Table of Contents
A straightforward guide for busy law firms who want to 10x their ROI on legal blogs.
- SEO Basics
- Measurement & Analytics
- Websites
- Keyword Research
- On-page Optimization
- Link Building
- Local Search Optimization
- Strategy
The tough reality is that most blog posts by law firms will never see the light of day. Without an effective process, your writing will fail to win new clients for your law firm. With our 4-step approach, you can change all that and turn your law firm website content into a revenue generator that you can put on autopilot.
If you’re writing blogs for your law firm’s website, you’ve probably noticed by now that your content isn’t bringing in the audience you hoped it would.
I hate to break it to you, but unless you have a targeted strategy to scale your firm’s legal content, there’s a strong chance no one will ever read your blog, much less become a client.
Turns out that over 90% of pages on the Internet get absolutely no traffic from Google. That’s right — the vast majority of everything written on the Internet is never seen. It’s truly a rough world out there…but not for all.
Thankfully, the solution to joining that seemingly exclusive 10% is surprisingly simple. With a few improvements, you can escape the ocean of mediocrity among law firm websites and start acquiring high-quality visitors from Google on every new post.
We have developed a proven formula for law firm content that not only gets traffic but also gets cases from your ideal clients. Follow along as we open up the vault and show you how to turn your regular blogs and law firm website content into revenue machines.
Here’s How to Give Your Law Firm an Unfair Advantage
The whole goal is to develop a webpage that Google deems worthy of a first-page ranking.
How does one do that? Well, there’s not really a manual for it.
The best we can do is make a continually evolving educated guess on what we think Google is looking for. Everyone has a different approach, but I’ll share exactly how we do it.
Our process heavily relies on a relatively new tool that has quickly become the industry standard, Surfer. This tool is kind of like a cheat code when creating law firm website content for potential clients.
Give Every Page a Primary Keyword
Law firms typically get this wrong on their content marketing, so stand out amongst the crowd!
There are literally millions of new pages created on the internet every day, so to have your law firm marketing efforts stand out from the crowd you have to be laser-focused. Building your blog post or page around a specific keyword helps Google understand what your content is all about. Adding the keyword of your choosing to the page’s title and meta description and using it throughout the law firm page help paint the picture.
If you do this right, your landing page acts like a digital billboard, drawing people in.
Law firm marketing is extremely competitive and it’s vital that your law firm’s content strategy is tight if you want to stand out. For your next page or blog post, make sure it has a theme.
If you don’t carry this thread throughout the page, it will go to the graveyard of other blogs written by law firms on page 2+ of Google. Put yourself miles ahead of the competition with a primary keyword.
Using Surfer to Dominate Search Engines
It works by taking your keyword, running a search for that term, and then extracting and analyzing everything in Google’s search results. Behind the scenes, Surfer is collecting a bunch of data points that you can use for comparative analysis. It sounds complicated because it is, but using it to create compelling content is actually quite simple.
Through this process, you’ll see the average characteristics, such as word count, headings, and more, of other law firm websites that already rank for your desired keyword. With these comparative characteristics in mind, you can begin to create a composite idea of what the average first-page result looks like. As I said, it’s basically a cheat code.
The Simple Method for Busy Lawyers
If you aren’t ready to commit to a new tool, a simple way to replicate this process is available. In fact, we used to do something like this before Surfer came onto the market. It’s slow and definitely not sexy, but it can still work.
If you want to do this on your own, simply search for your keyword and spend 10 minutes reviewing each of the first three organic search results. Count the words with a tool like WordCounter and make a note of what topics they cover or how they present the information. That’s it.
By manually reviewing the top three and taking some notes about each page, you can start to see some commonalities and differences. This will give you some basic data about what you need to write about and how long your page should be for potential clients.
This is definitely the quick and dirty process – it’s not perfect. But it’s way better than what most people are doing right now, which is writing aimlessly.
There are even some free tools out there that will help expedite parts of the process for you. If you want that list, just let us know and we’re happy to share it.
These Proven Content Writing Tips Can Tip the Scales Over Another Law Firm
Now comes the actual writing process.
While just about anyone can write a blog post, knowing know to write legal marketing content that converts is a whole new ballgame. Here are a few of our tried-and-true legal content writing tips to help you get started.
