Combining Legal SEO with Information Architecture (IA)

Information architecture (IA) is an integral part of achieving high organic search engine optimisation ‘SEO’ rankings and results for your law firm. 

It is a discipline that focuses on how the information is organised on your website in order to help improve its discoverability through search engines and ensure good user engagement. 

In this blog, we are going to explain why information architecture is critical to good SEO (and why we use it).

How can Information Architecture combined with SEO help my law firm?

Information architecture is all about organising and labelling content on websites to support usability and ‘findability’ while SEO’s primary concern is improving the visibility of a website or a page in search engines, such as Google, via organic traffic. 

IA achieves its goal through content organisation, hierarchy, terminology used to describe your content, and navigation.

SEO, on the contrary, does this by creating optimised content with keywords and alt-image text attached to images as well as organising content.

When combined, IA and SEO make your law firm’s website more ‘findable’ through search engines for your target clients. This in turn results in new leads and cases.

The benefits of combining legal SEO and Information Architecture for law firms

Great website architecture is concerned with improving how your law firm’s website’s users and search engines read your website. It is about knowing your prospective clients and giving them the most relevant content where they expect to find it with the least clicks possible. 

For Google and other sophisticated search engines, an optimised site architecture helps their crawlers and spiders find and index all of the pages of your law firm’s website. 

Reducing your law firm’s website’s bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who enter your site and leave after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate usually means low engagement with your content. 

Typically, visitors arrive at your site looking for answers to a specific legal issue. When they enter and don’t find the solution, they leave increasing your bounce rate. 

SEO is heavily concerned with engagement and that is why the goal of SEO experts is not only to achieve a higher ranking but also to make visitors stay on a website and interact with the content. 

IA helps to achieve this goal by having a good information infrastructure. This essentially means that a website has a clear and defined structure. 

A good information infrastructure makes it easier for visitors to find the information they are looking for and this happens when the content is organised according to their mental models. 

Sitelinks shown by search engines

Websites with well-defined information architecture mapping tend to be recognised and rewarded by Google’s algorithms with sitelinks.

Sitelinks are a list of the most visited web pages that show along with the target page whenever somebody searches for your law firm’s website.

It is a small detail but it can have a huge impact on how people perceive your brand.

The presence of sitelinks will not only increase your reputation and improve trust but also increase the amount of ‘real estate’ you get in organic search results.

A well-defined IA makes it easy for search engines like Google to understand the structure of your law firm’s website.

The value of information architecture

Content is the main reason why people visit law firm websites. It is what drives them to click on your website links. It is therefore important to produce content that people will find valuable.

What is equally important is to make sure that this content is easy to find.

We live in a world where people expect to find solutions to their problems within seconds, with the least amount of effort. When finding information becomes too tedious or too slow, there is a risk they will just abandon it. And when visitors abandon a website, it is much more difficult to bring them back.

This is where IA design plays a major role.

While IA is not really visible to the end-users of your website, it is the backbone of your law firm’s website design.

The information architect’s job is to create a good experience that allows your site’s visitors to focus on their task (finding the right information and filling out your contact form), not on finding their way around a complicated website.

How our team uses IA and SEO?

In summary, information architecture plays a vital role in SEO effectiveness. Good architecture makes legal content easier for search engines and users to access and navigate.

This is why our Intellistart legal SEO experts combine SEO and IA to generate work for our clients.

Read our case study to find out how one of our newly designed law firm websites generated the first lead within 14 days of being published.

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