Law Firm Website Redesign- What About Your Old Site?

Many attorneys redesign their law firm websites, choose SEO friendly URL’s but forget about their old website and the issue of duplicate content.

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In order to keep pace with the ever more competitive legal category, many law firm websites are redesigned to make them more "sticky" and to make their architecture more search engine friendly, all with the ultimate goal of improving their natural search engine rankings. After all, what good is an aesthetically pleasing, informative website if no one can find it. Increasing the number of unique visitors and getting them to spend more time on your law firm website is the way to increase lead generation.

 

Because the content on existing attorney websites has already been indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines, it often makes sense to migrate the content from the existing site to similar pages on the new website. Even in cases where the content on the original website is sparse, certain pages such as the home page, attorney bios, and case studies are often reproduced verbatim on the newly designed site. There are SEO techniques that allow the search engines to be redirected to the corresponding new page when a search is performed that would have pointed to a page that has already been indexed.

 

In many cases, your old website design firm may have provided custom URL's with associated landing pages. Once you redesign your website and move on, they may not renew those URL's or may just cancel any redirects that you have put in place, negatively affecting your natural search engine results. Even worse, they may leave those pages live so that Google and the other search engines view the content on your new site as duplicate and penalize you. That can even be true for interior pages with URL's that no one would think to type into their browser address bar.

 

Often, you will not be aware that pages from your old site are still live until your search engine page ranks decline enough for you to notice. You may not be aware that the landing page URL's that have been redirected to your new site are no longer functional, unless you receive notification by your prior web design firm that they will not be renewing them and they have already turned off the functionality.

The redesign and launch of a law firm website requires care and attention to detail that can only occur when the SEO engineer either works closely with your firm and redesign team, or all of the tasks are  handled under one roof.

 

At Cepac, all of our websites are designed with an eye towards SEO for lawyers and redesigns are handled with care, so that your data migration and reengineering can reap the maximum results. Our team works with you to ensure the smoothest transition possible by focusing on both design and search engine optimization.

 

For more information on website design for lawyers or SEO for law firms contact Kevin Quinlan.

 

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