Finally, it’s spring! The light of day lingers past dinnertime. The sweet smell of flower blossoms float in the warm air through windows, now open. I cringe at the thought of all the dust and dirt drifting into my house and finding a home on my window sill, and I am reminded that spring begins with spring cleaning, or it should according to Martha Stewart and me! I rely on her overzealous spring cleaning list and try to tick off at least half of the tasks before summer. Don’t tell Martha that I don’t get to everyone every year, but I still find that starting with a checklist is the best way to make anything happen.

Like the dust on my sills and the flannel linens that are swapped for crisp cotton ones, your law firm’s website should have a spring cleaning as well. You could work on these tasks any time of year, and spring is the perfect time because the winter holidays are behind you and you have some can-do momentum still pulsing before the summer hits. If you need buy-in or approvals from partners, they are not yet out on vacations or at the beach. My advice is to simply begin. This list will help you get started.

1. Start with attorney bios

Attorneys’ bios are the most-visited pages of law firm websites, so you should put your best face forward…literally.

What new information should be added?

• Significant matters, deals, settlements, etc.
• Awards received
• Publications
• Memberships and board appointments
• Speaking engagements
• New! Consider editing/revising/removing time-sensitive content that is no longer relevant. Outdated content creates an opportunity to update it with a fresh take.

While adding the current things is of top importance, you should also keep an eye on what could be culled. Consider a retention policy for list items such as speaking engagements older than three years, for example.

2. Practice area pages come next

Right now, everyone is talking about storytelling to connect with consumers. The same approach can and should be taken with matter descriptions on your practice area pages

• Can any new matters be added to the list?
• Can they be more descriptive of the problem and the unique approach and solution achieved by your lawyers? Just a list of case names is a snooze that generates little interest for the buyers of legal services.
• If your clients have confidentiality agreements, generalize the description to hide their identity. If there are many similar ones, use that to your advantage: Hundreds of M&A transactions… You get the idea!
• Framing your services from the prospect’s perspective helps them understand how you can solve their problems. If your practice area content is focused on you and not them, you’re making it hard for them to understand the connection.
• New! Have any new practices emerged within your firm that should be memorialized on the website? Or are there new areas in which there is room for growth, like medical marijuana, cryptocurrency, cyber security, social media accountability, or e-sports? Maybe this is even an opportunity for young partners or rising associates to hold leadership roles in new groups. Meet with them to determine how to position your firm’s experience in these areas on the website and in your broader business development plan.

3. Check the dates

Do you have news articles and event posts that go back five, 10, or (gasp) 20+ more years? (Don’t laugh, I’ve seen it.) It’s time to ask yourself if they are still accurate or relevant. Yes, it shows that you were focused on the topics even way back then, but that may just add to the clutter on the site that should be cleaned up—this is spring cleaning! If you find articles that predicted, for example, that Brexit would pan out differently, consider cleaning those out and writing a new one.

You can also use this as an opportunity to identify content that can be updated and repurposed. (Kind of like this article!) Some content is evergreen — meaning it is relevant any time. Small tweaks, updates, and additions to the piece add value and can help you drive new interest. (See what we did there?)

New! When you find dated content on your website, double-check that there is a link to the repurposed version or update. For example, if your commercial real estate group predicted that everyone is going back to the office in 2021, but then the COVID-19 delta variant hit, make sure there is a link from the content that never totally materialized to a revised and current perspective of the commercial real estate market in 2022.

4. That’s so SEO

New! Make sure you are crafting content to match your audience’s intent. Remember not everyone searches in the same way, and not everyone is ready to buy immediately. There are generally four types of intent: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. You should aim to, at minimum, have a lot of informational content: this will allow your firm to establish thought leadership. Use Google Search Console as a free way to find out what topics interest your audience. Here is a great guide to get you started: https://seonotebook.com/notes/gsc-regex-longtail-keywords-questions/. If you don’t have the bandwidth, your SEO agency should be able to help you out. You can also use Google Trends to figure out what people are searching for if you get stuck. 

