What is Middle of Funnel Content?
Middle of funnel (MOFU) content is designed to nurture the relationship with the new leads who have recently become aware of your brand and set them up so that when they decide which firm to go with, they go with yours.
Mid-funnel content does this by emphasizing your value proposition and providing service-based solutions to their problems.
To understand the importance of middle of funnel content and its role in SEO for attorneys, it’s helpful to understand the marketing funnel.
The marketing funnel is a concept that describes the stages a client goes through as they discover your firm, evaluate their options, decide to convert, and become advocates for your services.
Prospects (leads) often enter the funnel through top-of-funnel content designed to educate and make them aware of your firm, then evaluate firms during the middle, and convert from bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) service pages or ads.
Middle-of-funnel content is the bridge between the high-level top-of-funnel concepts and the specific services you offer at the bottom of the funnel.
Potential clients can arrive at the middle of the funnel from your top-of-funnel marketing tactics, as returning clients, or from a word-of-mouth referral they get from someone else.
That means for your personal injury firm, middle-of-funnel content gets into greater detail of how you can help clients increase their likelihood of getting a bigger settlement amount — often the main thing they're concerned with.
You can also use MOFU content to educate and guide them through the settlement process or the process of going to trial, highlighting how your firm can help them arrive at a resolution swiftly.
You won’t just tell your audience that you can do this — the most effective mid-funnel content demonstrates what you can do with concrete proof.
The Importance of Middle of Funnel Content
Your website visitors will interact with you across multiple touchpoints in their journey from becoming aware of their problem to deciding you’re the right firm to hire.
These touchpoints along the way are critical to success.
In a study based in Europe, McKinsey found that brands with more digital touchpoints converted customers 2.5 times more often than their competitors.
Middle funnel content is essential for lead nurturing and convincing your audience of the value and trustworthiness of your services as it creates these digital touchpoints.
There's a lot of content that can be made in this area for personal injury lawyers.
For every type of practice and each type of case you take, there are a thousand questions your potential client may have that your MoFu content can answer.
For example:
- how much do personal injury attorneys charge
- should i get attorney for car accident
- how to choose a personal injury lawyer
- how to sue walmart for a slip and fall
Don't solely focus on bottom of the funnel keywords like slip and fall lawyer, car accident lawyer, etc. If you do, you'll miss out on these lucrative opportunities that middle-of-funnel content can bring in.
A lot of law firms forget this. They create service pages and publish news-related content (a waste of time). The good news is that you can take advantage of the competition by having more touchpoints and building more trust with potential leads way before they ever even know your competitor's names.
Tactics for MoFu Content
The topics you tackle play a role in planning MoFu content, but so does the formats you deliver that content in.
Here are the common types of content that work best for middle of funnel content:
Blog Posts
Write educational and helpful articles that center your service as a solution. This is similar to your top-of-funnel content; but at this stage, your target audience is already aware that they would like to hire a personal injury lawyer — they're just not sure which one.
Think about the most common sources of confusion that hear during consultation calls. You can use blog posts to address them. This will not only bring more people to your site and build trust, but it can also make your consultations go a lot smoother as well.
Topics like “The Benefits of Working With a Personal Injury Lawyer” and “How to File a Personal Injury Claim” work well.
With an article about how to file a claim, you can educate them how they can do it on their own and clearly point out the cons of doing so — guiding them closer and closer to the decision to hire a firm (like yours) to handle it for them.
Case Studies & Testimonials
Proving you can win settlements for your clients is one of the most persuasive types of middle of funnel content. At the end of the day, people want to know you can help them win.
When writing about your past successes, focus on telling the story of your client’s case. Start with their particular problem, what you did to help them solve it, and the results they (not you) achieved in tangible terms if possible.
Think of how you would present evidence in a case. The order of the facts and the quality of the evidence will affect how persuasive your argument will be.
And just remember, your clients are the hero in this story. Not you.
If you focus on yourself too much you'll turn them away. You're Yoda, they're Luke Skywalker.
Email Campaigns
Not all middle-funnel content needs to live directly on your website. Your social media and email list are important law firm marketing tools for mid-funnel marketing strategy as well.
Your email marketing campaign can play an important role in nurturing leads and convincing them to move further along the content marketing sales funnel. Consider segmenting your email list by the stage of the funnel the recipient is in.
Don't send prospects news updates unless it's specifically about their case (such as an MDL) — they get enough junk mail as it is.
They don’t care about what reward you've recently received, who you've hired, or what charity you're sponsoring. Share that news on social. Your prospects care about what you can do for them.
Comparison Content
In the middle of the funnel, people ask themselves: “Should I go with this firm or this other firm?”You can make a better case for yourself by showing how your services compare to others. While you can't easily compare yourself directly to other competing law firms by name, you can call out what makes your firm unique and why people should work with you over another firm.
You have to be honest of course — don't violate any of your state's ethics for attorney advertising.
One way to make this easier is to create pages that lay out exactly what a potential customer should expect from you. Break down the process, step-by-step, and use video testimonials and case results to back it up.
Build a Content Hub
In addition to persuading your prospective clients, your content should count them as leads and help you segment them. This is incredibly useful and enables you to target each customer more effectively.
As a personal injury lawyer, you probably handle a wide range of personal injury cases — or even specialize in other areas of law — so, it’s important to consider each client’s journey (their particular problem) and create content to address them all.
Suppose someone was recently in a car accident and found your article on what to do after a car accident helpful. They shouldn’t have to dig through content on medical malpractice and workplace injuries to find other relevant content. If they do, you could lose them.
