Part 1: Design & SEO Ideas For Lawyers and Law Firms to Consider in 2014
By Peter Boyd on April 23, 2014 in SEO
Trends come and go quickly in the digital industry. At PaperStreet, we have to stay on-top of what is current and cutting edge in order to continue to provide lawyers with the most effective and good-looking websites on the Internet. Of course, some trends are better suited for lawyers and law firms then others, but there is always time to test a new idea.
Our team compiled a list of so new ideas to consider for your law firm website. It’s a lot of information so we broke it up into Part 1 (Design and SEO) and Part 2 (Content and Internet Marketing, including Social Media).
- Design
- Focus on Mobile Design & Responsive Design – nearly 1/3 of your traffic is mobile and this will continue.
- Full-width design for all devices. Block design that sticks to a grid.
- Menus built for a desktop, tablet and mobile device with off-canvas menus for mobile (i.e. they do not appear until you click an icon).
- Consider vertical menus as those are coming into style again
- Simplicity, Minimalism & Flat Design
- Awesome photos, taglines, and text
- Don’t put everything on a page, only what is needed
- Clear typography and taglines (this never goes out of style)
- Development
- Scaled photos to only show photo size needed (and not pull down large photo)
- Stacked design for modular content
- Animations that enhance the design
- NO SLIDERS / CAROUSELS
- Lazy loading of images and text, loads as you reach the area. This saves on bandwidth and provides a nice animation.
- HTML 5 / CSS 3, but make sure a solution in place for old browsers. Consider text shadows, transitions, animations, canvas, and forms.
- jQuery functionality
- HTML5 videos with background videos and images. Videos can play on a background loop with content in the foreground to read.
- Long page scroll (one-page design)
- New web safe font from Google & Web Kit
- SEO
- It’s still all about Google results.
- Rich snippets of data for content, authorship, and location
- Local Listings – Get listed in all the proper local citations
- Directories – Focus on the best and not spam or low-quality directories
- Google – Focusing on ads, directories, Google local map (7 listings) and then search results. Need to be in the local map for sure.
- Speed, speed and more speed – speed matters for SEO
- Compelling content that generates their own authority/links
- Localization of search
- Priority of Google+ authorship
Need Help? Call Us
PaperStreet can assist clients with all of the ideas mentioned above. Get in touch with our sales department to learn more about our design and SEO packages.
