Performance anxiety
The internet changed the face of the legal sector, but many law firms are still lagging behind when it comes to their performance online, says Birketts’ Matthew Rowe
The internet undoubtedly changed the face of the legal sector, but many law firms still aren’t prioritising how they perform online.
And in many ways, I get it - it can often feel like every time you’ve got the hang of things like SEO, Google moves the goal posts once more. Add to that the existing workload with which every lawyer and law firm professional is familiar, and it could be easy to wonder why you should bother.
But then, you remind yourself that by understanding how Google (and other search engines work) you can outperform your competition. In essence it can be an essential tool in your arsenal and allows us “smaller” firms to punch above our weight. Google is a great leveller - it doesn’t care how big you are - just how well you serve its readers. It therefore remains a huge opportunity for all firms.
Winston Churchill, who undoubtedly wasn’t talking about digital marketing at the time, reportedly said: “A pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.” A fair observation and certainly hints at the rewards of getting things right where others may falter. If you can get it right the rewards are certainly there.
Many of you may already be familiar with Google’s new algorithm update (Core Web Vitals), which now looks to be coming into effect as we went to press. It’s all about page experience, so web pages offering a better user experience (faster loading, less shifting around of elements on the page when it has loaded etc) will see their content climb up the Google rankings – which should lead to more website traffic, more leads, and more on the bottom line.
What are you going to do to keep up?
At Birketts our marketing headcount has grown in the last 12 months, and we have been given the green light to continue to invest but we don’t have an ‘expert’ in every area. One thing that I have learned working in-house is that you need to know enough about some subjects to be able to instruct others to help you with it and avoid being taken for a ride.
Whilst we might not be industry-leading experts in SEO, my team understands its importance to our overall business and marketing strategy. We identified Simon Marshall from The Digital 100 to help us focus our efforts and to take on the challenge of adapting to Core Web Vitals. The result? In the last four months we’ve jumped 250,000 places in our website rankings overtaking much bigger City firms in the process. That’s one hell of a leap. So how did it happen?
Let’s take a step back for a minute and think about why law firms need to take notice when Google announce changes to their algorithms in the first place. In short, the competitive landscape has changed and customers (or clients as the industry insists on calling them) have become more sophisticated. How they find, validate and purchase legal services is directly impacted.
In many ways Google sets the rules of the game and as Albert Einstein (another famous non-marketer) said: “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”
However, it is crucial to remember that in order to be successful you have to write for two audiences: the search engine (to serve up your content) and the human (who you’re hoping is seeking the insight that you're providing).
Tech, as we all know, is changing rapidly in the legal sector and it’s vital to keep up. Nowadays, and especially since the rise of remote working brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are fewer and fewer borders. This includes borders for clients - we can work from anywhere, so potential clients are no longer bound by location. Instead, in many cases, where we appear on the web is what decides whether a potential client will even consider our services.
So where to start? Technically, our website is in pretty good shape. Sam Mckechnie and I work incredibly hard to keep on top of day-to-day grunt work to ensure good website governance.
However, Simon identified that we should look to drive down our page speeds to be ahead of the Core Web Vitals release. It might not sound like it would make a huge amount of difference, but Google already gives preferential treatment to websites that load more quickly and that is set to become even more important.
The faster your site loads, the lower the bounce rate - the number of people who leave without visiting a second page. If your site is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google over slow sites that continue to have high bounce rates.
“In the last four months we’ve jumped 250,000 places in our website rankings overtaking much bigger City firms in the process. That’s one hell of a leap.”
It makes sense - people are busier than ever, and our impatience is something that Google has measured to last a maximum of 2.11s. Why wait around when there are so many other options that could give us what we need much faster? One click backwards and select the next firm on the list.
If your website can’t compete with the top 10 organic pages you won’t rank on the first page of search results, and the vast majority of search engine users simply won’t click to the second page. So focusing on page speed is paramount to having a website that attracts new visitors.
The area that we identified that had the biggest impact on page speed was working with our web agency to optimise our images. Most sites (especially in the legal sector) tend to have very large, bulky pictures that can take a long time to load. If you can minimise the size of your images you stand to make up considerable ground.
But as I said earlier you are writing for two audiences: the search engine and the human. You therefore can’t just look at the back end of things. Simon didn’t just look at page speeds, but also the Emotional Marketing Value and optimizing the headlines of our content. This was a big part of the project - we hadn’t truly appreciated how our headlines were performing on Google.
Lawyers tend to think the work they do is very interesting and important - and it is - but the key is translating this to a wider audience to make it more engaging and exciting. It needs to have titles that people are seeking out and answer the questions potential clients desperately need to know.
We took a look at the headlines we currently had, and with Simon’s help, curated new, optimised headings that ranked highly against our competitors. Internally, we did a lot of the hard yards, putting in place more structure to every article, signposting to audiences (and Google) what each section was about.
It’s paid off
Having an outside advisor who is an expert in their area has been a game changer for our digital marketing approach. With so much to do it can be difficult to break things down and identify where the big wins lie.
However, people can be resistant to outside help. For this approach to be effective you need to work with a web agency that is happy to collaborate with other experts to get the best results. Too many agencies, in my experience, try to mark their own homework, are resistant to outside input, and don’t like to be challenged. If that sounds like your agency my advice would be to find another one.
We still have work to do and accept that we will always have work to do if we’re to keep up with Google’s algorithms. We’ve worked hard to be ahead of the game right now and are well placed to keep up with the competition, thanks to the internal efforts and those of our agencies. If we keep up the hard work, who knows where we’ll be ranking in the coming months?