Is Your Law Firm Losing Organic Traffic? Here Are 6 Reasons What Could Be Causing It (And Solutions)

Let's address the elephant in the room.

You’re worried that your website traffic is down, which means your bottom line is suffering. You're puzzled as to why your traffic is down and your rankings have dropped even though you didn't make any significant changes to the website.

A drop in site traffic can happen for a variety of reasons.

I'll cover the six most common causes of a website traffic drop, as well as solutions for each issue.

1. Google’s Helpful Content Update Affected Your Website Rankings

Search engines aren’t lounging around and are always looking for ways to improve the search experience because a better search experience means happier users, and satisfied users mean increased loyalty and?market share.

That’s why it’s common for search engines to update their algorithms regularly.

Back in August 2022,?Google rolled out an update?that significantly impacted the rankings of certain sites. According to Google, this algorithm change focused on:

"Rewarding websites that offer a satisfying experience to visitors and demoting sites that don’t meet the visitor’s expectations. This means publishing 'people-first content' that isn’t stuffed with keywords and provides lots of value. Google also discourages a 'search engine-first approach,' where the primary goal is to get ranked and drive traffic from search engines"

Unfortunately, if you had been using AI to generate content, hired freelance content writers who used AI or you just stuffed your content with keywords, you could've been affected by the update.

The Solution

While your firm can’t do anything about search engines improving their algorithms, you can adapt your online strategy to account for these updates. A?cross-channel marketing strategy, for example, can help your business earn website traffic from multiple sources.

A few examples include:

• Paid ads
• Social media
• Email

You can also check if any of your content was written by AI by using AI content checkers like Copycat or Writer and taking down these posts and having it written by a human.

2. Too Many Blog Posts

It’s easy to get stuck in the "content is king" phase where your top priority is publishing more and more content.

It makes sense right? Google won’t consider your site up-to-date and you’ll potentially lose traffic.

In reality, you’re drowning your website in blog posts that do the exact opposite of what you intended.

Recently, I audited a law firm website and they had over 650+ blog posts.

This is a high number of blog posts for a law firm. Unless you’re a massive firm with dozens of locations and practice areas, there’s not really much to talk about in a single practice area.

This means there’s likely a ton of overlap in many of your blog posts.

Why is this bad?

Because they’re competing for similar keywords and will battle for rankings and traffic in the same SERPs (search results).

In other words, you’re cannibalizing your own keywords and traffic.

When you have multiple posts targeting the same keywords and topics, it sends traffic to multiple locations of your site instead of directing them down a clear path. The end result is your website has a poor user experience, so people leave without converting

This also hurts your rankings since only one post can rank #1 for the same keyword. The one that’s ranking highest may not be the one you intended people to visit first in their journey to convert.

The better option is to combine similar blog posts into one high-value, authoritative post, so there’s only one ranking and driving traffic for that topic. Then you can develop a clear path to a tailored landing page or call for conversion.

Sometimes, Gary Vee ain't the answer.

The Solution

We recommend "spring cleaning" your content by deleting low-quality, low-performing posts altogether. It’s better to have fewer high-value posts that deliver results than to bog down your blog with unnecessary fluff that does nothing for your SEO or conversions.

3. Your Keyword Strategy Is Outdated

An old keyword strategy can also create a slow, steady, and consistent traffic decrease.

Law firms that experience a gradual decrease in website traffic need to evaluate their keyword strategy. Even if you don’t have a?keyword strategy for SEO, it’s essential to review your content and what it ranks for in search results.

The Solution

Updating your keyword strategy is a time- and resource-intensive process. Even if you have a small website, your team needs to invest the time to optimize and revise content. The ROI is substantial and well worth the investment.

Build your website traffic back up with the following steps:

• Audit your keyword strategy, looking for outdated or generic keywords
• Research alternative keywords with a higher search volume and overall value
• Revise your content to include these alternative keywords

This is a big win for your business because it improves your?content marketing plan?and?SEO strategy. Plus, new content can help your firm rank in valuable search results and earn additional site traffic.

4. Your Website Agency Forgot About SEO

Let's be real, web design agencies care more about how pretty a website looks rather than focusing on SEO.

A site design that doesn’t consider SEO can cause significant damage to your website traffic.

Redesigning your website?is an excellent decision, especially if you have an older site. A refreshed website looks modern and professional, plus provides a better user experience, which can increase your bottom line.

Ok, I gotta give credit where it is due. While they understand design and how to create an attractive and usable website, they don’t recognize the relationship between web design and SEO, and how a redesigned (or newly designed) website can tank traffic.

A few ways a?website redesign can hurt your SEO?and traffic include:

• Replacing page content, including title tags and meta descriptions, with unoptimized content
• Creating brand-new pages for existing pages, without setting up a?301 redirect
• Changing the?site structure, without updating the sitemap
• Redesigning the website without including your Google Analytics tracking code

Since your website’s design impacts your entire site, it’s critical to fix this problem right away.

The Solution

Law firms can approach a traffic drop following a site redesign in a few ways, including:

• Restore your previous site with backups
• Optimize your new content and website
• Update your sitemap
• Set up 301 redirects

Depending on your redesign, your fix may take a significant amount of time.

For example, if your company needs to restart its SEO strategy, it will?take time to rank in search results?and earn the kind of traffic that your website had before. In comparison, creating 301 redirects requires less work, though your traffic levels will probably take a few weeks or months to recover.

5. Poor Website Structure

This isn’t just about how you link and set up menus — it also covers how you name your URLs.

For example, if a personal injury law firm has multiple locations in Georgia, it could create subfolders such as “www.example.com/atlanta” or “www.example.com/alpharetta” Or you can take it a step further and have a service sub-folder and then different locations for each:?www.example.com/burn-injuries/atlanta.

Then when search engines crawl your website, they’ll understand the location-specific content and return relevant results for users searching for PI services in that.

The Solution

Using location-based subfolders can improve your website’s local SEO and visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant local searches.

6. No Internal Links To Money Pages

Not including links to other pages and blog posts on your website is a big mistake. Not only does it prevent people from browsing through your site longer, but it also prevents Google from indexing (listing/ranking) those pages. \

Your site’s navigation should be structured in a way that allows people and bots to find relevant content.

For example, your home page should have a menu that directs visitors to your service pages, location pages, blog posts, and contact page. Then under your blog post page, there should be categories to quickly find the information a visitor needs.

By including links on your pages and blog posts, you can direct visitors to other relevant posts they may find useful. It also inches them closer to contacting your law firm.

The Solution

Make sure you’re interlinking relevant service pages, blog posts, and other resources (e.g., guides, eBooks, case studies) in your content.

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