Check-Up on Your Legal Help Website
How does your legal help website do, when it comes to four quality factors: tech, search rank, design, and content?
Get to know what issues you can fix, to help your website reach & serve more of your target audience.
We have a Quick Scan audit rubric. Use this tool to quickly review your site & talk through priorities with your team.
And then to dive in further, you can use our 3 in-depth tools.
- Technical Performance Rankings
- Design and Content Performance Review
- Search Rank Audit
- Search Audit Results 2023
Quick Scan of your legal help website
Talk through each of these 4 categories with your team. How would you rank on 1-5 for each? This can help you prioritize where you need to focus efforts to make a successful website.
1.
Discovery & Rank
- Page Rank/SERP Audit: When a person in your zipcodes searches for legal help on Google, where does your site show up?
- Backlinks: Do authoritative .gov, .org, .edu, and .com websites link to you?
- Schema Markup: Does your site have your overall organization and specific services marked up in the schema.org standards?
2. Tech Performance
- Mobile-friendliness: Does your site load quickly & cleanly on phones?
- Speed: Does your site load quickly?
- Bugs: Are there errors on your page?
- Crawlable: Can search engine bots ‘see’ everything on your page?
3. User-Friendly Design
- Visual design: Does your site have clear hierarchy, groupings, navigation, and features?
- Formats: Do you present complex info in step-by-steps, FAQs, short videos, user stories, and referral lists?
- Accessibility: Do you help people with Limited English, visual impairment, and other needs? Do you put info in PDFs or live on your site?
4. Good Content
- Topic Coverage: Do you answer the key questions people are searching for? Do you emphasize what jurisdiction it’s for?
- Plain Language: Do you write at 8th-grade reading level? Do you use phrases and terms that people use?
- Scannable: Do you have short passages — with headings in users’ own phrases– that are easily scanned by people in a rush?
Deep Audit in 4 Areas
1. Technical Performance ranking
Our rankings website uses the Google Lighthouse tool to score public interest legal help websites. How are they performing when it comes to speed, bugs, loading issues, and other technical concerns? The ranking also gives concrete action items to fix them.
Which sites have the best technical performance? This includes rankings on websites’ speed, accessibility, SEO, and other key technical factors that define how people easily use websites. One tool that we will be using to rank the technical performance is Lighthouse, an open-source evaluation tool for the technical quality of any webpage.
You can see more about Lighthouse from a Google 2019 presentation at the YouTube link here.
2. Design & Content Audit
Want to check how your website is performing when it comes to Design & Content?
Use this DIY design audit. Go through your main pages, and rank how your site is doing, when it comes to user-friendly navigation, hierarchy, content, and visuals.
3. Search Ranking Audit
Our team can audit what websites are showing up in your jurisdiction for common queries.
Step 1. You give us zipcodes & issue types using the form below.
Step 2. we’ll tell you who’s placing in Google’s Top 10 in your local geography, as well as how your local public interest websites are performing.
Search Audit Results 2023-24
Our team ran search audits in partnership with 14 different states’ law help website teams. Each of these teams is a Legal Help Online Cohort member. For their states, we ran thousands of common legal help searches through Google Search and recorded the results.
We created interactive search audit dashboards for each member’s jurisdiction. This helps them understand the local online ecosystem of legal help. What are people seeing when they look online for help? And how is their law help or court site ranking on Google Search? Take a look at the audit results for each state below.
