Page 31 - PIC e-newsletter Spring Issue 8

There are a number of tools and metrics that you can use to see how well a website is performing, but a website visibility score is one of the best ways to indicate how visible your domain is for key searched terms.
Well actually no, because of those websites we audited 66% have seen a decline in their visibility score and they have fallen by an average of 58% or 84 points each.
However, there have been winners. 24% of rms have seen increases in visibility of between 20% and 400%, improving their visibility by an average of 98 points each.
The top 10 legal websites are also facing the same challenges, with 4 of them seeing falls in online visibility of between 15% and 40% and six seeing rises of
up to 149% with our own website improving by over 400% over the year, improving their visibility by an average of 1,635 each.
So why are you struggling to
get a decent visibility score?
There are many reasons why your visibility score will be low and Google uses over 200 ranking factors from the technical structure of your website through to the quality of links or even the type of web hosting but our analysis suggested the biggest issue for the sites we audited
was a lack of content or the use of low quality content.
This is one of the key issues within the personal injury sector and a lack of content or poorly put together content has a direct correlation between visibility and the number of keywords they
rank for.
There were over 75,000 keyword variations that drove traf c to the First4Lawyers website in the last
12 months. However only a handful of the websites we audited appeared in search results of over 500 keywords with the average ranking at 392.
Unfortunately, things are going to get even more complex and challenging for you in the future as we move into a mobile rst driven market.
Mobile rst websites are nothing
new and have been around for many years. However mobile is becoming an increasingly important part of marketing and Google will be placing more emphasis on mobile when it determines how it ranks websites in the future.
Reassuringly, our audit identi ed that 87% were responsive – this is a big tick in the box for a mobile rst strategy and was reflected in the visibility scores for mobile which averaged at 252 which is higher than the average desktop visibility score.
But don’t breathe too much of a sigh of relief – 10% of these responsive websites (including one of the top 10) were identi ed to not pass Google’s mobile usability guidelines. As such they may have been built as responsive but don’t work as they should. At some point in the next 12 months I suspect they will be hit by Google’s algorithm updates and potentially downranked.
Whilst the overall average visibility score
is up, some 44% of rms had worse mobile visibility scores for their websites compared to their desktop visibility scores.
Without adding to your woes, mobile site speed will also increase as a ranking factor for your website in the next 12 months.
Naturally the longer a page takes to load then the higher the abandonment rate as people get frustrated and move on, and research suggests that the ideal load time should be 2.4 seconds.
But very few websites actually achieve this.
When we ran our own audit at First4Lawyers we found that the top 10 websites were achieving an average
load time of ve seconds, but each site was taking anything from four to seven seconds to load. When we looked at the wider range of sites we saw that it was taking an average of 8.5 seconds and load time ranged from three to 24 seconds.
However many of these websites ranking at three seconds were low on the visibility score rankings and shouldn’t be measured as a success!
When we put all this information together we get a full picture of what performance looks like.
HTTP + SSL = HTTPS Security
A staggering 62% of the websites we reviewed do not have SSL implemented into their website.
SSL is security technology encrypted into your website to make it more secure for visitors. A standard feature of all ecommerce websites for many years but it is becoming a standard quality Google expects all websites to have.
Up until now this hasn’t been a major issue for many websites but it is about to change and become increasingly punitive over the next 12 months.
The Chrome browsers (which accounts for about 60% of all web browser usage) who visit any website that doesn’t have SSL will have it flagged to them that they are visiting a website that is not secure.
Initially a warning message, soon it
will start blocking people from visiting websites without SSL which will actively drive traffic away from your website.
Andy Cullwick is Head of Marketing and Digital at First4Lawyers.
Sadly, the legal services sector seems to be lagging behind when it comes
to online marketing. If you are worried about the performance of your website then take a look at our whitepaper
for some hints and tips. Visit www. comparemymarketing.com/whitepaper.
Without adding to your woes, mobile site speed will also increase as a ranking factor for your website in the next 12 months.
www.pic.legal Spring 2018
INDUSTRY EXPERTS
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