Improving Your Legal Website’s Crawlability and Indexability: How to Increase Your Online Visibility

In today’s competitive legal market, knowing how to effectively increase your online visibility is crucial for UK law firms seeking to attract new clients. While many firms focus on content creation and link building, one key aspect of search engine optimisation (SEO) is often overlooked: ensuring that search engines can efficiently discover and understand your website. 

This process, known as crawling and indexing, is essential for your website’s visibility. If your pages aren’t crawled or indexed, they won’t appear in search results. This would hinder your ability to connect with potential clients.

Understanding the Importance of Crawlability and Indexability for Legal Websites 

Before diving into specific strategies, it’s important to understand the concepts of crawlability and indexability: 

• Crawlability refers to how easily search engine bots, such as Google’s spiders, can navigate your website. A well-structured site that is easy to crawl ensures that all your content is accessible to all major search engines.
• Indexability is the process by which crawled pages are added to the search engine’s index, making them eligible to appear in search results. Without being indexed, your pages won’t rank, no matter how strong your content might be.

 

For law firms, optimising these aspects is vital for ensuring that your website is visible to prospective clients searching for legal services online.

1. Optimise Your Website’s Speed for Client Retention 

A slow-loading website can deter potential clients and hinder your site’s crawlability. Search engines prioritise websites that load quickly, as these sites are likely to offer a better user experience. You can enhance your page loading speed by: 

• Choosing a reliable hosting provider – see that your law firm’s website is hosted on a fast, secure server capable of handling high traffic volumes, especially during peak times.
• Compressing large files – optimise images and other media to reduce file sizes without compromising quality.
• Streamlining code – minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files to decrease load times.

2. Focus on User Experience with Core Web Vitals 

Google’s Core Web Vitals are not just metrics. They are crucial measures of web user experience. They play a significant role in how Google evaluates your law firm’s website, making it essential to focus on these metrics. 

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – ensure that the most important content on your page loads quickly, ideally within 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – aim for high responsiveness, with an INP of less than 200 milliseconds, to keep users engaged.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – minimise unexpected layout shifts to create a stable and user-friendly experience.

3. Efficiently Manage Your Crawl Budget 

For larger law firms with extensive websites, managing your crawl budget is essential to increase your online visibility. The crawl budget determines how many pages search engines will crawl within a specific timeframe. To ensure your most critical pages are prioritised: 

• Streamline your site structure – organise your website into a clear hierarchy to make it easier for search engines to navigate.
• Avoid redundant content – eliminate duplicate content that can waste your crawl budget on unnecessary pages.
• Utilise robots.txt – use this file to guide search engines away from unimportant pages, such as internal resources that clients don’t need to see. 

By managing your crawl budget effectively, you can ensure that search engines will focus on the most important areas of your site, such as practice areas, legal blogs, and contact pages.

4. Build a Strong Internal Linking Strategy

Internal linking is a critical component of SEO that helps Google and other search engines determine the relationship between different pages on your website. For law firms, a strong internal linking strategy can enhance crawlability by: 

• Connecting practice areas – ensure that your homepage links to the main practice area or specialism pages, which in turn link to relevant articles, case studies, and team profiles.
• Preventing orphaned pages – make sure every page, especially key resources such as legal blogs, is linked from other parts of your site.
• Regularly checking for broken links – broken links can lead to crawl errors. Frequent audits can help you identify and fix these issues. 

A well-structured internal linking system not only boosts your SEO but also helps clients easily navigate your site to find the information they need.

5. Submit Your Website’s Sitemap to Google 

A sitemap is a vital tool for law firms, especially those with extensive websites. Submitting a sitemap to Google ensures that it can quickly discover and index all your important pages. This is particularly useful if: 

• Your firm frequently updates content – if you regularly publish new blog posts or update service pages, a sitemap ensures that search engines quickly notice these changes.
• Your website has deep navigation – for sites with multiple layers of navigation, a sitemap helps search engines efficiently crawl deeper pages.

