Today, it has become inevitable for every business to create an attractive and engaging website. When compared with other businesses, the online journey of legal firms was a bit slow. However, they are quickly catching up. The first task in creating a law office website is choosing the right domain name. Your website domain name affects your site search engine rankings and social media searches in a great way. Before proceeding any further, it is important to identify relevant keywords for your law firm and decide the right domain name. However, choosing a keyword-rich domain or a brand name domain is always a big challenge.
Keyword-rich domains
Keyword-rich domains have been very popular for several years. The reason for the popularity is because they provide higher rankings for your site. For instance, people who want to hire an attorney would search for a phrase find an attorney or hire an attorney. To tap this search segment, you can choose a domain name like findanattorney or hireanattorney. Moreover, when people link to your site, they use the same keywords in the anchor text. When people search for this term, the chances of your law office website displaying on top are maximum. This is called Exact Match Domains or EMD. The problem with EMD is that keyword-rich domains rank higher even though they contain low quality content.
However, Google algorithms keep changing. According to High Position, Google has released an update on EMD which answers the apparent low quality EMD issues. After this update, the EMD ranking went down from #13.4 to #26.6. These numbers tell us that EMD and keyword-rich domains might lose their charm in the future. It doesnt mean that you should not use keywords in your domain. The emphasis here is laid on the quality of the site and not merely on the keywords of the domain. If you can publish quality content and get more backlinks, your law office website would rank higher even though it does not contain any keywords in the domain name.
Brand name domains
Using brand name in the domain has its own advantages and disadvantages. Basically, people should be able to remember your legal firm. When you use a keyword domain, your brand name does not become a household name. The traffic you receive would only be from search engines. When brand name is used, it gives a reputation to your legal firm. Within short period, your law firm gets recognized. After some time, people will search for your firm using your brand name and not keywords.
Brand names offer credibility to your business. Keyword-rich domains would look good. But when it comes to credibility, people would be more interested in clicking the link that has a brand name of the company. Sometimes, your brand name can be coupled with a keyword to get the best of both worlds. Another way to build credibility is to minimize hyphens in the name. If you have already chosen a domain name for your law office website, there is nothing to worry. You can still rank your site higher in search engines by following quality SEO standards regardless of your domain name.
