Marketing Tips For Lawyers: Small Mistakes That Can Tank Your Site

Hey guys, my name is Viktoria. I am a legal SEO and marketing expert and it is my job to get my clients, mostly lawyers, to the top of Google.

I have been doing these videos and I get a lot of questions from potential clients of “Can you look at my competitor?” “Can you tell me what they’re doing right/ what they’re doing wrong?”. And I actually love these kinds of questions because I always love digging into people’s work and learning from other people’s experiences. So, I thought I’d start a little series where I look at successful websites of larger companies, and we can kind of take a look together at what they’re doing and what they’re not doing, and maybe give you some ideas for what you can do better with your own online marketing.

Website Desciption

So what I like to do is I like to look not at page one, but I like to look at the bottom of page two. Because I always feel like you can learn the most from people who are kind of almost there, but not quite because you can see what they’re doing right but you can also kind of spot some of the bigger mistakes, and maybe I could show you guys how they could fix it.

So one of the big things that any person should do when they design a website is tell Google what the website is about. It’s very, very important. If I look here at this website and I’m just hovering over the tab, and this is my website description. Right now, my website description is “Iyer law”. Now that might tell a lot to the people who actually work there, but unless you specifically are looking for the brand, it’s not going to say anything to a potential client.

Let’s take a look at a top site and let’s see how they use that tag. So let’s take a look at these guys. And again, I’m doing this off the cuff, but just because they’re at the top, I already pretty much know what the result is gonna be. So you could see right away, these guys say “Chicago divorce attorneys”, “divorce lawyer Chicago”. They are using excellent keywords. They are using keywords that generate listings for lawyers. Right? When I put in “divorce lawyer”, I’m getting, these kinds of directories. It’s called Google My Business listings.

When I put in “Iyer law”, it’s really just a brand. So if I was working with these guys, the very first thing I would do before I did anything else, I would change the description of their website to something like “Chicago lawyer”, “divorce law attorney”, “family lawyer” is another good one, because that’s actually a category that Google uses.

H Tags

Next, let’s take a look at some of their other on-page. Okay. I see a big problem here. Now, Google is a machine. Its artificial intelligence is the most sophisticated piece of artificial intelligence in the world. But as smart as Google is, it can’t read your mind. You have to communicate to Google in a way that it understands.

So I’m looking at this website and these guys have 5 H1 tags. An H1 tag is a tag that we use to communicate to Google what this website is about. It is the most important tag on the pages. It is sort of like the header to the table of contents. And so these guys are using one good tag, “Family Law and Domestic Relations Practice”. It’s not a great tag, but then they’re saying things like “Contact”, “Areas of Practice”, “Let’s Chat”. Those are obviously not the clearest things, not the most important things to communicate to Google.

Let’s take a look at these guys. Again, I’m doing this completely off the cuff. So hopefully they have the right tags. So these guys’ H1 tag is “Chicago Divorce” and “Family Law Attorneys”. They’re using good keywords. They’re using what people are actually searching for. Now, their H2 tag is “Challenges”. Does “Challenges” tell you anything? Probably not. So if I was working with these guys, I would change their H2 tag to maybe “Contested Divorce”, “Uncontested Divorce”, “Child Custody and Support”. So are they doing it perfect? No, they’re not. There are some issues on here for sure. “Divorce Process” is a good H2 tag. “Know you’re not alone” is a terrible H2 tag because it could be a hospital. It could be a dating profile. You could literally be anything, right? So your H tags have to communicate something important, something crucial to Google. And these guys do some of the straights, right? We have “Divorce”, “Family law”, “Child Custody”, but you can rearrange it to make it even more prominent.

Word Count

Let’s take a look. Now we have a thousand words here. So that’s actually probably about right. I would have to refer to some other tools to see how many words we should have in a homepage. But to make a quick shortcut, we can actually just take a look at it. So the top guy here has a thousand words. So if you don’t have the right tools, I use Page Optimizer Pro, Labrika, and other tools. You can actually just look at how many words your key competitor has on their homepage. And then you should do about the same. And this plugin is called SEO Minion, it’s free. You can just download it.

Font Size

Okay, let’s see what else. We’ve got a bunch of H1 tags here. One thing I’m seeing, and this is very important, not so much for Google, but for user experience. It is very, very small font that they’re using here. It is very important to use a nice size font because it’s hard to read it, right? And remember Google measures, how long the person stays in a page before they decide to present you to their clients. If you’re using a small font, people will stay less on your website. Now, I don’t know what the mobile version of this site looks like, but based on the design so far, I’m guessing the mobile is going to be even smaller. The less somebody stays on your site, the less likely they are to actually contact you. And also the algorithm for Google that calculates how valuable you are, looks at how long somebody stays.

In contrast, we have nice big font here. By the way, I love it when we use proper pictures for lawyers. A lot of times I struggle with it a little bit because my clients say “I don’t want to take pictures”, “I don’t like pictures”. But pictures are very, very, very important. People want to see who they talk to. They want to see whom they interest in their life. So, this gentleman here has some great pictures with very unique outfits. People are going to remember him, probably results in very good amounts of conversions. Whereas here we see a little bit more of a generic site. You know, it’s all, it’s a very pretty picture, but it’s more generic. It’s always good to have a person, you know, who you’re going to trust your life to be able to see them, to talk to them. You know, even if just kind of to picture them on the website.

Let’s Chat

That’s my time I wanted to do about eight minutes. I’m going to come back to this and I’m going to do these more. If you enjoy them, please let me know in the comments. By the way, if you are interested in my services, my website is BSP Legal Marketing. I will talk to you. I will help you analyze your competitors. I will help you analyze your site. No big sales pitch. We just have a chat and you can learn a lot more about me and working with me if you’re interested. Thank you so much. And see you soon.