At 9Sail, we help law firms navigate the world of online legal content marketing, providing you with the insights and services you need to not only publish the best content, but for crafting and customizing it to achieve three main goals:
- Ensure that your content ranks highly in online search
- Provide the greatest possible value to people seeking legal information
- Bring in new qualified leads and conversions, and ultimately to sign new clients
We understand that, as an attorney, your area of expertise is in your field of law, not search engine optimization (SEO) or digital marketing. That’s why we provide a wide array of boutique, hands-on services to help you achieve the results you want, so that you can focus on what you do best: serving your clients.
What is Content?
The definition of “content” is somewhat nebulous, but it boils down to just about anything you see online. Types of content include:
- Web pages
- Blog articles
- Client advisories and alerts
- Press releases
- YouTube videos
- Instagram photos
- Songs and podcasts from Spotify or Apple iTunes
- Social media posts
- And much, much more…
Since the internet began to dominate the information and entertainment space, consumers have come to expect almost all the content they find online for free. The tradeoff is that we see advertisements everywhere. People are willing to open their wallets for premium or ad-free content in some cases, but they still expect to get a certain amount without paying for it.
This is where content marketing for law firms can really shine: providing free, value-added information to consumers before they decide to purchase a product or service; in this case, legal advice or representation.
What is Content Marketing?
Law firms are in the business of signing clients who are willing to pay a fee for legal services. But how do you prove to them not only that you are the right attorney(s) to provide those services, but that you have the knowledge, credibility, and experience to help get them a favorable outcome? Not to mention getting yourself noticed above the incredible amount of noise and competition online.
Content marketing for lawyers is one of the best ways to attract the attention of prospective clients. By providing the public with valuable content at no cost to them, you create a tremendous amount of value, for comparatively little effort.
Our team at 9Sail is committed to bringing you the services you need to create and publish high-quality online content. We provide a white-glove, personalized experience for every one of our clients, with a customized SEO strategy and unique approach to the way your firm operates.
Want to write and create all your own content? We provide you with the structure and guidance you need to do it right. Want someone to do it all for you, so you can focus on your clients? Our team of experienced writers, SEO professionals, and legal marketing experts is here to help.
The Impact of Content Marketing on Your Law Firm
The goals of any content marketing strategy are to:
- Drive qualified leads
- Increase conversions
- Create sales
At 9Sail, we are well versed in the tools and approaches needed to build a winning content strategy. Take the example of one of our clients, a boutique entertainment law firm in New York City. After we started working with them in early 2020, our client was able to double their annual revenue between 2018 and 2020.
The firm’s management attributes that growth in revenue largely to new qualified leads generated from renewed SEO efforts, including a robust content marketing strategy, along with other SEO tactics that we specialize in.
Building a Content Strategy
Every law firm and the clients they serve are different, so each content marketing campaign must be tailored to their specific practice and location. Many SEO agencies focus on bringing in as many clients as possible, doing the bare minimum to keep their search rankings afloat, without much improvement, if any.
We provide our clients with a custom-tailored, white glove approach to managing their SEO and legal content creation. While this means that we have a smaller client portfolio than other SEO agencies, we can focus more on helping each individual firm to achieve their desired results.
Understanding Types of Content
Knowing who you are creating content for will help you tailor what kind of content you create, as well as how each piece of content is presented. If your practice focuses on estate planning, for instance, your client base likely leans toward an older, wealthier demographic. In that case, comprehensive blog posts and sober, thoughtful videos may be your best bet.
Ask yourself: who is your target audience? What are their pain points? Does your firm serve clients in the local metropolitan area, throughout the state, or on a national level? Do you cover many different practice areas, or is your practice specific to criminal or family law?
Our role as your SEO partner is to work with you to understand the audience for your content, through discussions where we learn about your firm’s history, clients, and approach to practicing law. We also perform comprehensive online research using specialized SEO tools to discover who is engaging with your content, and how to best serve their needs.
How to Choose a Topic for Your Content
This part is a bit more technical, but not to worry! You don’t have to know what arcane-sounding terms like “bounce rate” or “keyword volume” mean. That is, unless you want to. We’re happy to explain anything you want to know, and will provide you with custom reports detailing the results of our investigation. This includes keyword research, SEO audit results, organic traffic reports, and competitor research, along with actionable recommendations for publishing new content and optimizing existing content.
It’s helpful to begin by focusing on the specific results you want to achieve, in order to guide your content creation. Is your goal to increase new client signings? Do you want more organic traffic to your firm’s website? Or are you more concerned with appearing prominently in local search rankings, such as on Google Maps? These factors will impact where your content focus should be. We’ll check in with you periodically to discuss focus areas based on our observations and your intentions.
The most important thing to remember is that we do all the hard work for you. Everything we discover in the course of our SEO research will go straight into your hands, along with estimated effort and impact for any recommendations we make. Our goal during this process is complete transparency. You and your team can be involved as much or as little as you like, with your level of involvement calibrated to whatever works best for you.
How Content Impacts SEO
There are a huge number of factors that go into how search providers like Google sort and rank search results for any given query. In the past, effective SEO meant little more than including all the right keywords on your web pages so that search engines could see what the page was about and index it accordingly.
All that has changed. Over the last few years, the internet has become exponentially more complex, both technologically and in terms of the sheer amount of content that exists. Search engines aren’t just looking for keywords any more. Now, they are also looking at features like page structure, subheadings, images, technical aspects like page loading time, even the quality of the writing itself.
We’ve also found that, with many law firms, competition for online search rankings may not be who they think it is. You might be competing with a crosstown law firm for actual clients, but your main search competitor could be some obscure firm on the other side of the state, country, or even the world. They may have invested more in their SEO strategy, giving them an edge over search competitors.
With all that in mind, it is essential that your content goes beyond just including keywords that your potential clients might be searching for. It also must answer their questions in a concise, authoritative, and well-supported way. And it must do it with the kinds of high quality content that they are most likely to engage with.
Let 9Sail Guide You Through Your Law Firm’s Content Marketing
9Sail is here to work with you to create, guide, and implement your law firm’s custom SEO strategy. We perform comprehensive research to discover all the best opportunities for creating and optimizing online legal content to help you achieve your goals. And everything we do is tailored to let you focus on what you do best: serving and representing your clients.
To find out more about our boutique law firm SEO services, contact us today!