Once you have the right content written, it’s important to make sure you are filling out the meta title and meta description of each page. A meta title is what displays as the blue link on a google search, the meta description appears below it. Both have varying degrees of SEO importance, for example: meta titles are factored into ranking on Google while meta descriptions are not directly factored, though they could help increase click-through-rate to your site. If you have a lot of pages on your site, this task could seem daunting. There are plenty of SEO tools out there that will help you dynamically create this meta information. At LISI we are big fans of Yoast. If you need help, contact your SEO company for support.

5. Benchmark search engine results pages

Identify the keywords and terms for which you want to be found in a search. Then open a private browsing window, like Chrome Incognito.

Note: your location and search behavior influence what pops up in your search results, so two people may have different results on the same search terms. Remove that variable by searching in private when you benchmark.

Search for all the terms and note your position in the search results.

Don’t like what you see? Invest in a pay-per-click campaign or SEO support. Don’t be shy, your competition isn’t!

Also, make sure you check out the “People Also Ask…” section of the search engine results pages (SERPs) as well — this is a great way to identify what additional information people may be looking for, and help you craft content to speak to those audiences.

New! If you want to speed up the process, check out this SERP checker from AccuRanker: https://www.accuranker.com/rank-tracker. You can do five free searches a day and get a feel for what the search landscape looks like for your desired keyword(s). 

6. Benchmark analytics

Take a close look at your Google Analytics for patterns, trends, and maybe even a surprise or two. It can reveal which pages of your site are getting lots of attention, and which give you an opportunity to take advantage of messaging on pages people see most.

If priority pages are not getting the views you expect, they deserve extra love. Build internal linking or a marketing campaign to support this.

While you’re at it, take a look at your social media analytics!

We know this one can feel daunting — what are the key performance indicators you should even be looking at? Aside from total traffic volume, what does the data show us? Check out our blog 9 Steps for Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy for a measurement framework overview.

New! Make sure you upgrade to Google Analytics 4. If you are unfamiliar, Google announced they would be sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023. It is imperative that you upgrade your existing Google Analytics to 4, and download all historical data so that you have a record of it. If you need help, let the LISI team know.

7. Fix broken links

It is a best practice when you launch a new site to go through a “301 redirect” process in which you match up every link on your old site to a new link on the new site. This way, if someone linked to a page or bookmarked something, the redirect still takes them to the appropriate place on the new site. Since everyone does not follow this, links break. It will naturally happen over the course of a year, and now is a good time to check for them. There are tools and people out there to help if you don’t have the bandwidth to tackle this.

Keep in mind that search engines hate broken links as much – or more – than we do. If the links on your site create a poor user experience, driving visitors to bounce quickly, that signals to search engines that your site does not offer much value and can impact how often your site is crawled and updated on SERPs. Siteimprove has a useful tool for checking broken links.

8. Link LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most widely used social media platform for professionals, so make sure that your lawyers’ bios link to their LinkedIn profile. This helps make business development more engaging and interactive. You probably have been training your lawyers to create a profile and use LinkedIn, but don’t forget the step of making that link available in the bio.

Beyond simply linking to their LinkedIn profile from your website, make sure that when someone lands on their LinkedIn page, it is well crafted and tells the story of who they are, what they do, and what it might be like to know them and to work with them. Check out this video explaining how.

New! Still need help convincing your attorneys of all the networking and business development opportunities LinkedIn has to offer? Find one person who is willing to give it their all, and then highlight their successes within the firm to entice others to join in. Or bring in digital marketing experts to explain the why and the how. LISI can help with this!

9. Share and share alike

Is your website content easy to share on social media? It should only require one click for website visitors to share pages of your site via email and on social media. This is a simple plug-in your web agency should install for you. This is valuable engagement, so don’t make people work too hard for it.

When implementing this, make sure you’ve formatted your content so it appears the way it should when shared on social. This means accurate titles – both in terms of describing what the content is as well as length; correctly sized images and thumbnails; and better yet, campaign tags to allow you to track how people found that content.

10. Mobile review

When you view your website on your phone or tablet, it should not just be a tiny version of the homepage and content. It should present the content—particularly content people read on mobile: contact info and news—in a clean mobile format. This means no need for zooming and sliding the view back-and-forth.

Review any new pages added to your site in the past year: Do they work as expected on mobile devices?