6. Review Your Robots.txt File for Optimal Crawling 

The robots.txt file is a powerful tool that tells search engines which web pages should or shouldn’t be crawled. While it’s helpful in directing bots, errors in this file can block important pages from being indexed. To avoid errors: 

• Audit your robots.txt regularly – ensure that crucial pages, such as practice areas and contact forms, are not inadvertently blocked.
• Avoid blocking essential resources – sometimes, scripts or stylesheets critical to your site’s functionality might be accidentally blocked, which can hinder proper crawling.

A well-configured robots.txt file ensures that search engines can access all necessary parts of your website without unnecessary restrictions.

7. Implement Canonical Tags to Clarify Content Importance 

Canonical tags are used to indicate the primary version of a webpage when similar or duplicate content exists. For law firms like yours, this is particularly important when: 

• Managing multiple specialisms or practice areas – if similar content appears across different practice area pages, canonical tags help prevent search engines from indexing duplicates.
• Handling regional pages – if your legal practice operates in multiple regions, use canonical tags to specify the correct version of a page for each location. 

The correct usage of canonical tags ensures that search engines will index the most relevant pages, helping potential clients find the right information.

 8. Conduct a Regular SEO Audit to Maintain Site Health 

Regular SEO audits are crucial for maintaining your law firm’s online presence. These audits help identify and fix issues that could be hindering your site’s crawlability and indexability. Key areas to focus on include: 

• Indexation rate – check how many of your site’s pages are indexed by Google compared to the total number of pages. A low indexation rate could signal problems that need addressing.
• Technical SEO issues – use the appropriate SEO tools to identify technical problems, such as slow-loading pages or broken links, that could affect website performance.

 9. Address Duplicate Content to Avoid Confusion 

Duplicate web content can confuse search engines, resulting in inefficient crawling and indexing. For law firms, this often occurs with: 

• Practice area overlaps – when different practice areas cover similar topics, ensure that each page is unique and focused.
• Session IDs and pagination – these technical elements can create duplicate URLs. Review your site to eliminate any unnecessary duplicates.

10. Simplify Redirects to Maintain a Clean Structure 

Redirects are often necessary when updating your website. However, they can create complications if not handled properly. For this reason, you should: 

• Avoid redirect chains – ensure that redirects are straightforward and lead directly to the intended page without unnecessary steps.
• Regularly review redirects – use tools such as Screaming Frog to check for redirect chains or loops that could confuse search engines.

11. Monitor and Fix Broken Links 

Broken links can significantly impact both user experience and your website’s crawlability. Regular monitoring is crucial for law firms, where clients expect seamless navigation. To address broken links: 

• Use Google Search Console – this tool can help you identify 404 errors and other issues related to broken links.
• Update or remove dead links – redirect outdated links to relevant pages or remove them if they are no longer necessary.

12. Utilise IndexNow for Faster Content Updates 

IndexNow is a protocol that allows you to notify search engines of significant content updates instantly, ensuring faster indexing. This is particularly useful when: 

• Updating legal news or blog posts – notify search engines immediately when you publish new content, ensuring it’s indexed quickly.
• Launching new services – use IndexNow to inform search engines of new specialisms or services as soon as they are live.

13. Implement Structured Data for Enhanced Search Visibility 

Structured data provides search engines with additional context about your web content. This can help increase your online visibility, enabling you to attract more potential clients. Implementing structured data can help:

 

• Highlight practice areas – use schema markup to categorise and describe your legal specialisms, increasing the chances of appearing in rich search results.
• Showcase client testimonials – implement structured data to highlight positive client reviews, improving trust and visibility.

Attract More Potential Clients with Better Online Visibility 

Ensuring that search engines can easily crawl and index your law firm’s website is crucial for maintaining and growing your online presence. By implementing these web optimisation strategies, you can boost your site performance and search rankings, allowing you to attract more clients. 

At Kinetic Traffic, we understand how challenging it can be to maintain a robust online presence while managing the daily demands of running your law firm. This is why we offer bespoke SEO solutions, ensuring that your website not only attracts potential clients but also stands out in a competitive digital landscape. Get in touch today, and let our team of law firm SEO specialists optimise your online presence to drive more traffic and convert leads into clients.