How to Structure Your Law Firm’s Blog Posts and Why It’s Important

Date: February 21, 2023

Now that you’ve read about the importance of blogging, it’s time to discuss the importance of your blog post’s format. Your blog’s structure is not only extremely beneficial to your readers and potential clients but to the search engine crawlers that index your site as well. 

Elements Your Legal Blog Needs

For your law firm’s blog post to be optimally structured, there are many individual elements each piece of content needs.

1. Great Design

First off, the overall template of your blog should be designed with both user experience and SEO in mind. The design of your blog is the first impression a reader and potential client might have of your firm, so it is essential to present a professional, attractive layout that’s easy for your readers to follow.

2. Title Tag

One of the most basic, but nonetheless important, elements each and every blog post needs, is an H1 title tag. Within your title, you should try to include your focus keyword so that readers can easily see what this post will be about. 

3. Introduction

Just like in all writing, your blog posts should include an introduction. You don’t want to just throw your readers into the most technical or intricate elements straight away. Rather, you can ease them into your post with an introductory paragraph. 

Your introduction is your chance to grab the reader’s attention. Your introduction is a great spot to educate readers with background information and your firm’s expertise; just make sure that it clearly ties into the focus of your post! 

4. H2 and H3 Headers

Subheadings are imperative to your blog post’s structure. Before you start writing your post, you should outline it so that each topic is organized under subheads. This is not only important from a writing perspective, so that you can be certain your content flows well and makes sense logically, but also from the perspective of both your readers and the search engine crawlers, as it makes the content easier to process and understand. 

If you’re unsure as to what H2 and H3 headers are, look no further than the top of this post! “Elements Your Legal Blog Needs” is an H2 post, as it breaks this blog post down into shorter subsections. An example of an H3 tag is “Title Tag” because it further divides this post into even more subcategories. 

This makes your blog much more visually appealing to the readers, as they are generally less likely to read through a long block of text. Using short paragraphs and organizing them under H2 and H3 headers will ensure that readers are not overwhelmed by the prospect of reading through your post. This also allows the information to be organized in a way that readers can jump to a specific section if they are looking for a quick answer.

Search engines utilize crawlers to scour the internet. These bots, also commonly referred to as spiders, will download and process each specific page of a website. They then index all of the information on each page. By employing H2 and H3 headers, each element on the page is explained, making it easier for Google to understand what your content is about and rank it higher. 

5. Calls to Action

Since one of the main functions of your law firm’s blog is to convert your traffic into leads, it is crucial to include calls to action throughout your post. These are clear instructions for a next step that are hyperlinked.

Examples of strong calls to action are “Click here for more information,” “Give us a call,” and “Reach out to us for a free consultation” 

While they can be included throughout your blog, calls to action are absolutely essential to your post’s conclusion. After demonstrating clear expertise throughout your blog post, you want to end by suggesting your services to the reader. 

This is a proven practice for driving leads, so it should certainly not be overlooked! 

6. Images with Alt Text

Another important element of your blog is the inclusion of images. They not only further break up the text, making your blog easy to read, but they also positively impact the search engine crawlers. 

When choosing images to add to your blog, you’ll need to ensure that the picture has a clear connection to your post. If the image just seems randomly chosen and does not pertain to your blog, there’s no purpose in adding it. You also need to ensure that you own the images, as not to breach copyright. Examples of images can include infographics and photos pertaining to a specific practice area.

Once you’ve added the images to your blog post, you’ll need to include alt text, also called alt descriptions, to each picture before publishing the post. Alt text is a description of the photo that you must physically write out. It is used to help screen-reading tools let visually impaired users know what the image is. 

Alt text not only ensures that all site visitors are getting value from the images, but explains the picture to the search engine crawlers.

7. Meta Description

Meta descriptions are short pieces of text that summarize what your web page is about. Every time you’re on Google, you’ve seen them, and your blog needs them too.

These meta descriptions will not only help the search engines understand your post, but will allow readers to see if it’s the content they’re looking for before clicking it. Properly implementing meta descriptions throughout your post should help include your click-through rate (CTR) as well.

8. Value

You need to make sure that each and every one of your blog posts demonstrate clear value to the readers. Whether it’s an informational blog, a legal update, news story, or case study, every blog post needs to have a clear and obvious purpose. 

Overloading your site with irrelevant blogs that don’t demonstrate value to the reader will not do anything for your business. If your blogs are not helpful or useful, readers will not be inclined to follow your calls to action, and you won’t see any benefit. 

When planning out a blog post, ensure that it will be of obvious value before you start writing it! 

Why Your Blog’s Format Matters

Designing a user-friendly blog template, formatting your blog properly, and implementing each of the above-mentioned elements is imperative to your legal blog’s success.

By keeping your paragraphs short and employing different header tags, your post will be easier to read for your website’s visitors and for search engines indexing your page. 

Employing meta descriptions and title tags will convince potential readers to view your post. Images with alt text will help search engine crawlers understand your page, and calls to action will drive leads to your business, which you will hopefully be able to convert into clients! 

If you’re curious about what other elements should be added to your website, contact the team at 9Sail!