How to Get the Most Out of Your Legal Blog Writing
Over 70% of people would rather get information from blogs than through traditional advertising. That means blog posting is necessary for law firms that want to grow their business through organic traffic from Google.
When written well and with the right law firm marketing strategy, your blog can help you grow your law firm by:
- Enhancing SEO performance: Google and other search engines favor websites that regularly publish fresh, relevant, and valuable content. Through targeted keyword usage and by addressing the topics your potential clients are searching for, blogs can improve your website’s ranking in the search engine results pages
- Establishing Authority in Your Area of Law: Through your blog, you can answer common questions from potential clients, address how you approach legal problems, and showcase your knowledge. By offering insightful analysis, commentary on recent legal developments, or detailed guides on complex legal processes, you position your firm as a thought leader in the legal industry. This not only builds trust with your audience but also establishes your lawyers as go-to experts in their field.
- Utilizing Cost-Effective Marketing: Compared to traditional advertising and many digital marketing strategies, blogging is a cost-effective way to reach and engage with your audience. Blogging offers a high return on investment and continues to draw in traffic long after the posts are published, contributing to your firm’s long-term online presence and visibility.
By following the tips below, you can get more out of your writing and set yourself up for an increase in new cases.
1. Identify Topics of Value to Your Target Audience
Writing a blog starts well before putting words on the page. A great legal blog requires keyword research and planning to get the best results. Depending on your legal marketing strategy and your target audience, you'll also want to consider how you can position your law firm's brand through voice, storytelling, and strong calls to action.
Create Synergy Between Keyword Research and User Intent
Many lawyers make the stake of writing topics at random and hoping that something meets their audience's needs. Planning ahead helps you find the topics your ideal clients actually care about and increases the likelihood that they will find your content online.
Legal blog topics related to the services and practice areas you offer are a great place to start brainstorming ideas. After considering your clients' most common questions and problems, you're ready to start doing keyword research.
When you do keyword research, you'll find all the different ways that people search for the legal services you offer. You'll find the common questions you hear all the time. These keywords map directly to topics you might want to use as blog posts and will inform your content strategy.
But you'll also find the topics you didn't even know your prospective clients cared about. These make excellent topics for articles that address unique needs. They also allow you to share your insights and build trust with underserved audience members.
2. Balance Your Audience's Needs with SEO
When you write on the web, you're really writing for two audiences. First are the people that your law firm serves. Second is the search engine that helps these potential clients find your content. However, Google has shifted to prioritize more and more content that is geared toward the user. So, in a sense, these audiences are still one and the same.
To get the best results from your legal blogging, you'll need to harmonize your law firm's SEO tactics with your target audience's needs. Great blog posts are created for people while keeping SEO in mind.
Harness the Power of Competitor Research
Before you begin writing an article, look at the pages that rank on Google for that topic.
Doing so will give you an idea of what people are looking for when they perform that search. It helps you determine the “search intent” for the topic. It will also show you the types of content that Google tends to rank for the topic.
This information is critical since it helps you decide on your title or headline, choose the format for your article (e.g., whether it's a guide, a list, or something else), and figure out what content should be in the post.
As you write an article, consider both how you'll connect with the reader and how search engines will try to understand the content.
How to Write Legal Blogs for Audience Engagement and SEO
Here are some of the best ways to write an effective legal blog for reader connection:
- Write in a clear, concise, and engaging style
- Use language that is accessible to non-lawyers
- Eliminate jargon and legal terminology and define them if they must be used
- Avoid long paragraphs
- Use formatting elements like bulleted lists to break up text into scannable sections
At the same time, draft with the search engine in mind, too, by doing things like:
- Using relevant keywords
- Selecting internal links to other pages on your website with additional content
- Reference high-quality sources with external links
One thing that helps both readers and search engines is using subheadings to break up content. This makes the post more digestible and also highlights the major concepts of the piece.
Remember that writing helpful, engaging, and well-formatted content is the best thing you can do for your readers and your rankings.
3. Write with Authority
As a lawyer, your expertise matters to your clients. Your legal blogs are an outlet for demonstrating expertise to readers and search engines.
Take the time to write credible, accurate, and valuable content. Drafting informative and authoritative blog posts shows your clients your familiarity with the law. By helping them find answers to their questions, you also demonstrate the value of working with you.
Use E-A-T Principals to Stay On Track
Writing with authority isn't just important for connecting with readers. Google cares about expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (or EAT) in the content that it indexes.
Google uses these metrics to decide which content to trust over others, so each piece you create should be infused with all three.
In addition to speaking from experience in your blog, you'll also want to provide proper citations. Back up any claims you make with evidence to show you've done your research and take your blog seriously.
Many legal professionals struggle with balancing authority and simplicity. It's easy to fall into the trap of writing content as "legal experts" by stuffing in formal language and jargon.
Writing over someone's head to show your level of knowledge will backfire. It can intimidate readers or make them feel that you won't be able to communicate well with them. Write your law firm blogs in a way that provides valuable insights while being accessible.
4. Create Engaging Headlines
You only have a few seconds to get someone's attention. One way to grab that attention is with enticing headlines for each blog post.
However, doing so requires a balance between SEO best practices and understanding your audience.
Make a Good First Impression
The best headlines don't just use titles that pique someone's interest. They also use relevant keywords to help search engines understand what the content is about.
