Savvy consumers – and search engines – have raised the bar when it comes to content. Does your website deliver? Andy Cullwick, director of marketing at First4Lawyers, shares his top tips.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression – or rather, your website does.
These days, that all-important first interaction with consumers is typically online and, as well as the goods or service you’re selling, how your website looks and works can be the difference between them sticking around or taking their custom elsewhere.
Clever marketing may get them there but, in the battle for business, regularly refreshing, refining and generally just making sure that your website is in good working order will help convert them into clients.
Need for speed
Convenience is king and it goes without saying that a mobile-friendly website is a must-have. According to Google, visitors are five times more likely to leave if it is not.
For today’s time-poor consumers, speed is also essential and how quickly your site performs is still a ranking factor for most search engines.
Simple steps to increase speed include removing unnecessary code, compressing images so they are smaller but still high quality, reducing the number of redirected links and fixing broken ones.
Try Google’s free Page Speed Insights tool which enables you to see how users experience a page as well as suggesting improvements.
Quality content
Gone are the days when you could simply fill your content with keywords to bag a spot at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). While keywords are still important, relevance is now the number one ranking factor, or as Google put it in its core update in August “more content that people find genuinely useful and less that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search”.
Search engines scour the internet for content that best answers users’ queries, so you need to make sure that everything your target audience might be searching for (the ‘trends’ tool in Google Analytics can help with this) is laid out clearly and comprehensively on your website.
Using ‘schema markup’ will also help content be more easily understood by search engines.
The aim of every marketer is to get their content in the ‘AI Overview’ that appears at the top of a search, or as a ‘featured snippet’ or ‘people also ask’ box. This is becoming increasingly sought after as the number of zero-click searches – where SERPs answer a question without the user having to look elsewhere – continues to rise.
Good enough to EEAT
Google also uses the EEAT principle to rank content based on the experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness of its creator. As well as ensuring content is high quality, you can also demonstrate the above by clearly displaying your credentials, including biographies of your people, highlighting third party endorsements such as positive reviews or award wins, and by making it easy for users to verify information.
Work in progress
A good website should be informative, accurate, easy to use – and a work in progress. I recommend at least a quarterly review to check that information is still relevant, whether there’s anything new to add, and that it’s working as it should i.e. that links aren’t broken and contact forms or calls to action are reaching the right destination
As well as general maintenance, changing trends, algorithms and consumer behaviour mean there’s almost always room for improvement and those who put in the time and effort will reap the benefits.
Andy Cullwick has worked in marketing for more than 25 years, the last decade of which has been working for First4Lawyers. The UK’s largest independent legal marketing collective, which matches potential claimants with specialist lawyers and is seven-time winner at the Personal Injury Awards, is based in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.