As evidenced by those rather corny Public Service Announcements from the early '80s (à la Have you hugged your kid today?), we oftentimes need to be reminded of the obvious. Instead of hugging your kids, however, the message we as law firm marketers might need to hear is Hug your website! That is, let’s give our websites a little attention via a periodic site audit.
A website audit, performed annually, encourages you to slow down and take time to pore over each page, ensuring your firm’s site is healthy and happily performing all of the tasks required.
While certainly not exhaustive, the following list can help you identify some of the key areas of focus should you venture forth and conduct your own website audit.
Practice Area Content. When was the last time you read the content describing your firm’s areas of practice? While not quite as popular as the attorney biography pages, the practice area pages describe your firm’s services and provide search engines with solid, searchable content.
Have your firm’s practices changed, either expanding into new areas or consolidating in others? While we tend to jump on the opportunity to add new content to our sites—new attorneys, new practices, etc.—removing old or outdated content can often be overlooked. You may have a description of a niche service within a practice area that was tied to one attorney. That attorney moved on; did the content?
Reading practice descriptions may sound as entertaining as reading the phone book, but you could be surprised by new ideas that may surface when you read the content again. You may have new terms of art to incorporate into the language, or it may become apparent that you missed some search-friendly terms in the last round of edits.
Perhaps, looking at the pages afresh, you realize that the lengthy paragraphs might be better presented as condensed bullets. Keep in mind the incredibly short attention span of our web audience!
It may also be helpful to have a completely new set of eyes review the content. Recruit an associate with experience in the practice area you’re reviewing, and ask him or her to provide you with comments. Those fresh and eager young minds may even suggest additional content not previously contained in that practice description.
Links. When did you last check to see that all of the links on your site still functioned? Links to news articles, attorneys, and other helpful resources should be checked periodically to make sure they are still accurate.
As it’s been coined, LinkLove—the links to, from, and amongst your content—will get you found by Google, but it can give you a black eye if the links don’t work properly. Google may not be offended by a broken link, but the visitors you truly want to attract—your potential clients—will form opinions quickly if they run across bad links.
Attorney Biographies. We have all received the hurried request to update a biography before a client meeting or as a proposal flies out the door. Yet those scattered requests don’t come from the firm’s entire attorney population. How up to date are your firm’s attorney biographies?
Attorney biographies, representing the very "product" the firm is selling, are said to receive the most traffic on any law firm website and should be updated as your attorneys grow, publish, and present. Consider implementing a regular schedule for reviewing and updating attorney biography content. A New Year’s resolution perhaps? A new task for more-quiet summer months? The key is to calendar it and hold fast.
News and Archives. For those of you who are able to publish news articles on your websites, what do you do with your news once it’s no longer new? Do you rotate old news off/out after a year? Do you archive it somewhere else on the site?
Archiving old news articles by placing them on a separate page or within a separate section of your site will provide visitors and search engines access to information that still may be of interest. An article penned in 2010 detailing noncompete agreements may no longer be new enough for your front page, yet the information is still highly searchable and likely of value to those interested in the topic.
Photos. This is where things can get sticky. Do the photos on your website accurately reflect your firm’s attorneys? Are the photos of your attorneys relatively fresh, or will potential clients be surprised when the young gun they think they hired turns out to be closer to retirement? Styles change and subtle differences through the years can be easily recognized. The Flock of Seagulls hair may have been awesome in 1986, but it just doesn’t fly today.
Take some advice from the PSA and take the time to hug your website today. It will love you for it.
Kelly Annis is the owner of Branch Communications LLC, a marketing strategy and communications firm providing consultation and in-house marketing services to the legal and real estate industries. She can be reached at kelly.annis@branchcomm.com.