In the spirit of Disney’s new movie, “Finding Dory,” I’m going to borrow her favorite catch phrase, “Just keep swimming,” with one little change. Instead of swimming, I’m going to say, “Just keep updating.”
Your website, I mean. Just keep updating your website.
Here’s what I’m talking about. See if this sounds familiar:
You’re a solo practitioner who is just starting out. About a year ago, your law firm’s website went live and it was exactly the way you wanted it to be. All of your website content is optimized and the design is perfect. Certain pages are ranking for the proper keywords on search engines and it’s driving in the potential clients. So you decide not to mess with anything. A few months go by. Then all of a sudden, your website starts dropping in the search engines, leading to less clients coming to your site. You try everything to get the site up again by adding new blog posts and new pages and even redesigning the front page. After all your changes, although your website is still doing all right, your older pages are just not ranking like they used to and your new pages are nonexistent. What happened? Why the drop? Panic ensues, blame is issued, and worlds collide.
If this is happening to your law firm’s website right now, then you know the panic we’re referring to. But relax…we have a solution to this problem and it’s three little words:
Just. Keep. Updating.
As you can imagine, Google loves fresh website content. And the fresher the content, the better the ranking. Google knows that this is what people want to see — information that’s as up to date as possible. Think about it. If you have a page on, say, alimony payments in New Jersey and the content hasn’t been updated in three years, chances are your bounce rate is going to be sky high. Your new clients are doing research and if they come across your website filled with outdated information, chances are they aren’t going to be your clients. Even if your outdated page is sitting at the top of the search rankings right now, know that in a few months’ time, it won’t even be on the first page anymore.
Ok, so we know that an old page can lead sink your rankings. But why should you choose to update a page than create a new page with updated information? It all comes down to SEO. We already know that the old page is ranking on Google. A new page can take anywhere from three to six months to begin ranking on search engines. And even if it’s optimized to the gills, chances are that page isn’t going to go very far at first. It can take at least a year to see any real traction with a page. So it would make sense to update an already ranking page with new content. You’ll see an improvement in a matter of a few weeks as opposed to a few months!
Another problem with creating new content over redoing website content is that you’ll be competing with yourself. And yes, this isn’t a good thing. When creating content for your law firm website, you need to remember that you’re trying to get the maximum number of clients. This means your content should be coming up on searches that your competitors may not have a foothold in. However, if you have two pages devoted to the same topic, they could cancel each other out. So instead of dominating for a certain key phrase, like alimony lawyer, with additional pages on the same topic that are both growing older each day, you may not get the rankings that you would get if you only had one page filled with fresh content.
So how often should you update the content on your website? Well, if you have a competent marketing team, like ENX2 Marketing, that team should be running website audits on a regular basis. And once you start seeing a drop in one of your pages, maybe it’s time to give it a fresh update. And if you just don’t have the time to update your site, maybe we can help. Contact the website content experts at ENX2 Marketing today for a free consultation on your website.
