Producing content for your law firm’s website is helpful in any form, but it has the most impact when you create content with SEO, or search engine optimization, at the forefront of your mind. Knowing the building blocks of search engine optimization will allow you to focus your content in a strategic direction. While unfocused content may have some positive effects on your law firm website’s ranking and traffic, taking the time to research and create an SEO content strategy will mean long-term success and a higher chance of readers converting into qualified leads.
Remember that ultimately, the goal of SEO-focused content is to organically influence where your law firm’s website appears when searched. Where you land on the search engine results pages (SERPs) can have a major impact on whether or not users choose to click on your links and delve further into your high-quality legal content and determine whether your law firm is right for them.
Why Publishing Blogs on Your Law Firm’s Website Has Value
Why is it that every SEO professional and digital marketer has such an obsession with content? The truth is that while so much of search engine optimization can feel to the outsider like an enigma, content is something tangible that helps you to understand what’s happening inside your website. From beginning to end, the content creation process focuses on each aspect of search engine optimization, all brought together in a single marketing tool. Choosing a blog topic comes from your market research and understanding of your target audience. The writing incorporates your keyword research. Optimizing and posting your content brings in the analytics, seeing how potential clients and the search engine results pages (SERPs) have reacted and responded to your pages and whether that’s had an impact on conversions. As a microcosm, content can truly give you a picture of where you are in your digital marketing journey.
On a more practical note, content is often what, simply put, brings people to your website. Producing content gives your law firm’s website greater visibility, and utilizing those keywords associated with your legal niche will bring potential clients to whatever content you’ve produced relating to that topic. You want to be seen as a thought leader in your legal niche, both by your target audience and through your digital footprint, and producing successful content demonstrates your expertise and experience.
Your content should aim to speak to both your potential clients and to your partners in technology, mainly the SERPs – writing well-researched content related to your experience, combined with the knowledge and research from your SEO team, should produce content that truly balances all goals. Using keywords is essential for SEO, and once your content reaches potential clients, writing with empathy and humanity encourages them to engage further with your firm.
Now that we’ve established the value of building a blog for your law firm, let’s break down the process into steps.
Define Your Content Goals and Target Audience
In order to have a successful SEO-based content marketing strategy, you must first establish your goals and objectives in order to understand your direction. To define your objectives, your initial step is to pinpoint your target audience. Who is the ideal client for your law firm? What do they most need from you? What are their pain points? Whether you’re an elder law firm or a business law firm, perform a deep dive into your client base and your most successful cases to look for connections and similarities; this will give you a broader understanding of who to target in your content marketing efforts.
Avoid Mixing Up Content Marketing with Advertising
In many circumstances, it’s easy to conflate marketing and advertising, and assume that the approach to each should be the same. However, when it comes to content, the idea of traditional advertising should be on the back burner. Making your content sound like a sales pitch comes across as disingenuous, and undercuts your true goal in content creation, which should be demonstrating your expertise in the topic at hand.
Additionally, a sales pitch approach will often not provide the reader with the clarity that’s needed at the end of a quality blog post. For example, if your business is a family law firm, a blog that leans more towards the advertising side will likely give reasons why your law firm is the one to choose, but won’t provide information or perspective to back up that claim. On the other hand, a high-quality blog post might give a detailed exploration of the topic at hand, demonstrating an in-depth and hands-on knowledge of the work that needs to be done, and will end with a call to action encouraging the reader to reach out to your firm for further conversation. This format is far more appealing to your potential clients, as it still encourages further discussion with you, but provides them with much more security and confidence in your ability to help.
Conduct Comprehensive Keyword Research
Once you have a grasp on your marketing goals, you’re ready to begin arguably the most important phase of your SEO-based content process: conducting comprehensive keyword research. This phase of your process has you look closely at your practice areas, target audience, and closest competitors to find what specific words and phrases people are utilizing the most when looking for services like yours. You can do this through something as simple as a Google search or through more sophisticated SEO systems and data analysis. Specific SEO tools allow you to hone in on the terms, including the ever-vital long-tail keywords, that your prospective clients are using in their search efforts. Even deeper, they show you what terms people are using to find general information versus what terms people are using that lead to prospective clients becoming qualified leads.
These tools will also give you perspective on the traffic value of each keyword, from an average monthly level of traffic to difficulty of ranking for that term to related words and questions associated with each of your intended keywords. Once you’ve determined what keywords will be most effective for you to use, you can find ways to incorporate them organically into your content. The more ways you find to include these terms in a natural and smooth way, the more likely it is that your content will organically rank higher for those inquiries on the SERPs.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Some writers, however, look at the vital component of using keywords to build quality content and take it to the extreme. Your business should be very conscious of the concept of “keyword stuffing,” a tactic used by some companies to take advantage of useful SEO tactics. Keyword stuffing generally means that your writer is filling your content with as many keywords as possible with little regard for readability or cohesion. Not only does this decrease the quality of the content you’re producing, but it can also lead to Google flagging your website for unethical practices. The key to solving this content marketing mistake is to find a balance between too many keywords and too few– include the ones that make the most sense semantically in your text, without compromising your content’s quality. An experienced SEO expert or team can help you find the right balance for your content.
