For law firms actively adding content to their website
Rate your firm 1-5, 1 being very poorly and 5 being very well

1. 1. Does the website have a new blog posted every week?
   2. Are you aware of the traffic and leads being produced by content?
   3. Do you have a dedicated geographic/city page for cities around the main office location?
   4. Are SEO On-Page best practices being done on all practice area pages (H-tags, external/internal links, keyword density, etc.)?
   5. Do main practice areas have extensive content, including answering the most common questions (pages are often over 1,500 words)?
   6. Do you have dedicated FAQ pages for each main practice area?
   7. Are you tracking how content is performing on analytics software (like Google Analytics) as far as content, time on site, bounce rate, etc.?
   8. Are you utilizing tools and resources to verify the content you’re producing has search volume and user intent?
   9. Are you tracking what content on your website has naturally received backlinks?
   10. Is unique meta information is written for each page/blog on the website (meta title/description)?
   11. Is the content is formatted well to keep readers engaged (embedding images, videos, infographics, bulleted lists, easy to navigate, etc.)?
   12. Have you verified that all content is being crawled, via Google Search Console, manual searches, and/or an updated sitemap?
   13. Are you running a plagiarism check periodically to make sure you aren’t copying other website content too closely, in addition to other websites not copying you?
   14. Are you repurposing content for e-books, guides, social media, and other platforms?
   15. Are you tracking the conversions of pages to know what pages are generating leads, and using heat maps/user flow to check how people interact with the page?

If you answered 3 or below:

1. 1. Does the website have a new blog on the site every week?

Consistency with your blog is key – your blog is your go-to for generating ongoing content that answers the main questions your potential clients are asking. For assistance with getting on top of your blog, and finding the time and topics to execute, check out the following link:

Reference: https://www.marketmymarket.com/why-having-a-thorough-content-strategy-is-essential/

1. 2. Are you aware of the traffic and rankings being produced by content?

It is essential to have a basic understanding of what your hard work is producing. Pages of content with high traffic can indicate what work you’re doing correctly that you can emulate for other pages. Pages with lower traffic and rankings have opportunities to be reoptimized so they can perform better, especially for pages you created with the main intention of generating organic leads.

1. 3. Do you have a dedicated geographic/city page for cities around the main office location?

Most service-based websites have something along the lines of an “areas we serve” section, so it is a great content opportunity to create dedicated city pages for each city (typically for cities with a population of 10,000 and higher) within a 10- or 20-mile radius. In some instances, it can even be as many as 50, and this strategy is applied for any office location you have. In light of COVID-19, some law firms are taking this strategy statewide since clients are aware of legal services being conducted remotely.

Reference: https://www.marketmymarket.com/10-types-of-content-you-could-execute-right-now/

1. 4. Are SEO On-Page best practices being done on all practice area pages (H-tags, external/internal links, keyword density, etc.)?

This is the framework of on-page optimization for your content — one of the core factors for your pages getting the visibility they need online to generate traffic. There is essentially a checklist of best practices that should be applied to every piece of content you create, from a practice area page to a blog. If you want to know more about the process for properly optimizing the content on your website, please refer to the following link:

Reference: https://www.marketmymarket.com/beginners-guide-to-on-site-optimization-in-2021/

1. 5. Do main practice areas have extensive content, including answering the most common questions (pages are often over 1,500 words)?

As we’ve seen for years, it seems like the minimum word count for a good page has increased exponentially. Remember when the target word count for blogs used to be arbitrarily 350 words? Now you can rarely get traction without writing 800-1,000 words or more.

Reference: https://www.marketmymarket.com/10-reasons-your-on-page-content-isnt-working/

1. 6. Do you have dedicated FAQ pages for each main practice area?

Answering questions should be a pivotal role your website has, and so every opportunity to do so (and implement proper FAQ Schema information) is a prime opportunity. FAQ pages often get quality traffic, and the enhancements they can have on SERPs helps people choose your website over the others.

1. 7. Are you tracking how content is performing on analytics software (like Google Analytics) as far as content, time on site, bounce rate, etc.?