Keep everything segmented and flowing to the next step. A lot of attorneys mess this up by adding sidebar navigation widgets to their site with a list of their other practice areas. It's irrelevant and not the best practice from an internal linking standpoint.
One of the best ways to do this is by creating a content hub. That means organizing your content on the same theme together and making it easy to navigate that hub.
Not only does this help users get around to the parts of your site that are most relevant to them and their situation, but it also helps develop topical authority with Google, ultimately boosting rankings for your articles in the hub.
Creating well-defined physical hubs (meaning you have the hub defined in the URL schema) can also help you avoid keyword cannibalization (where two pieces of content are competing with one another and neither wins) as it’s easier to track content in a content hub when analyzing it in tools like Google Analytics.
Get Users To Take the Next Step
Once your potential clients are in your marketing funnel, ensure that they stay in. It takes active and continual work to nurture your leads until they are ready to make their decision and hire your firm.
If you think they're going to see one social post, read one blog post, or have on consultation call and automatically decide you're the best firm to work with — you're not living in reality. Can it happen? Sure. But when it does that's the exception, not the rule.
One way you can dramatically speed up this process is by using more direct calls to action. Doing so can make a huge impact on your conversion rate with a few optimized calls to action.
Free Consultations
This is the one you're all probably already doing. Offers of free consultations are prevalent on personal injury lawyer websites — it’s because they work.
After proving what you’ve done for past clients or comparing your services against the competition, your audience will be primed to seek insights on their specific problem.
Hendy, Johnson, Vaughn, and Emery include this simple contact form at the end of their blog posts that prompt visitors to fill out a short form without overloading them with calls to action (like annoying pop-ups and chat prompts) throughout their website.
Email follow-up
71% of marketers say the most effective tactic to move people through content stages is to send an email follow-up.
With a well-built email campaign, you can customize your messages based on where you last had contact with your potential client. Alternatively, a monthly newsletter helps to keep you at the forefront of your audience’s mind, but again, make sure you're adding information to your newsletter that people would actually care about.
Image Source
Suggest Related Content
Your user won’t always be ready to decide after engaging with your middle of funnel content. They may need more time and more information.
You can give them that time and keep them interested by providing another article or webpage to maintain engagement through education.
Rossman Law’s blog posts encourage users to continually engage by inviting them to read more on similar subjects.
Internal Linking
A more subtle way to pull readers towards content they may be interested in is through internal linking. This on-site SEO tactic has multiple benefits:
- Moves users through your marketing funnel
- Passes link equity between articles, helping them all rank higher
- Lowers your bounce rates by keeping people on your site taking actions
Rosenfeld Injury Lawyers link to their topic-specific landing pages when relevant throughout their article.
Image Source
Topic Frameworks for MoFu Content
Though your middle of funnel content won’t be as plentiful as your top of the funnel content, it’s still important to identify as many relevant topics as possible.
However, you’ll find that when you’re brainstorming ideas, the lines between each phase of the marketing funnel blur. Figuring out what topics to cover as mid-funnel content can be difficult.
And that's okay. You don't have to get it 100% right. A middle of funnel topic for one person may be a top of funnel topic for another.
Here are some quick guidelines though:
Question-Based Topics
Questions-based mid-funnel topics follow this framework:
- The topic pertains to your service or the services of personal injury firms.
- The topic directly helps the client evaluate their options for their solution.
Problem-Based Topics
When creating content around specific client problems, some content may fall into the more generalized top of the funnel area. Follow this framework to determine what will work:
- The problem is one you are able to offer a solution to.
- The topic will show how your work solves the client’s problem.
Best Practices and Mistakes to Avoid with MoFu Content
In the abundance of personal injury content out there, you want your middle of funnel content to be unique and to build trust between you and the clients. Follow these guidelines to stand out from the crowd:
Best Practices
Solution-Oriented: The content should be solution-oriented. Your mid-funnel content should have a clear takeaway: that your service solves their problem.
Real Examples: Use real-life examples whenever possible. When relevant, highlight cases you've worked on, and consider creating a testimonial page that showcases how you helped others.
A testimonial page like the one on Clark Law Firm’s website can be a powerful tool for convincing prospective clients of your value.
Don't Rush: Your middle of funnel content needs to be deeper and more informative than your ToFu content. Take the time to identify the best topics, craft in-depth content, and use concrete examples that support your case.
Every piece should follow the MECE principle: mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive.
Things to Avoid
Don't Invoke Fear: Don’t focus too much on the problem. When emphasizing your value, don’t get too caught up in demonstrating the depth of your potential client’s issues — they already know.
Instead, focus on how you can help them get what they want every step of the way, from recovery to financial compensation.
Avoid Ambiguity: We know you can’t make guarantees about the potential client’s case, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep them entirely in the dark.
Discuss your statistics and past results from similar cases. This will help them determine if you’re a good fit.
Avoid the Echochamber: Don’t forget to get feedback. Pay attention to the questions your clients have and ask them what information they feel would have helped them make a decision.
Tip: You can also check out your SEO metrics in Search Console or by viewing which pages paths (not just pages) convert the most visitors into leads.
Next Up: Closing Arguments
Your middle of funnel content is a vital part of the marketing funnel that guides new leads towards choosing your services. The goal of your middle funnel content strategy should be to show how your services can solve the potential client’s problems.
Your marketing funnel can be a terrific way to generate new leads — but we know it’s not always easy.
We've consistently helped law firms rank across the search results for everything from the top of the funnel through the bottom. The strategists and team at Rankings.io are all legal marketing experts and have the results for our clients to back it up. Contact us if you have any questions. You'll know if we're a good fit after just one call.
