Filling in content and technical gaps for this law firm’s site redesign.
The Challenge
This law firm based in South Carolina already had a relationship with a design and development agency; that agency handled the design and development work and brought us in to help plan site structure, SEO, and recommend a content strategy.
Though we can create digital experiences soup to nuts, some projects simply call for partnering with a pre-existing team. In this case, we helped fill in gaps of expertise with 5 steps:
1. The Content Audit
2. The Technical Audit
3. The Competitive Audit
4. Sitemap + Content Strategy
5. Redirect + Linking Strategy
The deliverables from each of these steps were then delivered to RPWB’s design and development agency to implement.
1. THE CONTENT AUDIT
Our content audit process starts with an inventory of all the content on your site. This includes metrics for each page, such as traffic segmented by channel, e-commerce metrics, page value, and backlink metrics. With this data, we can see a complete picture of the value of any given piece of content. Once analyzed, we then create a plan for every page.
2. THE TECHNICAL AUDIT
Our technical site audits analyze the existing site to identify potential problems and opportunities.
A full technical site audit isn’t typically necessary on a redesign since most / all of the existing code is probably thrown out, but a simplified site audit that considers the platform the site is moving to can act as recommendations for the dev team.
3. THE COMPETITIVE AUDIT
Likewise, a competitive audit is a crucial step in content and site structure planning because it identifies what competitors are doing well that we can copy or improve on, and what they’re doing that we should avoid.
4. Sitemap and content recommendations
After the research above, we start planning the site structure. In most cases, you want to create a more logical, navigable, and optimized structure without discarding important content from the existing site. This is one of the deliverables that can come out of that process:
5. Redirect and Linking Strategy
Links from your homepage are not only given extra weight by search engines, but help users more easily navigate the site. You can see the client chose to link to case types, a taxonomy that best represented how users would be searching for content on the site.
The results
We set this site up for success at launch and the client has managed to implement content recommendations, doubling traffic in the first months. It’s only gone up since then.
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