Law Firm Website Completely Switching Marketing Focus - How to Best Handle
-
Hi Moz Community,
Thanks in advance for the help! We have a law firm client interested in fully switching their SEO marketing from Criminal Defense to Personal Injury. Our client no longer wants any business for Criminal Defense cases.
Background Info: The website for the last 10 years has focused on Criminal Defense (and ranks well). Over the last couple of years we have introduced Personal Injury content on the website and achieved some decent rankings as well.
In order to make the website less relevant for Criminal Defense, it had crossed our minds to de-index these specific Criminal Defense pages but still leave them present on the website.
Question: Would you recommend de-indexing all of the pages at once or done in a gradual manner?
Our concern it that doing it all at once could affect the overall domain's authority more sharply and harm rankings for any other keywords not involving Criminal Defense.
-
Given the background provided, where the website has been established with a strong emphasis on Criminal Defense over the past decade, it's understandable that you're concerned about the impact on the site's authority and rankings if you de-index the Criminal Defense pages abruptly.
Here's my recommendation:
Gradual De-indexing: Instead of de-indexing all Criminal Defense pages at once, consider a gradual approach. Start by identifying the least critical Criminal Defense pages and de-indexing those first. Monitor the impact on rankings and site authority over a period of time.
Monitor Performance: Keep a close eye on how the de-indexing process affects the site's overall performance, particularly in terms of rankings for Personal Injury-related keywords. This will help you gauge the impact and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Optimize Personal Injury Content: While de-emphasizing Criminal Defense content, ensure that the Personal Injury content is optimized to maintain or improve rankings in this area. This might involve further optimizing existing content, creating new targeted content, and refining your keyword strategy.
Maintain Quality and Relevance: Throughout the transition, prioritize maintaining the quality and relevance of the website's content. Ensure that the Personal Injury content meets the needs of your target audience and aligns with their search intent.
Regular Analysis and Adjustment: Continuously analyze the performance of the website and make adjustments as needed. This might involve further tweaking the de-indexing strategy, refining keyword targeting, or optimizing site structure. -
@loramartin
Hey there, it's great to see your dedication to adapting your law firm client's marketing strategy! Switching focus from Criminal Defense to Personal Injury is a significant shift, but it sounds like you've already made some headway with the introduction of Personal Injury content.Regarding de-indexing, I'd recommend taking a gradual approach rather than de-indexing all the pages at once. Here's why:
Domain Authority Transition: Google's algorithms consider a website's overall authority. If you de-index all Criminal Defense pages at once, it might lead to a sudden drop in authority for your domain. This could impact your rankings for other relevant keywords, including Personal Injury-related terms.
Ranking Stability: Gradually transitioning by removing or de-indexing Criminal Defense pages while strengthening Personal Injury content can help maintain your current rankings while the new content gains traction. It's like shifting your weight from one foot to the other instead of jumping entirely to the other side.
User Experience: Abruptly removing all traces of Criminal Defense content might confuse regular visitors who are accustomed to that focus. By gradually transitioning, you allow users to adapt to the new content and navigate your site more comfortably.
Link Equity: Your current Criminal Defense pages might have accumulated valuable backlinks over the years. Gradual de-indexing allows these links to continue benefitting your site's authority while you build new ones for the Personal Injury pages.
So, my suggestion would be to selectively de-index or remove the Criminal Defense pages over a span of time, maybe a few months. This will give you room to monitor the effects and adjust your strategy if needed.
Remember, consistency in updating the Personal Injury content and maintaining a seamless user experience is key. All the best with your transition, and I'm sure your law firm client will appreciate your strategic approach!
-
Shifting the marketing focus of a law firm's website from Criminal Defense to Personal Injury is a significant move, but it's definitely manageable. Firstly, make sure to thoroughly update the content of your website to reflect this transition. Revisit all pages related to Criminal Defense and replace them with informative, engaging content about Personal Injury law. This will not only provide a clear direction to visitors but also improve your website's SEO for the new focus.
Next, ensure that your website's navigation is user-friendly and intuitive. Create separate sections for Criminal Defense and Personal Injury cases, with relevant subcategories and pages. This will make it easy for visitors to find the information they need and distinguish between the two practice areas.
Since your website has already achieved decent rankings for Personal Injury content, leverage this success by optimizing those pages further. Update meta titles, descriptions, and headers to reflect the new focus. Additionally, reach out to your existing audience through newsletters or blog posts explaining the change and emphasizing your expertise in Personal Injury law.
