Over 6 million blog posts are published on the web every single day. Due to the sheer volume of posts competing for internet users’ short attention spans, you might ask why a legal blog should be part of your marketing plan.
When done right, law firm blog content is a powerful way to improve the SEO for lawyers because it positions you directly in front of your target audience with valuable information highlighting your unique value proposition.
Whether you work in family law, criminal, estate, personal injury, or some other practice area, blogging is the best way for your law firm to remain competitive because of its benefits over other forms of marketing and advertising.
Lawyers who invest in a solid digital marketing plan with a legal blog at its center have much to gain. Consistent and focused blogging can help you climb in search engine rankings, allowing you to reach and build trust with potential clients so that they bring their cases to you.
Content Marketing vs. Paid Search Advertising
In the early stages of developing your attorney marketing plan, paid search feels like an easy win. You put money in, and if you're targeting the right things, you'll be lucky enough to get results.
The problem with paid search comes when you rely on it over time. Blogging is more sustainable than paid advertising and comes with long-term results that build on one another.
Organic search engine marketing is responsible for 53% of website traffic compared with paid search, which drives only 15%. Both techniques can get good results, but it's essential to consider which one has the potential for long-term ROI.
Paid advertising can get extremely expensive, and it's only as good as the money you spend on an ongoing basis. If you want a new click or lead, you need to pump money into the machine.
The minute you stop putting up cash for bids and clicks, your results come to a screeching halt.
That's a dangerous hamster wheel for lawyers, especially if more people in your area start bidding on the same keywords and audience. You'll need to keep investing on a regular basis to get results.
With organic search marketing, however, you build on your reputation and rankings over time, making it easier to see a snowball effect on your marketing efforts without bidding for ads daily. SEO for lawyers has much more long-term potential, especially for personal injury attorneys.
Your pool of prospective clients who see or engage with paid ads is limited, too. Many people don't trust paid advertising; as many as 80% of search engine users ignore ads placed above organic search engine results.
The rise of ad-blocking technology, too, can dwindle your target audience. Between 2018 and 2019, for example, ad-blocking technology increased from 142 million adopters to 615 million. Today, 42% of people use ad blockers on their computers.
Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing
Social media has billions of active users across multiple platforms. Some platforms, like Facebook, receive daily visits from 65% or more of their users. Due to the proliferation of social media, changing algorithms, and the fact that these platforms and your pages are owned by social media companies rather than you, social media should not be the core of your marketing.
Instead, blogging with search engine optimized content gets your brand in front of people when they need you the most and are most likely looking for the services you provide. Your followers are probably not your target clients on social media, either.
Consider posting an image on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram about the common symptoms of whiplash after a car accident. Of those people who follow you on Facebook, only a small percentage will even see that post. An even smaller group will find that post relevant unless they were just in a car wreck. Some people might be annoyed by seeing what they perceive as irrelevant content and hide the image or unfollow your page.
Compare that with someone who types can you get whiplash from a car accident, whiplash car accident symptoms, or can you sue for whiplash into Google.
That person almost certainly has a timely nature to their search, making them a much more qualified potential client. You don't want your marketing message to get in front of people when they couldn't care less or when it's irrelevant.
Another major problem with social platforms is that while you might own a channel or page there, the platform owns the rules of engagement and how well that content performs. Remember the 2018 changes Facebook made to be more community-based and less business-focused?
Many company owners saw instant declines in the reach of their organic social media marketing as a result.
You might think that paid social media ads are the best of both worlds: you could get the fast results of paid search and grab the attention of a captive social media audience, right?
Paid social media ads are really tricky for lawyers. It's not guaranteed to meet people when they're looking for your services, and once you stop paying, the ads and their results cease.
While an estate planning lawyer might be able to target people in their audience, it's much harder to find people who might have committed a white-collar crime or are thinking about getting a divorce based on their Facebook data.
Don't hand over complete control of your content strategy to a social media platform that might change tomorrow.
Content Marketing vs. Other Forms of Advertising
Lawyers have long relied on traditional advertising to get their brand out there. Traditional advertising does work well for brand awareness, but it's much harder to track how that's performing in terms of leads in your law firm.
While you can see, for example, what keywords draw people into your office and who ultimately becomes a new client, it's much harder to see how a big investment in a billboard or local magazine contributes to your bottom line.
SEO-driven content marketing again gets the edge because you're building a large hub of high-value information for your target audience, and those results stack up over time.
When you add a new blog post, it's not just about who sees that content this week but about who searches for it in the future and relies on that information to help them make a decision about hiring legal help.
Blogging Builds Your Authority and Demonstrates Expertise
Clients want to hire lawyers who have a deep understanding of their practice area and the common challenges law firm clients face. You can do this effectively in your blog based on the questions that you answer and how you address these concerns.
When thinking about blogging, SEO-driven legal content marketing rules the day. In the past, people thought of blogging as a weekly publication requiring new content each week to make a difference.
These days, blogging tactics have shifted to thinking of your website as more of a library of content or a resource hub. You'll still need keyword research and blog topics aligned with your audience's primary needs and frequently asked questions, but you'll build to this hub over time with high-quality content that positions you as an expert in your field.
Content marketing allows you to answer your audience's questions, and along the way, you build trust and win them over that you're the right choice to retain as their legal counsel.
Over time, your law practice benefits from an array of content that explains FAQs and other important topics because it shows that you deeply understand your field.
Content From Your Blog Can be Repurposed
One of the many benefits of blogging is that you can reuse what you create there for other aspects of marketing.
The material from your law firm blog can also be packaged and repurposed into other content. This means you start your marketing work with the blog but can leverage it into more traction on different channels.
For example, you can take a few main points from your law blog and turn that into social media content for the week. This saves you time and helps you get the most mileage out of the time you put into crafting strong content.
While it takes a little time to learn blogging platforms like WordPress and the required formatting, it's an easy learning curve, and your base content can continue to perform on and off your website when it's repurposed.
Build Your Blog with an Expert
Starting a blog is the first step, but the work continues long after that. To get the best results from your blog, you need valuable information shared in that blog based on a content marketing plan.
As an attorney, you have enough on your plate, and your most important work is guiding the firm and providing an outstanding experience to your clients. Getting distracted by all the details of blog strategy implementation is overwhelming and unnecessary.
The most successful law firm blogs come from a clear plan and usually rely on the help of an outside marketing team. One 2022 study of over 1,000 bloggers found that the average time it takes to write a blog is 4 hours and 10 minutes—and that only accounts for drafting a piece, not the planning, editing, designing, or search engine optimization that should go into each blog post.
That's far too big of an investment for you to keep up with, so it's far better to develop systems and review processes that allow you to stay in your zone of genius. When lawyers blog with the support of an outside marketing agency, they can get better results with less personal time investment.
Creating blog content and investing in SEO techniques as a channel and tactic is the best way to get an ROI from your marketing budget. At Rankings.io, we'll help you develop your content marketing strategy to attract website traffic and high-quality visitors looking for legal services. Ready to invest with the best in legal SEO? Contact us today.
