It’s somewhat tricky to set up your website’s navigation. Nevertheless, it plays a vital role in your user’s experience and your legal SEO (search engine optimization). Unfortunately, these two don’t always agree with each other, but if you work with an SEO company, you’ll be able to achieve a good balance here.
What are the different types of navigation menus that can be used?
There are numerous designs available. Your SEO company will be able to recommend one that aligns best with your style and branding. These include:
- Horizontal – running across the top of the website, which is very user-friendly.
- Dropdown – listing numerous pages under a horizontal menu which is great when you have a variety of subtopics.
- Hamburger – three horizontal lines that can be clicked on to reveal various pages to navigate.
- Sidebar – when all your pages live inside of a side panel.
What are some of the tips to remember when setting up a site’s navigation?
Once your SEO company helps you decide on the right type of menu, they’re likely to have some tips to help you achieve good law firm SEO results with this menu. Some of the tips that an SEO company may suggest include:
- Make sure you don’t use generic terms (e.g., products, services) in your law firm’s SEO. For instance, instead of using something like “legal services,” opt for something more specific like “divorce attorney” or “criminal defense.”
- Include a search bar on your site so your users can quickly and easily find exactly what they’re looking for.
- Limit the number of links on your homepage. An SEO company will tell you that this is the most important page on your website. The more links you have here, the more diluted your law firm SEO will become, thus lowering the chances of your other pages ranking well. Therefore, you should only have seven links on your front page at most.
- Pay attention to the order you put your links in. Research shows that people will remember things at the beginning and end of their list while forgetting what’s in the middle. Therefore, an SEO company will tell you to put the most important links in these areas.
- Whenever possible, you should consolidate your web pages. You should aim to consolidate all your similar pages into one comprehensive page whenever possible. This will help with your law firm’s SEO because your pages won’t be so diluted. In other words, a single page with detailed and comprehensive information will rank better than a few different pages containing sparse information. Beyond the search engines, this consolidation will also help your site’s users because it’ll be easier for them to find all the information they need without searching through multiple pages.
- Use a sticky menu so that your visitors don’t have to scroll back to the top to click on another page. By setting up your menu so that it stays put when your visitors scroll down it, you’re improving their experience with your website.
- Your design layout isn’t something you create and forget about. As your website grows and evolves, you’ll want to look at it again. You may need to rework some things. It’s vital for your navigation to reflect any changes you make to your website (e.g., where things are moved, when things are removed, and additional items).
- Before launching any changes in your site’s navigation bar to the public, make sure you have a few different people look at them first.
Check your website frequently so that you can keep an eye on how your visitors interact with and move through your site as well as how your law firm SEO is doing. When you find an underutilized section, talk to us at the Local SEO Tampa in Tampa, FL, to discover ways to improve it.