Finally, monitor the transition's impact closely. Use tools like Google Analytics to track changes in traffic, bounce rates, and conversions. Adjust your strategies as needed to ensure a smooth shift in marketing focus without losing the gains you've achieved in rankings.
Regarding your request to download Pikashow, I'm here to provide information and assistance on various topics. If you have any questions or need guidance, feel free to ask! However, I cannot assist with downloading or promoting specific software or applications that might not align with legal or ethical standards. If you have any other queries or concerns, I'd be happy to help.
-
Hi @peteboyd
Here I am sharing my experience and powerful SEO strategy for your Law Firm website. You should keep this in mind when you will be starting SEO for Law Firm.
Here are some steps you Follow While Doing SEO for Law Firm Websites
Step 1: Finding and Analyzing CompetitorsStep 2: Technical SEO Audit For Law Firm Website
Step 3: Zero-Down on the Keywords
Step 4: Optimize Google Business Profile according to your competitors
Step 5: Optimize website Content with SEO Keywords
Step 6: Optimize Metas (Title & Meta Description) with SEO Keywords
Step 7: Optimize Heading & Subheading tags with SEO Keywords
Step 8: Optimize Schema Tags (Organization, Local Business, Navigation, Attorney, Event, Video, Rating & review, FAQs, etc)
Step 9: Optimize Footer add about content, location, and images with SEO Keywords
Step 10: And lastly You should Focus on High-Quality Link building (Profile creation, business citation, classified, bookmarking, content syndication, guest post, content outreach, web 2.0, forums, Q&A, etc.)
I hope these steps will help to rank higher in Google SERPs.
Also, if you don't have any experience SEO team you can consult with No. #1 India SEO company.
Thank you.
-
If the rankings of the criminal defense pages have direct links then those links are helpful to any query that any page of the site competes for. So, I would not delete them.
There are law firms with strong websites that rule the SERPs for everything in their town. Their office takes any call that comes in, accepts the cases in practice areas where they have interest and expertise, and refers the rest to other firms for a referral fee.
-
I would not deindex anything. The search rankings are the bread and butter. The question is how do you leverage current traffic and use it to boost personal injury.
I would start by curating new content that aligns with the criminal justice content. Then take the criminal justice content and redirect it to your new content.
If you deindex, traffic will drop considerably and it will be like starting from scratch. If you redirect you may be able to pass link juice to your new pages while rankings start to increase for personal injury.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Advice for structuring hotel website
Hey guys, I am currently setting up a hotel booking website and I'm not so sure how to structure it. I have landing pages for: 1. Cities
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baresound
2. Sights
3. States The main keywords are mainly "Hotels in Cityname" or "Hotels near Sightname". What would be the best SEO friendly way of structuring the url? https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cities/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sights/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/states/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-statename Or are there better ways of structuring it or am I just overthinking it? I would greatly appreciate any advice and suggestions 🙂 Best, Max0 -
Check website update frequency?
Is the tools out there that can check our frequently website is updated with new content products? I'm trying to do an SEO analysis between two websites. Thanks in advance Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Traffic impact from switching hosting.
Good Afternoon! Does anybody know what sort of impact I can expect to see from switching hosting? Not only that but how long it takes to come back from that sort of thing? Our website has steadily been dropping since I took it over about a month ago. I have been slowly, tediously trying to prune the bad stuff, and one of our issues is with out host. Any thoughts would be great! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate? I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'. What has been done: 1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www. 2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. What I have asked the programmer to do: 1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. 2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags. Have all bases been covered correctly? One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?) Thanks a million! **To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Website.com/blog/post vs website.com/post
I have clients with Wordpress sites and clients with just a Wordpress blog on the back of website. The clients with entire Wordpress sites seem to be ranking better. Do you think the URL structure could have anything to do with it? Does having that extra /blog folder decrease any SEO effectiveness? Setting up a few new blogs now...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PortlandGuy0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
How should I handle these links?
I recently purchased a site which is in the same niche as my personal blog. MANY of the keywords which I want both sites to rank for, they are already ranking well for (Eg I rank #1 with one site and #5 for the other). I haven't started linking the two sites to each other yet (waiting to announce the acquisition before I do). I have 2 questions for you all... How powerful do you think linking between these sites could be? How do you think I should handle the linking between these two sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Best way to handle old re-directs?
What happens if you go back and change old 301 re-directs? So instead of it re-directing from A to B then C, we write a new redirect for A to C. What does Google see this as next time it crawls the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anchorwave0