You could have the best website on the internet, an extremely loyal client base, and thousands of followers on social media. Still, if there’s a mistake on your website, it can affect your law firm’s credibility. So when a visitor comes to your website, it’s essential to prove that it is credible. Sounds easy, right?

Even the most minor, subtle mistakes on your website can make a huge difference in your credibility. And even if you put a significant amount of time into creating and editing your website, things can often slip through the cracks regarding content.

Credibility is vital to all businesses but often even more to law firms. People are putting their trust in you, so your credibility must be iron-clad. In this article, we will discuss website credibility and some common mistakes on your website that can affect your credibility.

What Makes a Website Credible?

Credibility is the foundation of any website. When visitors doubt the trustworthiness or reliability of your website, they will leave just to be safe.

The credibility of your website can also affect your search engine rankings as well. Google wants to provide users with trustworthy websites and looks at credibility factors when ranking sites.

Common Mistakes That Can Affect Website Credibility

Here are six seemingly insignificant mistakes that can affect the credibility of your website.

1. Copyright Year

Failing to update the copyright year on your website is a simple mistake that can occur, especially at the beginning of a new year. Sometimes it may have been multiple years since a website owner updated the copyright date of their website. While this mistake doesn’t appear to affect SEO, it can cause visitors to question your law firm’s credibility.

2. Outdated Blogs

Content marketing and blogging are excellent ways to generate traffic to your website. But if you take your eye off these factors, they can easily fall by the wayside.

What would you think if you ended up on a website and were looking through the articles or blog posts and saw that the last post was over a year old? First, you may wonder why the updates stopped all of a sudden. And then, you would probably head to another business’s website that has more updated content.

Keeping content fresh and new is essential. And when visitors see new content being posted regularly, you gain their trust and possibly a new client.

3. Embedded Feeds

The trendy thing to do used to be to embed social media feeds into websites. While this trend has slowed down (because embedded feeds affect the website’s loading time), if you still have embedded feeds on your website, you need to ensure that you are actively updating your social media accounts.

In the same way that not seeing updated blogs can make visitors question your firm’s credibility, heading to a website with an embedded feed that doesn’t show new activity on social media accounts can make the website appear outdated. It may even lead some visitors to believe that your law firm is no longer in business. 

4. Incomplete Content

By incomplete content, we are referring to pages that you may have created with a paragraph of text. Often, pages like this were made live when your website was created, and you meant to go back in and add more content, but it slipped through the cracks.

Keeping content updated and relevant not only provides visitors with the information they’re looking for, but it also helps with SEO in the following ways:

• Improves click through rate
• Updating links on pages makes your content more relevant
• Adding or updating images improves content. And Google likes content with mixed media, such as videos, images, and lists.
• Allows you the opportunity to add more keywords related to your primary keyword
• It gives you the chance to repromote your content which can earn new backlinks

5. Outdated References

It’s important to review your website at least annually to ensure that your content isn’t referring to times that have long passed. Creating evergreen content can help avoid this risk altogether. In addition, evergreen content makes content more manageable in the long run.

6. 404 Errors

A 404 error is an error code that appears when a link is broken, the visitor enters the incorrect URL, or the webpage has been deleted or renamed. 404 errors can negatively affect user experience. If visitors encounter a 404 error and aren’t led to where they need to be to get the information they’re looking for, they will likely leave your website.

You can avoid losing a potential new client by creating a custom 404 error page. When you create a custom page, the page will deliver your customized message notifying your visitor that they’ve landed in the wrong spot, directing them where they need to go to get the information they’re looking for.

Don’t Risk Your Credibility on Website Mistakes. Let Conroy Creative Counsel Help.

Getting visitors to your website can be hard enough. Leaving them with a bad first impression is something you want to avoid at all costs.

At Conroy Creative Counsel, we know the importance of keeping your clients happy and attracting new clients. We can help you establish a strong digital presence with impactful web design and the technology your law firm needs to set apart from the competition. We work with law firms of all sizes and practice areas to deliver website design services geared toward growth.

Contact us today for a consultation.