You are most likely aware that SEO is one of the fastest changing fields in digital marketing. To succeed in law firm SEO, you need to know the right marketing techniques and stay up to date on software updates that can affect client behavior. You may be reading this blog early in the year, or it might be the end of November and you want to know what you missed. Either way, knowing what to expect can assist your digital marketing in 2017 and onwards.
Voice Searching Can Gain Traction
It has been almost a decade since smartphones were introduced to the general public, but many people are still struggling with touch screen keyboards. Consumer voice recognition software is not advanced enough to type out something as intricate as this blog post. However, it works well enough to recognize simple commands and search queries. This is why smart watches, smart home devices, and even smartphones make use of voice search technology. For law firm SEO, this means planning and drafting out content that sounds more natural. Consider how someone searches for a local restaurant. In Google search, a customer would most likely put in a query like “Restaurant near me” or “New York Restaurant.” With voice, there is a higher chance that the user will phrase the query as a question, like “What is the nearest restaurant?” or “Where can I find an attorney?”
Speed Over All
According to kissmetrics, the majority of internet browsers will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. A faster loading time isn’t just for Google ranking bots anymore; the potential client is paying attention too. To help smaller law firms, Google itself introduced the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMPP), which simplifies HTML coding to improve website load speeds. If you are unsure about your law firm website’s load speed, Google’s pagespeed insights can load a free report.
Google May Crawl Mobile First
Many smaller law firms make the mistake of focusing how their site looks like on a desktop without considering the smartphone aspect. To reflect the customer trend of mobile traffic overtaking desktop traffic, Google is likely to start crawling mobile versions of websites before the desktop versions. If the web design for your mobile site is poor or nonexistent, the speed or aesthetics of your desktop site may end up not mattering.
One of the most effective ways to generate online leads for your law firm is building organic traffic through popular search engines. To help keep your eye on core SEO elements, contact us at Market My Market today for a consultation on how to improve your digital marketing performance.