How To Improve Site Structure For SEO

Lawyer SEO Website Structure Best Practices

Your law firm's website is going to be your online calling card. Therefore, it has to feature everything clients want to know about your law firm, including who you are, what you do, and what you can offer them. When you need to present that much information, you might struggle to think of ways to organize them.

Why Is Site Structure Important For Lawyer SEO?

The main reason why you should have a well-structured site is to give your users the best possible experience. So even if site structure had no bearing on Lawyer SEO, you'd still want to work on it for the sake of your site visitors.

Whoever comes to your site should be able to quickly locate the information they need. A user should always know where they are on your website and can see how they can get to other pages within your domain.

Proper site structure can affect user interaction and generate leads from your website. You don't want users to abandon your site because they're confused or frustrated.

Remember: The way users experience and interact with your domain reflects on your SEO ratings. For example, if users leave right after clicking to your pages or traffic drops because people are trying to avoid your site, it can affect your rankings in the search engines.

5 Tips On Improving Site Structure On Your Law Firm's Website

1. Plan Page Hierarchy

Decide which pages are the most important. In a previous post, we discussed the most important pages on your website, and those include your home page, about page, contact information, service offerings, and blog.

Setting main pages does not mean you can't add more. Instead, you only need to set up your most important pages and create subtopics and related pages under them.

Not only is this great for organizing your website, but it also allows you to tell search engines which of your pages to focus on. You can do this by using your internal links to imply page hierarchy—the more links pointing to a specific page, the more important it is in your domain. For example, homepages tend to be (and rightfully so) the most important page on most websites.

2. Use Internal Links

In a previous post about internal links, we discussed how they could be used to tell users and algorithms where everything is.

Use internal links to encourage users to read your content backlog, visit other pages, and navigate the site. Additionally, search engine crawlers follow every link that's on your website, so you can use them to tell bots where things are and what they are.

Internal links also establish the relationships between your pages. This includes their relevance to each other and the difference in their level of importance.

3. Create A Site Map

Site maps allow users access to every page on your website from anywhere they are on your domain. So instead of going to the homepage each time, site maps enable users to quickly jump around wherever they want to.

Remember: The best user experience is when nothing impedes the site visitors from experiencing your domain. Small details like easy access and convenient navigation can really encourage people to stick around.

The easiest way to make a site map is to either put links to the very top or the very bottom of each page (or both). Of course, make sure your important landing pages are there, but you should also add a few commonly visited pages, so users don't have to dig around.

4. Avoid Drop-downs

Search engines index links and phrases that can be found in the search results. Drop-down menus make it more difficult for bots to identify and store data since they use languages like JavaScript. If your data isn't indexed, it won't show up when people search for it. This hasn't been a problem with other navigational tools.

In the end, the decision is yours to make. Drop-down navigation menus might be helpful in some cases, but in today's mobile-first environment, you might want to think about other solutions for your law firm's website.

5. Organize URL Structure

Another way to organize your website is to create a logical URL structure. You can use the same format as you did when deciding on page hierarchy.

For Example:

You might want to create a law firm website URL structure that looks like this:

https://www.sampleurl.com/personal-injury/car-accidents

Again, you don't have to do it the exact same way, but formulating an excellent URL structure makes it easier to manage current links. Additionally, it also makes it easier for you to decide on URLs for pages you might want to add in the future.

What Can LawyerLeadMachine Do For You?

Lawyer SEO involves several moving parts. You have to manage both on-page and off-page SEO, manage existing tasks, and update strategies as algorithms, search volumes, and industry norms change. When done right, SEO can drive traffic to your law firm's website.

To get started on your SEO, you can review your options here.