It’s necessary to perform a law firm content audit on a regular basis to review your website’s weaknesses and strengths. Conducting an audit will help you see how your website’s content is performing so you can make the needed improvements.
If the content on your site is not driving traffic, it can trigger two major problems. These problems result from maintaining and adding low-quality content or using collateral that does not align with your legal practice’s objectives.
Therefore, if your content is of a lower quality, Google will perceive your site as being inferior as well.
In its blog, Semrush states that you can’t begin an audit without asking two salient questions. Therefore, when preparing for an audit, you need to first think about your firm’s objectives. What are the advantages of a content audit for your firm? What, exactly, do you want to accomplish?
Replacing Content that Does Not Drive Traffic
If your content does not drive value for your legal practice, you need to replace it. After all, if the content is not aligned with your practice’s objectives, it really isn’t serving your needs professionally or financially.
Also, it’s important to remember that even well-written content can lose value if it becomes outdated. After all, laws and legislation changes over time, so older laws no longer apply and therefore are no longer useful to your site.
If new lawyers step into the arena or incumbent lawyers upgrade content, it affects your content or may lessen its value as well. That is why you cannot overlook a law firm content audit for your website. Doing so means the difference between falling behind online or improving your online reputation.
The legal field is hypercompetitive. If you’re not auditing your content at least annually, you should start doing so now.
What Content Law Firm Audits Include
When online marketers audit content, they look at three key metrics:
- How much traffic the legal site receives, or the amount of traffic per page
- How much the legal firm receives in organic traffic
- The number of backlinks on a page
The above metrics do not necessarily relate to the value of the content on your site. Instead, they normally are used to measure marketing activities.
To assess the quality of hte content, you have to extend your audit to reviewing the number of “high-quality” backlinks, the number of conversions per page, and the amount of revenue conversions a page gets.
Backlinks are the links that link from another site. Therefore, their quality is assessed by the popularity of the site from where they originate.
Semrush further defines linking as internal and external. While internal links point from one page to the next on your website, external linking points to a page on another website. You also want to make sure these links coordinate well with the content on your site.
While traffic information tells you about the popularity of your content, the conversion and revenue data show how your readers relate to the material. Therefore, breaking down this information for a law firm is essential to revenue earnings and growth.
For an online marketer to do this, they need to check leads and revenue, and establish conversion goals in Google Analytics. This can be complicated, so you need to work with an online marketing agency to ensure an increase in your earnings potential.
The Primary Benefits of Conducting an Audit
To further understand why a law firm content audit is necessary, it’s important to look at the primary benefits. Once an auditor receives market details, he or she can also proceed to correct your site’s deficiencies.
This type of assessment may take from several hours to as long as a couple months. It depends on your website’s features and the scope of content. At the conclusion of the activity, you’ll gain a keener insight into the elements of website development.
As noted, an audit is primarily helpful in addressing issues with your website’s content. This will help you check performance issues, fix broken links and improve site access. Not only will the fixes increase the search value for your website, they will also make your site more user-friendly.
Inventorying the Information on Your Website
An audit will also help you identify opportunities for repurposing content. When your content is of a high-quality, it lends to increased usability, visitor loyalty and search engine ranking. It also allows you to diagnose gaps in content, as it gives you an inventory of the information on your site.
Identifying Content Gaps
While you may have to improve the content you already have, that does not mean you have to start from scratch. However, for any voids you find, you’ll need to pinpoint what new content you’ll need to add. This new content should be written to increase your brand identity.
The audit will also determine the quality of the content, which is assessed as high, medium, or low. Auditors check the basic character of the content as well. Is it generally light and shorter in duration or long and rich in nature?
Crawling Your Website: Avoiding Repetition
Google’s website crawlers will pick up content that is repetitive or lacks quality. If this happens, your site will be penalized in the search engine rankings as being inferior.
A content audit can also be used to improve the structure of the information you provide. While your content may be strong, it may not be helpful and accessible to your clients. Online marketers who perform a law firm content audit use specific analytics to help Google and your audience find content more easily.
Therefore, the main goal of performing an audit is to ensure that a law firm showcases a broad framework of content that is useful and in alignment with a law firm’s goals. The activity allows marketers to find out what content to eliminate, reorganize, repurpose, optimize, or create anew.
This may mean a revamping of a landing page or recreating more informative blog posts or videos.
Who to Contact
If you have not had a law firm content audit, you need to find out about the process now. To get started, contact an online marketer that can audit your site and follow up with the necessary improvements. To begin the process, call Attorney Online Marketing at 888-992-9529 today.