No one wants to read Statutory Negligence Concerns for Comparative Fault in Georgia. It might be a little too dry of a title for your audience. The same reader may want to know the answer to What Are Georgia's Accident Fault Rules?
Both articles might cover the same information, but one has a better headline. At the same time, the second one uses keywords that your target audience actually uses to find the information they need.
Using power words and emotional triggers in your titles can create a sense of urgency or interest. These can be helpful in crafting a title but always come second to search intent.
Here are some headline styles that generate interest:
- X Mistakes to Avoid with ___
- X Reasons Why You Must ___ in Your ___ Lawsuit
- How to ___ While ___
- What You Don't Know About ___ Could Hurt You
The goal is to accurately portray the information in your blog post while getting someone interested in reading beyond the headline.
5. Direct Your Readers to the Most Important Information
The way that people read content on the web is different from the way they may read a book or magazine.
When people search for answers to their questions on Google, they want that answer as soon as possible.
As a result, they'll open a few relevant results for their question and scan through each to see if they can find their answer. The fact is, most people don't read online content one word at a time.
Instead, they scan to see if it's relevant to them. If not, they hit the back button and leave your site entirely.
How to Write for Scannability
Writing for the online reader may be different from any kind of writing you've done before. If you want to capture their attention, your top priority should be answering their questions as directly as you can.
Beyond that, there are some readability tricks law firms can use to make blog content scannable.
Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and headings that direct their attention to what is most valuable for that reader. Long walls of text are difficult to read for anyone and may also be intimidating.
6. Repurpose Your Legal Blogs for Multiple Channels
Law firm content marketing is about more than just blog posts. If you put in the work to create a solid blog post, you probably also want to get as much traction as possible from it.
You can get more mileage out of your legal blog content by repurposing the ideas from your law firm's website for other attorney marketing channels.
The ideas that you cover in your blog are a great jumping-off point for social media marketing content or video marketing for lawyers. If your law firm has an email newsletter, you might even repurpose your content for those readers.
7. Measure Your Success and Optimize Every Blog Post
If you're investing your time and effort into blogging, you'll want to make sure that effort's paying off.
It's well worth setting goals for your blog at the outset. Once you've published content for a while, you can revisit your goals and compare them to your blog's actual performance.
Perform Regular Audits on Your Legal Blogs
Many analytics tools are available to track your blog's performance and engagement. These tools can provide a lot of detail on performance, but are often highly specialized. Most lawyers choose to outsource tracking to an SEO professional.
One of the best parts about writing a blog is that nothing is set in stone. Unlike printed material, your blog is a living thing.
If a certain blog post isn't performing the way it should, you can always return to optimize it. On-page optimization can help you improve your rankings, drive increased traffic, and net you more new clients.
With the right data analytics tools in place, it's easy to see where you have the most opportunity to improve older posts.
8. Highlight Client Success Stories and Testimonials
One of the most effective ways to build both is through sharing client success stories and testimonials on your blog. These narratives not only humanize your law firm but also provide tangible proof of your expertise and dedication to client satisfaction.
When writing about client success stories, focus on the narrative journey. Begin with the client's initial challenges or situation, detail the legal strategies implemented, and highlight the positive outcomes achieved. This storytelling approach helps make the blog interesting and helps potential clients visualize how your law firm could assist in their own legal matters.
Success stories also provide an opportunity for law firms to highlight particularly diverse or challenging cases. This diversity in client stories can help your blog cater to a wider audience, as readers may come across scenarios that closely resemble their own legal challenges.
9. Regularly Update and Refresh Old Content
Regularly updating and refreshing old content not only maintains accuracy but also improves SEO rankings and enhances user experience.
Periodically review your blog's existing content to identify posts that are outdated, underperforming, or no longer accurate.
For posts that discuss specific statutes, case law, or legal principles, ensure that all information is up-to-date according to the latest legal developments. Additionally, check all external and internal linking for relevance and functionality, replacing any that are broken or outdated.
Once an old post has been thoroughly updated and refreshed, republish it with a current date. This can signal to search engines and readers that the content is recent and relevant, boosting its visibility and engagement.
Even if you have the time to write and publish consistently, there's a good chance it's not the best use of your time.
Writing for the web is highly specialized. Just like writing a motion or legal brief, blogs have their own unique nuances. It may be unlike any kind of writing you've done before. Most lawyers are better off focusing on their firm rather than trying to figure out the rules of blog content creation.
It's true that blogging is valuable for generating traffic to your law firm's website. It's also time-consuming to stay on top of writing new posts or optimizing old ones while still making time for your clients.
Partnering with a professional can prevent you from losing that valuable time. A professional law firm marketer can take over this aspect of reaching your audience for you by handling things such as:
- Planning out your content
- Regularly publishing high-quality content that aligns with your attorney marketing plan
- Promoting your blog
- Repurposing your blog content for other channels
- Measuring your blog's performance and engagement
- Optimizing your content for continued results
Working with dedicated, outside professionals can help attorneys reach new levels of productivity. When you outsource content marketing, your to-do list becomes more focused on helping clients, not taking on routine marketing tasks.
Invest in Content Marketing Now
If you know you want your website to do more for you, finding the right person to help you with blogging is your next step.
The team at Rankings.io knows what it takes to get a law firm ranking for ideal keywords. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you implement an effective content marketing plan.