Utilize Headings Throughout Your Blog
Once your keyword research is complete and you’re ready to write, an SEO factor to bear in mind is your use of headings. These are HTML tags that act as an outline for your blog, ranging from an H1 (usually your title) all the way through H6, allowing you the latitude to dig as deeply into a topic as you choose. Incorporating keywords into these headings gives Google a better sense of what your article is about, and will encourage search engines to place your content higher on the SERPs for those related keywords.
Develop an Editorial Calendar for Consistent Publishing
Though it may not be expected, a factor of Google’s content ranking algorithm is dependent on the consistency and frequency of your posting. One way to ensure that content creation doesn’t fall between the cracks is to build an editorial calendar for yourself and your team. Don’t put yourself on a schedule that is overly ambitious and results in short, inconsistent blogs; rather, create a content calendar in which every piece of content receives the care that it needs in order to be well-crafted and optimized, and in which you can ensure that you’re posting at a manageable and consistent clip.
Frequency in posting shows Google that you’re active as a law firm, always learning and exploring, and the quality of those pieces demonstrates your status as a thought leader. Assigning writing projects to various members of your team or working with a freelance writer can ensure that you always have something unique and interesting to share, and planning a month or a quarter in advance can give your team the time to put thought and care into each piece.
Optimize Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Your content’s title tag is, in both the loosest sense and truest sense, the “title” of the page – it’s an HTML tag indicating the information found there. You’ll recognize title tags from your experiences with search engine results pages– when you Google a query and receive a list of results, the clickable blue links are title tags leading you to another website. Similarly, your meta description is the piece of text that will appear under the blue text of your title tag in search results, explaining to the reader and Google alike what they can expect to find in your content.
There are certain best practices that, while small, can have a massive impact on how the public and search engines alike view your webpages. For example, while your title tag and meta description can theoretically be any length, the SERP will cut it off after a certain point, meaning that your potential audience will not get the full impact of what your webpage has to offer. This might result in them choosing a different website from the SERP simply because they don’t know what to expect from your site. Industry best practices dictate that if you keep your title tags around 60 characters and your meta descriptions at around 160 characters, you’ll have the best chance at keeping your tag fully visible and catching the eye of potential clients.
The most important factor to remember when planning both your title tags and meta descriptions is the use of keywords throughout. Choose a keyword to focus on– remember, no keyword stuffing– and ensure that that keyword is seen in both your title tag and your meta description.
Craft Engaging, Informative, and Shareable Content
Creating SEO content is not just about the technical SEO factors that we’ve discussed. Google and other search engines care just as much about user experience as they do about ranking factors. In fact, it would be helpful to consider readability as another search engine optimization factor for your content. Google wants your content to be navigable, clear, and to the point. Ensure that your content is unique– plagiarism can lead to Google viewing your content as “duplicate,” and penalizing your site for it.
As we previously mentioned, some SEO factors, like meta descriptions and word counts, are for both site crawlers and human readers. Google wants your content to be engaging and informative in order to appeal to real human readers. In fact, through their Helpful Content Updates, Google has become aggressive in promoting content written by people for people and suppressing content deemed “unhelpful.” Just as much as ranking, your goals with creating content should include demonstrating your expertise, clearly exploring your points, establishing yourself as a thought leader, and providing specific examples to potential clients as to why your law firm is the one to choose.
Shareability is another factor to consider. Never underestimate the power of an online network, especially on a social media platform like LinkedIn where your peers may have a different audience than you do. Shareable content can come in the form of FAQs, listicles, and multimedia content like infographics or videos.
By creating content about topics of interest, major questions, or current events, your network is encouraged to share your content to a broader audience who you might not have reached before.
Promote Your Content Across Digital Channels
You can’t just rely on your network to share your content– you also have to put in the work to make sure that your content, when posted, is fully optimized for SEO and promotable across all platforms.
Once posted, a major way to promote your new page organically is through link building. This is one of the most important elements of SEO optimization for your content, as building links as bridges between pages gives your new content more authority and allows search engine crawlers (and human users) to find new pages more easily. Link from one blog to another when they touch on similar topics, and connect case studies and blogs to relevant service pages and vice versa.
Audit and Refresh Your Content Regularly
Your content is a living creature that can (and should) be revisited regularly.
Refreshing your content is critical to ensure that your content is the most up-to-date. This is not just beneficial for current and future clients, but also for search engines. Search engines such as Google reward those with the best, most up-to-date information that can satisfy a user’s query, so don’t forget to take the time to review your content and see ways in which it can be improved and refreshed.
It can seem daunting to create an SEO content strategy. Trust a team of SEO professionals like our team at 9Sail to help you navigate the technicalities, benefits, and pitfalls of SEO-based content creation. Contact us today to learn more.