More and more law firms and legal departments are asking their lawyers to be able to combine their legal skills with digital skills.
Lawyers are and will be increasingly asked to be able to understand how an algorithm works, computer programming languages, artificial intelligence, blockchain ...
What about SEO?
Indeed, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an essential web acquisition channel to boost the traffic of a website.
It is about implementing a web visibility strategy to make sure that a website is the best to meet the search intent of visitors.
The levers to be activated are fourfold: technical, content, popularity and user experience (UX).
Understanding the subtleties of SEO, the expectations and requirements of search engines, knowing the main ranking criteria of their algorithms is the assurance of being able to get any publication or website buried in the search results until then.
At Seraphin.legal, your contract management software, we understand this because SEO represents a relatively large part of our website's monthly traffic.
We don't mean to turn you into an SEO consultant, you are still a lawyer, but we want to give you the basics in SEO to help you optimize your latest blog post, to optimize your personal website that highlights your areas of expertise or your favorite topics and to better communicate with your SEO colleagues and developers within your company.
The disappointment of not seeing your publication or website appear on the first page of Google
Spending hours on a text, an article and not seeing it appear in the search engine results is terribly frustrating.
If 130,000 billion pages are indexed by Google and 20 billion are crawled every day by the search engine (source: Blog du Modérateur), publishing your content on your website is not a guarantee to see it appear in the search engine results or SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
First of all, you have to make sure that the published content is crawlable and indexable by search engines.
The crawl is used to discover web pages and capture their content. It is the exploration by a robot of a website. It will capture the content (HTML code) of the page to send it to the engine. The robot will then detect the outgoing links (internal and external) in this page and follow them to explore other pages on which it will perform the same work, and so on.
It happens very often to website editors to have forgotten to remove the blocks to crawl when putting a website online. With a CMS (Content Management System), such as WordPress, you just have to check/uncheck an option to allow or prevent the exploration of the pages of a website by search engine robots.
More technical in SEO, it is possible to ask the robot not to crawl a website through the robots.txt file, it will then add the Disallow: / directive to the file. Indeed, the robots.txt file which is located at the root of a website /robots.txt indicates to the crawlers of a search engine the URLs it can access on your site.
Once the page is crawled, Google will, after analysis, decide if it indexes it or not. Some website editors and SEOs have noticed that some pages of their websites took a long time to be indexed.
There is no exact rule to push Google to index a web page even if adding Youtube videos, promoting it on a social network like Twitter with a link to it or making a link from an already indexed page to this same page could work.
To give yourself the best chance of being indexed, it is advisable to offer search engines, starting with Google, the best possible page to meet the search intention of users.
As we will see in this second part, natural referencing, SEO, is not only about technique, content is king as we tend to say in SEO.
If you want to get results in SEO, you will have to focus your efforts on creating reference "content", articles with high value and that stand out from the crowd.
Optimize your publication and website to please search engines
If Google communicates on more than 200 criteria used to rank websites, the improvement of the SEO of a website or a web page will be played around four pillars including :
La technique
- Il va s’agir de renseigner les balises title pour chacune des pages de son site web. La balise title correspond au titre de la page web et se présente sous la forme : <title>Contenu de la balise title</title>. Il est possible de de lire son intitulé dans l’onglet du navigateur affichant la page. Ce champ est affiché par Google comme titre (cliquable) de ses résultats de recherche (liens bleus). Le contenu de la balise title étant un critère de pertinence pour les moteurs de recherche, il doit être particulièrement soigné au niveau des termes utilisés.
- You must set up the Hn tags, that is to say the titles in the pages, the Hn tags are used to structure the editorial content of the text of the page. Most often, they are positioned on the title (h1), the subtitle, the headings ... The h1 tag is used to indicate the editorial title of the page.
- Although the engines (Google, Bing...) do not take into account the content of this tag to calculate the relevance of a page in relation to a given query, it is important to fill in the meta-description tags, it is a tag containing a text that is provided to search engines so that they display it as a description of the page in their search results (what is called the "snippet"). The content of the meta descriptions must be sufficiently attractive for the user to click on the link. The size of your meta descriptions can be up to 320 characters, the minimum size is 150 to 160 characters.
- You should also take care to avoid an excessive loading time for each page of your website by resizing and optimizing the weight of your images.
- It is also good in SEO to fill in the alt attributes of your images. This text that will describe the image!
L’expérience utilisateur (UX)
- You must offer users, readers of your website, web pages pleasant to read. Think for example to air your content with images, bulleted lists...
Le contenu
- You must offer users and search engine robots expert textual content with a nice semantic richness. The main keywords should also be included in the hot zones of each web page of the site. Let's specify that title tags, meta-descriptions, Hn tags, internal links, alt attributes i.e. image descriptions constitute the main hot zones of a website.
La popularité
It is important in SEO to get backlinks, external links from popular sites and located in your theme with anchors that are not too optimized. An anchor is a keyword on which a link will be placed. It is this anchor that allows to give details to robots and the Internet user about the page that is hidden behind. A non-optimized anchor is a text without keyword (example: "click here" or "follow this link"). An optimized anchor is a text with a series of keywords (example "SEO").
