5 quick wins to help conveyancers improve their digital profile

Annie Button has written an article that looks at five quick wins that can help conveyancers to improve their digital profile.

There is no denying that the internet has made the world a better place, for the most part at least. It is certainly helping the conveyancing world go digital. But while it has made information more freely available and allows customers and clients to find businesses more easily, it can be something of a double-edged sword.

The digital space is a competitive one, with companies seeking to take advantage of the accessibility of the internet to improve their marketing efforts.

Marketing companies specialise in helping their clients make connections, get noticed and bring in more customers or leads. The same is true of digital marketing, and here are some quick wins your conveyancing firm can implement to boost your online profile.

1. Updating your Google Business Profile

Finding clients online is competitive and while there should be a long-term strategy in place for this, we can also improve our fortunes with some simple and good digital housekeeping. One of the first and easiest steps to do is to create or update your Google Business Profile. This is a key organic search ranking indicator for Google and doesn’t take long to do.

It requires basic information about your business such as your address, services and industry to better help Google decide whether to recommend you as a search result. So if people are searching for help buying or selling a property, Google knows to send them your way.

Google Business Profile submissions also allow for your customers to leave experience-based reviews to better inform others and Google itself about whether you are a trustworthy company. It is worthwhile encouraging your clients to leave reviews for this purpose.

2. Building links and quality content

This is mostly a medium-term improvement but quick wins are also possible when focusing on creating quality content and industry insights that other sites want to link to. This improves the authority and ranking power of your website. As Google’s search function continues to improve and be refined, the smarter we have to be about where links to our site are coming from.

“A fundamental part of Google’s algorithm (PageRank) relies on links to understand the reputation and relevancy of a website. Without links it’s very difficult to get a page to rank,” explains Justin Aldridge, Technical Director at SEO experts Artemis Marketing.

He adds: “If you don’t make an active effort to get links to your website, it’s never going to make an impact in search.” The quality of links matters most and one way you can enjoy a quick win in this regard is to audit all of the inbound links to your site, determine which are of low or high quality and create a plan to generate more high-quality inbound links.

3. Doing keyword research

Readily accessible SEO tools like AHRefs can quickly showcase gaps in your content versus your rivals’ pages that are ranking highly. Gaining those insights, you can then tailor the content of your pages to include those terms.

For example, you as a conveyancing company may dedicate a service page to your remortgaging process. You can take your page and compare it to pages that rank better or highly for the same terms that you want your page to rank for, e.g. ‘Remortgaging in Yorkshire’.

It may highlight certain keywords (search terms) that you have left out or others that you missed entirely. This can enrich your content, not only with information or points that you might have missed but also by increasing the relevancy of your content in regards to what people are searching for when they need the services of a conveyancer.

4. Optimising pages for search

You can offer the best conveyancing service in the world but if your website isn’t built well or optimised for search results, few people will discover you. While link-building campaigns and creating a body of high-quality content can take time, there are some quick website optimisation wins you can use to give your digital profile a boost.

Adding the right metadata, a.k.a. meta description, to your web pages shows Google what it is looking for. Digital marketing experts at HubSpot define meta descriptions as “the snippet of information below the blue link of a search result. Its purpose is to describe the contents of the page to the searcher”. It comes in three main forms; title metadata, description metadata and keyword metadata.

Most content management systems (CMS) will pre-populate this data for you when you create a new page, but it’s important to write in the information yourself to better inform search engines about what they are looking at. In the past, these types of meta descriptions were stuffed with keywords, but Google now recognises this as an attempt to manipulate the system and punishes your ranking.

For example, a conveyancer may have shoehorned in several terms like ‘conveyancing’, ‘remortgaging’, ‘building control’, and ‘legal process’ but unless written in a coherent sentence, this will feel forced. It is worth purging all of your web pages of old metadata to make it more relevant and organic.

5. Enhance your mobile-friendliness

Think about how many times per day you go online, and of those occasions, how many of them were on your phone or tablet. A staggering 92.3% of internet users access web content using a mobile phone, so it’s essential to pay mobile users as much attention as possible.

Mobile-friendliness is now a ranking factor in Google’s assessment of your website, so it pays to create versions of your site that work on all devices. Imagine, someone has just discovered their offer has been accepted on a house but they aren’t at home so they look up conveyancing firms on their phone to get the process started.

They find your website but it doesn’t function properly on their mobile, therefore they don’t trust your firm and find another that has a perfectly functioning website. You’ve potentially just lost a conversion, and worse, they have gone to your rival. A major facepalm moment.