Why URL Matters In Lawyer SEO

Despite seemingly innocuous, URLs are still a factor in Lawyer SEO. While there are a lot of essential SEO factors like links and keywords, small details like URLs still have an impact on your SEO efforts. Remember, site crawlers will take everything into account, contributing to your site’s overall ranking in the SERPs.

In this post, we’ll discuss why URLs are important, how they help you, and a few actionable tips to optimize them on your law firm’s website.

URLs are an integral part of your link-building strategy. They are—quite literally—what makes your links. However, optimizing them serves multiple purposes, including:

1. Organization

URLs can be a great way to organize your pages. It could help tell the user where they are on your website just by looking at the URL.

For example, you can start creating a naming system that tells the reader (and search engine crawlers) which section or area of law the blog post comes from. Here’s what they could look like:

• https://www.examplelawfirm.com/personalinjury/car-accident-attorney
• https://www.examplelawfirm.com/estateplanning/California-living-trusts
• https://www.examplelawfirm.com/laborlaw/workers-comp-lawyer
• https://www.examplelawfirm.com/familylaw/California-divorce-laws
• https://www.examplelawfirm.com/criminaldefense/embezzlement-lawyers

Not only will this make it easier for site visitors, but it will also make it easier for you to organize and compile all your links. While this isn’t a substitute for a good navigation system and site menu, having custom links will only enhance user experience, not get in the way of it.

2. Branding

In some cases, you won’t be able to use anchor texts for your links. For example, naked links are often included in print ads (like fliers) and image-based ads (like profile headers). You might even need to spell them out during conferences and symposiums. The point is, you can’t always rely on anchor texts to add descriptions to your pages.

So, whenever you need to use a naked link, make sure it isn’t made up of random letters and numbers.

Take these two examples and see which ones would look better on a calling card:

• Example 1: examplelawfirm.com/Gahb67/ajsLd001
• Example 2: examplelawfirm.com/California-Labor-Lawyers

Not to mention, the second example would be easy to remember. So, even if people didn’t have their phones or access to the internet when they came across the link, they’ll be more likely to remember the one they can read than the random combination of letters and numbers.

3. Keywords

While URLs are considered a minor ranking factor in SEO, they’re still used to provide context to the page associated with it. That said, just because it might be a minor ranking factor for search engines, it still has some use when it comes to user experience.

When people look up keywords on search engines, they’re looking for a great match to what they intend to find. This is why SEO practitioners can still benefit from keywords in meta descriptions even when they aren’t an SEO factor.

For example, when someone looks up “California Personal Injury Lawyer,” they sometimes won’t click on a link right away. Instead, they’ll look at the meta description, title, and URL to make sure they’re getting what they want from their search. As such, applying a custom URL that matches the user intent can be a factor in swaying a searcher to click on your page (no matter how seemingly small that element might be).