Optimizing Your Law Firm’s Website Structure for SEO
Date: November 19, 2024
Website structure, also known as website architecture, is often one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO for law firms. Perhaps this is due to the widely acknowledged concept that “content is king”. While content will always be one of the most crucial factors of SEO, other pieces of the metaphorical SEO pie shouldn’t be forgotten. In fact, website architecture will help your firm’s content reach its full potential by making it easier for users to find and for search engines to crawl.
Understanding Website Structure and Its Role in SEO
What are the Basic Parts of a URL?
URLs can consist of as many parts. For this blog, we’ll take a simplified look at URLs, focusing on these four pieces:
- Root domains: The name of your website. This is often your brand name and is typically used as the homepage of your site.
- Subdirectories: Also known as subfolders, these are used to create organized sections of content.
- Slugs: The specific page the user wants to see.
What is Website Structure?
Website structure refers to the way a site’s pages and content are organized and interconnected. Let’s start with a simple example:
Think of website architecture like an organizational chart. At the head is the managing partner. This is your domain. Under this person, you have practice group managers, each of whom leads a team focused on a particular practice area. These are your subfolders. Now you have your attorneys under each practice. These are your slugs. Having a clear, organized structure is crucial for operational efficiency and establishing a hierarchy. The same is true for your website and its content.
The larger your website, the more complex these structures can become, as the need for additional subfolders arises to keep these organized.
Why the Structure of a Website Matters
Website structure shapes how information is presented, influences user navigation, and helps search engines understand your site. Pages should be organized in a manner that is intuitive for users to navigate, improving the overall user experience of your site. You may have great content on your site, but if a user can’t find it, does it matter?
This logic applies to search engines as well. Google crawls billions of pages per day, which requires utilizing its crawl budget most efficiently. One of the factors Google describes in determining which pages on your site to crawl is called Perceived Inventory.
Perceived inventory: Without guidance from you, Googlebot will try to crawl all or most of the URLs that it knows about on your site. If many of these URLs are duplicates, or you don’t want them crawled for some other reason (removed, unimportant, and so on), this wastes a lot of Google crawling time on your site. This is the factor that you can positively control the most.
The goal is to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find your pages, understand their importance, and index them for your audience to find.
The Impact of Subfolders on Hierarchy and Page Authority
Keep Service Pages Close to the Root Domain
Subfolders are an incredibly useful way to group related content and establish a clear hierarchy within your site. The closer a page is to your domain, the higher it is in the hierarchy and the more authority it holds. For example, yourlawfirm.com/personal-injury/ would be viewed as a more important page than yourlawfirm.com/services/personal-injury/. The additional “services” subfolder, puts that personal injury page one level deeper in the website structure. Because of this, the best practice is to keep your service pages as close to the root domain as possible, as these are typically your most important pages for a law firm.
For smaller firms, this is typically pretty simple to accomplish. For larger firms, the use of subfolders for service pages may be a necessity for organizational purposes. For example, if you are a full-service law firm with many practice areas, putting all of those pages off the domain would create a very flat structure and may not be your best option. Instead, you might consider using high-level practice pages as subfolders, with sub-practices nested beneath them, such as yourlawfirm.com/business-law/contract-disputes/. Another example would be if your firm has multiple locations. You could organize your content by location, like yourlawfirm.com/new-york/business-law.
Organizing Blogs and Other Content in Subfolders
Supplemental content is one of the easiest use cases for subfolders. Most of this content is already being grouped into hubs on your website, so why not apply that same logic to the URLs? Websites with blogs typically use yourlawfirm.com/blog for that page. Continue that structure with individual posts by nesting them within a /blog/ subfolder. For example, yourlawfirm.com/blog/blog-title-goes-here. This can be followed for any grouping of content you may have, such as FAQs, news, case results, etc.
Not only does this structure help with organization, it also ties into the hierarchy and authority. If you have all of your blog pages right off the domain, but your main services pages are in multiple subfolders, you’re essentially saying your blogs are more important, which is usually not the case.
Common Pitfalls in Law Firm Website Architecture
After auditing hundreds of law firm websites, there are a few common pitfalls we consistently see in website architecture.
Structure That Doesn’t Scale
When determining what your website structure will be, keep the future in mind. If your firm has plans to expand into more locations or add additional practices, choose a structure that will scale with you as your firm grows.
Neglecting Old URLs After Restructuring
Sometimes your firm grows unexpectedly or your original site wasn’t organized, so you complete a project to restructure your URLs. Good for you! But, don’t forget to redirect those old URLs and update them where possible.
Overcomplicated URLs
Many sites go overboard with organization and end up with pages in an unnecessary amount of subfolders. Try to keep it simple and avoid overcomplicated, lengthy URLs.
Lack of Consistency
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to website structure, but the key is consistency. Once you’ve ironed out a structure, continue to follow it as new pages are added to the website over time.
How to Audit and Improve Your Website Architecture
If you want to evaluate your current website structure, here are a few steps you can follow:
- Use a tool such as Screaming Frog to run a crawl of your site
- Bucket your pages by content type (service pages, blogs, etc.)
- Review the URL structure being used for each type of content
- If each type of content follows a consistent, concise structure that follows the best practices covered above, you’re all done!
- If you notice inconsistencies or areas for improvement, determine what a better structure would look like and create a restructuring plan.
Tips for Restructuring Without Losing Authority
One of the biggest SEO concerns people have when restructuring a website is the loss of authority. This is a valid concern and is somewhat unavoidable, at least temporarily. However, two critical steps should be completed to minimize the impact:
- 301 redirects: Ensure your old URLs are redirecting their new versions. This will pass th authority from those pages on to the new ones.
- Internal linking updates: Any links on your site that send users to a new page should take them to their final destination. In other words, don’t use an outdated link that has been 301 redirected. Once you’re restructured, make sure your internal links are using the new versions.
Leverage Your Law Firm’s Site Structure for Better SEO Performance
A well-structured website is essential for improving SEO and providing a seamless user experience. By keeping service pages close to the root domain, organizing content into clear subfolders, and maintaining a consistent structure, your law firm’s website becomes easier for both users and search engines to navigate.
Need help? Our team can conduct a full SEO audit of your firm’s site to identify areas for improvement and propose a plan of action to get you on the right track.
