If your law firm website is not consistently delivering the amount of traffic you need to generate leads, you could be the victim of bad SEO. Here are five tips on how to right the wrongs that could be plaguing your SEO strategy:

#1: Conduct an SEO Audit

You can’t fix what’s broken if you don’t know about it, which is why conducting an SEO audit to uncover issues affecting your website’s performance and visibility is critical before you do anything else to improve SEO.

If you hired a website design firm to create your site, do you know if they were equally skilled at SEO? If not, there could be some very common errors on your site that are negatively impacting performance, such as:

• Google Search Console was not set up, so you don’t know if Google is having any difficulty crawling and indexing your website.

• Bad or broken links have built up over the years.

• Page speed is too slow.

• Your site was not built with responsive design and is not mobile-friendly.

• Images are not optimized or compressed.

• There are inconsistencies in your NAP (name/address/phone) listings all over the Internet.

• Your site has too many pages competing for the same or similar keywords, which means that you are competing with yourself (keyword cannibalization).

• There are no AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) versions of your webpages.

• No one has added Attorney schema markup — computer code that lets Google know what is on each page of your website — to your site.

#2: Put Your Videos on YouTube and Connect Your Website

Links are valuable when it comes to SEO, and links from YouTube — one of the Internet’s most popular sites — are a good thing. You need to do two things:

1. Upload all your videos to YouTube and link to your website from your YouTube channel.

2. In the description area for each of your YouTube videos, add links to the most relevant web pages on your site for that video (bio of attorney featured in the video, any blog posts you’ve posted on the subject discussed in the video, service area, etc.)

#3: Develop Foundational Content

To drive traffic to your site, you need to rank well in search for your keywords. You need to create content pages that target relevant keywords for your practice areas and services as well as content pages that target long-tail keywords.

#4: Respond to Reviews

People looking for an attorney rely on online reviews and they also carry a lot of weight with Google, so it’s important for you to respond to both positive and negative reviews — especially those on Google.

#5: Use Email

Email is a great way to drive traffic, and there are several types of email campaigns that work well for lawyers, including:

• Following up with new leads — let prospects know what their next steps are in hiring an attorney with a series of emails that lead them to book an appointment.

• Lead magnet — give away a freemium — an ebook or access to informational videos.

• Obtain reviews — once a case is settled, email clients asking for a review with links to your pages on review sites. Making it easy for them to leave a review for you will result in more reviews, which helps to drive more traffic to your site.

Once you’ve implemented these fixes, you should see a jump in your traffic and search visibility, providing you with much better results from your SEO efforts.