Besides traffic reports, you want to know how the content itself is performing, or in other words, how people are actually engaging with your content. If your time on the page is low and/or the bounce rate is high, that can signal that there’s something that isn’t keeping the reader on the site. This can range widely; anything from the mobile experience, font size, time to load the site, and even the actual quality of the content produced can affect performance.

1. 8. Are you utilizing tools and resources for verifying the content you’re producing has search volume and user intent?

Do you write a lot of your content for the sake of writing content or because your competition happens to have the same material, and you want to emulate what you believe works for them?
It is important to use SEO tools to verify if the content you’re writing actually gets search volume each month and contains keywords that a potential client may use when searching for a lawyer.

1. 9. Are you tracking what content on your website has naturally received backlinks?

When we produce content that is more informational (as opposed to focusing on qualified traffic that will hopefully generate leads), we also want to make sure we are getting the other benefit from creating great content: backlinks. It should be commonplace for you to occasionally use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to see what links you’re gaining (and losing) over time to gauge how much authority you’re building naturally.

Reference: https://www.marketmymarket.com/why-is-link-building-vital-for-seo/

1. 10. Is unique meta information written for each page/blog on the website (meta title/description)?

It’s easy for us to overlook creating a custom meta title and description, especially when we have websites with SEO tools. Still, it is crucial to make sure customizing these is a priority. It is important not only for SEO purposes, but also for how your web page appears in search results.

1. 11. Is the content formatted well to keep readers engaged (embedding images, videos, infographics, bulleted lists, easy to navigate, etc.)?

It’s important to keep visitors to your website on your website interacting with your content for as long as possible. To do this, people expect your pages to be engaging and dynamic. Including some of the elements listed above can significantly increase the length of readership.

Reference: https://www.marketmymarket.com/defining-quality-content/

1. 12. Have you verified that all content is being crawled, via Google Search Console, manual searches, and/or an updated sitemap?

Having a site structure that allows bots to crawl your site easily is as important as anything when it comes to search engine rankings. If you want to appear in a search engine, you need to be indexed. It’s as simple as that.

For effective indexing, your website needs to have a sitemap. Sitemaps help search engines discover and crawl the pages on your site. A well-structured sitemap will make your website searchable by all search engines, offering users the most accurate and up-to-date search results when using keywords associated with your content. Additionally, submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console is important because it is essentially hand-delivering your site’s information to Google’s crawlers.

1. 13. Are you running a plagiarism check periodically to make sure you aren’t copying other website content too closely, in addition to other websites not copying you?

Regularly doing duplicate content analyses are a great way to ensure that all the content on the site is unique and original. Maintaining unique content will provide your pages/posts with the most ranking potential, as Google tends to penalize duplicate content and disregard it within the search results. This will affect rankings and overall SEO, which is why it is always essential to check for duplicate content on your site periodically.

Reference: https://www.marketmymarket.com/content-need-know-plagiarism/

1. 14. Are you repurposing content for e-books, guides, social media, and other platforms?

While it is tough to say the exact shelf-life of a piece of content, it goes without saying that there is almost always an opportunity to repurpose an outdated piece of content for something else.

Within the world of Digital Marketing and SEO, something you wrote last month may be completely irrelevant today. However, this does not mean that, just because a piece of content is outdated, it is no longer usable. There are great opportunities to repurpose old content for ebooks, guides/checklists, social media, and other platforms as well. The possibilities for repurposing content for creating new material is seemingly endless and should be a focus in any kind of content marketing strategy.

Reference: https://www.marketmymarket.com/a-quick-tutorial-on-repurposing-content/

1. 15. Are you tracking to conversions of pages to know what pages are actually generating leads, and using heat maps/user flow to check how people interact with the page?

When it really comes down to it, the most essential website metric measure of success is conversions. While it is great if a lot of people visit a page and read the content within it, the key factor is whether they are interacting in terms of converting within the end of the user journey.

Setting goals and measuring them is vital for identifying the primary converting pages. By having this information, you can focus efforts on increasing traffic to said pages, which will produce more conversions and leads in the long run. Using heat maps/user flow within programs like Google Analytics allows you to measure, test, and analyze many different everything from what people are clicking on to where they are spending their time within the site. This provides the ability to improve overall design, functionality, organization of the site, and overall SEO strategy.