating them about how you can help. As a result, you become a trusted resource and more likely to get a particular client as opposed to another lawyer.
One of the important search engine optimization factors you need to know about is the use of links on your website. Links between pages on your site as well as links that go to other sites are useful not only to the search engines, but to your readers as well.
When someone visits your law firm website or blog and sees a link, they’re going to click it. If that link takes them somewhere else on your site, you’ve kept them interested and engaged. More interest and engagement leads to a greater likelihood that your online legal marketing efforts will lead to a paying client. Paydirt, baby!
That greater level of engagement also serves to reduce your site’s bounce rate, one of the visitor engagement metrics that’s so important to search engines when determining how and where to rank you. I’ve already talked about how to lower your bounce rate, and why doing so is an important facet of your online legal marketing strategy. Lower bounce rate means better rankings in the long-term.
Though external links don’t do much for your rankings, broken ones tend to annoy visitors. Ever go to a website, click a link and find out that it’s busted? That sucks, and you’re less likely to visit that website again. As the owner of the site, your online legal marketing efforts have been wasted if you lose a visitor because of something as simple as that.
On the pure search engine optimization front, you need to realize that the spiders are constantly looking at your site and making sure all those links work. If they do, everyone’s happy. But if they don’t, the spiders are decidedly unhappy. It looks like you’re falling down on the job, delivering a less-than-optimal user experience to visitors.
And if the search engines think you’re doing a bad job then your rankings are going to suffer. Bad rankings mean bad rate of online legal marketing return.
These are the reasons why you need to check your site for broken links, and do so often. The tool I use is a free web-based on called the W3C Link Checker. The tool will go through your entire website or blog and report back on any broken links. If there’s a problem, you know where to look for it – and fix it immediately.
So check those links with this free tool. Your wallet will thank you.
I use a WordPress plug-in that goes by the catchy name of broken link checker. It appears to do the same thing in the background.
I use a WordPress plug-in that goes by the catchy name of broken link checker. It appears to do the same thing in the background.