Write With Your Audience in Mind
As an attorney, your initial instinct may be to make your content as jam-packed with information as possible to establish your authority on a topic. And while you do want your reader to pick up on your expertise in your legal field, writing the way you would in a legal brief or to a colleague is not an effective way to accomplish this.
Each piece of content you publish on your law firm’s website should be carefully crafted to attract your ideal client. This means that, in most circumstances, it should be written in plain English that is free of excessive legal jargon.
Remember: you aren’t writing for other attorneys. No matter how factual or grammatically correct your writing is, if you can’t grab the average reader’s attention, your content will fail to do its job. Keep it precise, persuasive, and conversational and the leads will roll right in.
Address Your Reader’s Concerns
Like I mentioned above, your content should be written with your reader in mind. This means not only writing in a manner that will appeal to them but also stepping into their shoes and considering the circumstances that led them to your content as well as their feelings surrounding the situation.
Although you’re probably more than comfortable with the legal system by now, many people have never interacted with an attorney before. This can spark feelings of apprehension about making that first call to your law firm. Paired with a stressful situation such as criminal charges, a child custody battle, or bankruptcy, your reader is likely full of fear and concern.
Your content should speak to these concerns by providing answers, explaining (in a non-judgmental manner) potential options, and instilling confidence that you can help them successfully navigate their legal challenges.
The more points that can be addressed upfront–without coming across as too salesy or promotional–the better.
Make Your Content Scannable
There is one unifying trait shared by nearly all successful web content: scannability.
The reasoning behind this is simple — the vast majority of people don’t actually read content online. Instead, they scan it, picking up the most eye-catching words and phrases as they go. With this in mind, your goal should be to make your content as scannable as possible while emphasizing the most important information for your readers.
Some of the most effective ways to format your content for scannability include:
- Using visual elements like bold, italics, and hyperlinks to emphasize key phrases.
- Writing relevant and eye-catching headings and subheadings to organize your text into sub-topics.
- Creating bulleted lists to quickly convey information.
- Breaking up large blocks of text into shorter paragraphs.
- Varying your punctuation with parentheses, ellipses, colons, and em dashes to keep the reader’s eyes moving.
Create Compelling Calls to Action
Well-written legal content will certainly bring visitors to your website, but without a reason to hang around, odds are that they’ll simply take the information you’ve given them and move on. If you want your reader to become a prospect, you’ll need to give them explicit instructions for what to do next.
Great law firm websites all have one thing in common: a clear call to action. Tell readers exactly what you want them to do and make it as easy as possible for them to accomplish that task.
This can be done in any number of ways. Encourage readers to subscribe to your email list, request contact from you by phone or email, or browse your website to learn more about your services. You can also add social media icons to the sidebar or sprinkle call-to-action graphics throughout the page. We like to add a little bit of each when creating legal content for our clients, but feel free to experiment with each to see what brings the best results.
Repeat and Scale Your Efforts for Sustainable Results
The most important part of a good content marketing strategy for law firms is consistency.
Consistency is important when you’re working to improve your law firm website’s visibility because SEO has compounding benefits. The more you invest, the better your results will be. The more topics you cover, the larger your footprint will become.
After you’ve completed your first piece of content using this new approach, start planning your next piece for the firm website. Ranking pages can happen quickly, but for the most part, it’s a long play. Figure out your niche, a process, and just start writing blog posts.
A great process to apply here is the topic cluster model. You can think about it as a tree trunk with lots of smaller branches growing off of it. Essentially, a single primary page acts as a “trunk” for the rest of the related content on your site by connecting to multiple smaller, more specific pages, which help establish authority for your primary page.
When building your law firm’s topic cluster strategy, practice area pages are generally the best option to serve as your primary, or ‘pillar’ pages. This prompts Google to rank your pages higher and ensures that a wide range of topics surrounding your practice areas is covered, effectively bringing more prospective clients your way.
Don’t get discouraged if things start slowly. As time goes on, you’ll start to see the benefits. Your firm’s website will become a better resource for potential clients and, soon enough, you’ll start to reap the SEO rewards.
We want you to be successful and we’re here to help. You can learn more about our approach here.