Make sure all the phone numbers are clickable and directions links open right up in your device’s default maps app.

New! Pick up your phone and/or tablet, go outside on a warm, sunny day, and do your annual mobile review outside.  It can be in the park or an outside cafe–maybe even your backyard. Even if you are back in the office, mobile testing and review are the perfect excuse to get some fresh air while you work.

11. Check behind the curtain

Are the fields in your website back-end clearly labeled and easy to use? Most content management systems can be edited so that field headers are named in a way that is intuitive, even with an example that shows the way the content should be entered. This makes training easier and reduces inconsistencies in the site content. Focus on the pages edited most frequently.

Also take a look at your asset library — the documents, images, and other downloadable content available on your site. Is it organized and easy to find? If someone downloads a whitepaper, is the file well-titled so it makes sense and they know what it is when they look for it on their computer? Little things like this, which extend beyond the on-site experience, really make a subconscious impression on your prospective clients.

New! If there is anything in the back-end of your website that seems unreasonably onerous, consider asking your website developer to revisit it. Maybe there is a way to streamline tasks. For example, every time you add a new legal update, does it automatically appear in the author’s bio, and the homepage featured news, and anywhere else it should appear?  Or are those separate steps? A few hours of development now may save your team lots of time in the long-run. Consider asking your developer to audit the back-end for ways to make loading routine content more efficient.

12. Plug into the plugins

As with your computer software and phone apps, your website plugins should be updated when new versions become available. Developers do this to fix bugs and release improvements, but sometimes this can break other functionality.

Make sure that your plugins are working the way they were designed to function within your site.

Pro tip: only use highly-rated plugins that are absolutely necessary. I’ve found that some extra coding during site development can replace many plugins and generally avoid this headache altogether.

New! Plugins have ratings and reviews–as well as a small discussion forum–so you can crowdsource feedback on which ones are worth implementing, and which ones are buggy and result in headaches. Folks trust reviews from peers in all types of products and services–why not website plugins?!

13. Mind the footer

Make sure all the little details that sit in the footer of your website are in good working condition.

Check that the links all work, especially to the legal disclaimers.

If there is a copyright notice, make sure it has the current year listed.

If you have social media icons there, make sure they are relevant and linked correctly. Twitter exclusively uses the bird symbol, not the lowercase “t” logo. Google+ doesn’t even exist anymore, so pull that one out.

New! Is your firm located in a state that requires particular disclaimers or the “Attorney Advertising” notice in the footer of every page of the site?  Maybe you just added an office in a location, like New York, that requires particular notices to comply with local ethics rules. It’s important to sweat the small stuff here!

14. Domain yo’ name

Find out when the domains of your websites and blogs expire and make a note in your calendar to renew, so you never get a “Page Not Found” message where your site should be!

Additionally, be on the lookout for scammers saying your domain is about to expire and to click a link to renew. Ask your website company before doing anything with this. You can use this free domain expiry checker as a first step!

New! Consider outsourcing this detail to your website company, or change your settings to auto-renew, so you don’t have to worry about it at all.

15. Policy is the best policy

Review your disclaimers and policies to make sure they are accurate and updated.

If you collect data actively or inactively on your site, you need a privacy policy that explains how that data is used and managed.

As a result of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union requires prior, informed consent regarding data. California implemented a Consumer Privacy Act in 2020. Laws and regulations in this area are moving quickly. Virginia is on the verge of passing its own consumer data privacy legislation. Address this now—before it becomes hindsight. 

New! Colorado is also adding to the momentum by becoming the third US state to pass comprehensive data privacy legislation that will go into effect in July 2023.

You can accomplish almost anything on this list on your own. But if you, like all the legal marketers I know, are already busy doing a million things, you might need some help sifting through the cobwebs and clutter. LISI is ready to assist with any and all of these cleanup tasks, so don’t hesitate to give us a call! Once your website is sparkling clean, you can sit back with a glass of lemonade and take a deep breath of fresh spring air. Aaaand then get back to the zillions of other things you have to accomplish because—let’s be real—in legal marketing, there’s always more to do!

New! And one thing many folks have learned during the past few years is that less is more. Sometimes it’s best to carefully prioritize the things only you can do, and outsource the rest.