Pillars in SEO as important as each other and therefore to work together in a complementary way to obtain good results in natural referencing. Your web pages must offer relevant and rich content at the semantic level without forgetting of course the need to obtain natural links (backlinks) from other sites to gain authority.
A great French SEO, Olivier Andrieu talks about Google as a "textual obsessive". So, after having worked on the technical bases of your website, you should focus your efforts on the creation of content. It is the creation of high value content that will allow you to obtain better positions in the search engine results pages.
The content should be both inspiring and impactful to make you an expert in your field. We advise you to focus on long content!
Be aware that first page content has an average of 1,890 words. In addition, longer content receives more backlinks than shorter articles.
Aiming for the top 3 in Google results is finally possible
You have technically optimized your website, you have just produced some valuable content, you have just collected your first backlinks, you can in the medium term start to have ambitions in SEO, that is to say aiming for the Top 3 on your strategic positions.
Know that 75% of Internet users do not click further than the first page. 67% of clicks on the Google results page go to the first 5 organic (or natural) results. So you should aim for the top 3! Of course, depending on the competition on certain keywords, this may take longer! Indeed, your SEO performance will depend on the age, popularity and reputation of your website as well as the competition.
Always keep in mind that it is the most relentless who wins in SEO! Above all, make sure you offer search engines and Internet users a website that is pleasant to read, perfectly explorable and with reliable content that is always more relevant to your theme.
Because the objective of Google, which is becoming more and more an answer engine, is to offer the best results to Internet users who make a request.
Google then implemented an EAT concept (Expertise, Authority, Credibility for "Trust") to highlight the most appropriate and relevant content. Put forward since 2018, this set of criteria is an integral part of Google's algorithms. EAT allows Google to evaluate content in its search results.
In order to rank high in the search results, it is important to take these criteria into account for your content. To do this, three factors should be put forward:
Expertise: You must be considered by Google as an expert. This obliges you to propose to its robots articles and more globally perfectly structured content with up-to-date information and a perfect link network for your SEO.
Authority: Google must recognize you as a reliable source! This recognition can be determined by obtaining backlinks, external links from other authority sites as well as mentions in various media experts in your field, sharing your content on social networks.
Credibility or Trust: It is important for your site to prove that it is trustworthy and that your article was written by a reliable source. To do this, do not hesitate to provide small "biographies" for the authors of your articles with links to their Linkedin profile for example or other links that you deem relevant to demonstrate their credibility in writing about these topics.
Since December 2022, Google has updated its search algorithm and added the experience to give the concept EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust). The experience of the author or content creator is thus taken into account! To get a high EEAT, you must produce quality content. Your content must provide real added value in terms of information. Producing reliable and relevant content should be your priority to improve your SEO. This means researching authoritative sources, providing multiple points of view, and defining acronyms and concepts that you bring up.
We also encourage you to update your pages regularly so that search engines can always index them. To have a good EEAT, it is important that you cite your information, even more so when it comes from authority sites. You show reliability, which helps you improve your SEO score. Even if you lose a little "SEO juice" by including an external link, it won't hurt your SEO.
Conclusion: Chat-GPT, Bard: is the future of search in turmoil?
At Seraphin.legal, we believe that a lawyer must have the basics, if not the rudiments of SEO to optimize his latest article, his website or to exchange with his colleagues developers and SEO.
Remember in conclusion that the SEO improvement of a website will be played around four pillars to work in a complementary manner.
- Technique
- Content
- Popularity
- the UX
Thus a website with a good technical base must offer relevant and rich content at the semantic level without forgetting of course the need to obtain external links, the famous quality backlinks to gain authority.
Above all, make sure you offer search engines and Internet users a website that is pleasant to read, loads quickly, can be explored perfectly and has content that is always more relevant to your theme.
SEO then seems very simple! Then in November 2022, the start-up OpenAI made available to the general public its prototype of conversational agent based on artificial intelligence techniques. It was and still is a huge success! And it is perhaps the whole world of "Search", the way we look for information on search engines that is completely changed!
At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft invested in OpenAI to integrate Chat-GPT into its search engine Bing, which only represents 4% of the search engine market share in France. Faced with this danger, Google had no choice but to retaliate and therefore announced the release of an equivalent to Chat-GPT: Bard.
Bard, the Google tool will be partly similar to Chat-GPT. Bard remains a conversational robot and its objective is to answer all the questions you ask it. With Bard, Google has managed to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) capable of crawling the existing pages on its search engine in order to deliver an accurate and up-to-date answer. Bard would display a detailed answer adapted to the question asked. It should appear at the top of your screens above the search results.
Questions remain, however, will Bard systematically display answers on the Google search results page? How will Bard select the answer it will give to the question asked? What will be its criteria?
Until we have answers to our questions, we can only recommend that you redouble your efforts to produce high-value, reliable and relevant content in your field.
