Easy Tips On Website Architecture for Law Firms

Guide for Planning An SEO-Friendly Law Firm Website Architecture

Organizing your pages is a crucial aspect of Lawyer SEO and user experience. An organized and well-planned law firm site architecture makes it easy to navigate, explore, and discover information.

Law firm websites used for digital marketing are likely to have many pages. Aside from your homepage, you might have dedicated landing pages for areas of law, an "about us" page for your profile, your contact information page, and many others. Among those pages might be linked to others, and so on.

Since there are so many, you need to make sure they're organized for site visitors and search engine crawlers alike. Whether you're on a fresh law firm website builder or reworking your entire site structure, you need to follow a few helpful tips to make the venture easier.

A Brief Intro To Site Architecture

Website architecture refers to the way your online pages are organized, from your home page to landing pages to your most recent blog post. In short, it has a lot to do with page hierarchy and the relationship of pages with each other.

Lawyer SEO factors that are affected by law firm site architecture include:

• UX. Google places a premium on user experience because they want users to keep using their browsers. They want you to maintain your website as fast and easy to browse as possible so that users have a positive experience. If your site isn't speedy and easy to navigate, they will not place your web pages at the top of the SERPs.

• Crawlers. "Spiders" or "crawlers" do rapid crawling from one online page to the next, making copies of your pages and storing them in an "index." Then, when a user searches for a specific keyword, these "spiders" quickly scan this extensive index for the most relevant websites and show the best ones at the top of the results for people to click and discover.

• Authority. Your website architecture can build high or terrible link authority across your site, depending on its structure. Remember to add internal links to your high-priority pages, such as your home page and other category or catalog pages. The more internal links pointing to these essential web pages, the more search engines will recognize them as authoritative pages that should be well-ranked.

Again, architecture is essential to your law firm's web design for its aesthetic and usability and its ability to affect your rankings. As it affects your entire digital marketing strategy, these are essential factors to note whether you're building your law firm's website yourself or hiring law firm website design services to do it.

Law Firm Website Architecture Tips To Keep In Mind

That said, let's look at some actionable tips to help you organize your site pages:

Tip #1: Planning

First, think of the pages and information you want on your law firm website. Next, you should list all the pages, links, and information you want on your website.

For example, your law firm might be experienced in both personal injury and employment law, and you might want two separate landing pages for that. You might have a pro bono program and need an accessible landing page for it. Or, you could be working on an electronic newsletter and need a landing page to send potential subscribers.

Of course, every law firm is different, so you might need more or fewer pages than others. However, planning out your pages is better than just tacking some on later. This is why many revamped websites don't just add new pages but they restructure the whole thing.

Tip #2: Determine The Hierarchy Of Importance

After listing your pages, the next thing you need to do is to determine which pages are the most important. The easiest way to do this is by creating a tree graph, so you can quickly identify which pages are important and which are related to each other.

For example, you could have a landing page for a personal injury law, then have sub-pages linked to different areas of personal injury (i.e. car accidents, catastrophic injury, dog bites, etc.)

Remember: the higher a page is in the hierarchy, the more it is deemed more important to rank. In standard practice, homepages are at the top of the hierarchy.

Tip #3: Mind Your Internal Links

Links to pages are how crawlers or spiders determine the most important page on your law firm's website. Your internal linking structure is also a way for users to navigate your site, adding another user experience element to them.

By specifying your hierarchy, you're basically telling crawlers where and how to crawl your website. Again, using the same example from earlier, homepages often get the highest priority because they have the most links pointing back to them.

Remember: Links and anchor text are used as descriptions of pages it's pointing to. This is how crawlers get a context of what the page is all about.

Consult Your Law Firm Web Design with LawyerLeadMachine

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To get started on Lawyer SEO and other digital marketing solutions for law firms, consult with our experts now.