Even though blogging works for some attorneys, most find that blog writing for attorneys can be a time consuming task and produces lackluster results. What do the best law bloggers know that you don’t?
We’ve created some helpful blogging tips for lawyers so you can see the benefits of content marketing for your law firm.
At Orsanna, we know what it’s like to have a heavy caseload and no time to market your law firm. We’ve worked with law firms to create content for their practice that drives website traffic, increases rankings, and brings in new clients.
Take a few blogging tips from our experience to help you make blogging more effective at helping your law firm get more cases.
Use Legal Blogging to Get Higher SEO Rankings
There’s no point in starting a blog unless people are finding it and reading it. But it can be hard to get your law firm’s blog posts to the top of rankings without at least a little bit of SEO knowledge. Google tends to favor websites that have keyword optimized content.
Content marketing for law firms can bring more business in by blogging but those posts have to show up in search results to perform.
Blogging allows your law firm to optimize content for longer, more complex keywords that may feel awkward on your main website pages. As well, Google looks for content that helps answer searchers’ questions and problems, which usually requires longer content than an average homepage or practice area page.
You can use your blog as a place to optimize for longer keywords and better address the needs and questions of your ideal target clients, not only increasing search rankings but also helping the right clients find you.
How can you use blogging to help your law firm rank higher in SEO? Here’s an overview of the process we use to help our clients rank higher in search results:
- Identify what your ideal clients are searching for with keyword research.
- Analyze the searches and potential keywords for opportunities for your law firm to succeed.
- Write an article using appropriate keywords and structure to follow search engine best practices.
- Publish the content on your law firm’s website with appropriate technical SEO information that helps search engines understand your content.
Most lawyers don’t follow this process and instead write blog posts that suit their particular ideas, not their clients’ needs. Many law firms fail to use blogging as a way to increase their SEO rankings because of failure to create customer-centric content.
We help our clients rank higher in Google search results through long form SEO content and use this four step process to create articles for law firm websites. As an additional step in our content marketing process, our in-house counsel checks over our blog posts before we send them to clients, saving our customers time and producing higher quality long-form content.
Use Blogging to Engage Potential Clients
The amount of time that people spend on your law firm website matters. SEO researchers show the amount of time people spend on your site from search engines likely has a direct impact on your rankings.
If you have engaging content that people spend time reading, chances are your website may rank higher for other keyword searches too.
For example, if a potential client comes to your website and spends time looking through your blogs, it signals to Google that the website was relevant and helpful to their search needs. In return, your chances of ranking higher on Google increases for similar searches.
Blogging often keeps your audience intrigued, answers questions they are asking, and makes you a credible thought leader in your space. All of this can have a cascading effect on your ability to get new business. We’ve seen that the more engaging your website is, the more likely you are to sign the visitor as a client.
Before you jump into creating content to engage visitors with your website, ask yourself how great you are at writing captivating content for non-attorneys. You may write a fantastic brief for a case that can grab a judge’s attention but can you do the same for your ideal clients?
You can use the following process to capturing the attention of potential clients:
- Understand how your ideal clients talk about their problems, the words they use, and the feelings they’re going through.
- Write content that captures attention from the first sentence to the last, using your knowledge about your audience and writing in a register and tone of language that appeals to them.
- Create a flow of content that keeps your ideal clients clicking around and gets them to convert into a lead.
If you want to rank well and get people to actually read your posts, the process isn’t quite as straightforward as simply logging into Wordpress and writing a blog post.
We work with our clients to help them transform legal writing into audience-captivating marketing copy for blog posts to increase dwell time on websites as well as capture attention to convert website visitors into leads.
Blog To Build Thought Leadership and Backlinks
A large part of how websites rank well in search engines is through links back to their website from other reputable websites. But getting links to your website beyond the basics of directory listings and associations you’re a member of can be a tricky process. Blogging can be a huge help to gain more backlinks for your law firm.
There are two types of links that you can obtain through blogging: internal links and external links.
Internal links, or links between different pages on your site, are a great way to keep people on your blog for a longer period of time and can help you rank better in Google. It can also help Google better understand the structure of your website and what content is the most important.
We use techniques to create internal links that help boost up the main pages of a law firm’s website, like practice area pages, which are often the most difficult to rank in search engines.
The more you blog, the more you will be able to link between your own blog posts within your content to create site authority and increase your relevance in Google’s eyes. Linking to other pieces of content will boost your SEO and give you a better chance at ranking higher on Google’s top results.
Another way to get linking opportunities through your law blog is by gathering external links. The more you blog with relevant, quality content, the more people will want to link your blog in their content. SEO research shows that quality links from relevant websites is the top contributing factor for website rankings and can help build up your authority both on search as well as in the legal community.
We help our clients obtain backlinks by writing valuable content that makes it easier to get links. Part of our law firm marketing SEO services include getting backlinks to your website to help build your credibility.
Make Law Firm Blogging Easier
We know first hand that running a blog can be tedious and time consuming, especially if you’re not trained on best practices for SEO and content creation.
If you’re thinking about how blogging can help your law firm get more clients but the prospect of writing blog posts and articles is daunting, working with our in-house team may be the solution you’re looking for.
We understand the ins and outs of marketing and our content is checked by in-house counsel to produce higher quality, legally accurate content. If you’re ready to start blogging, contact us for a free consultation to get a blogging plan and see how content marketing can help your law firm succeed.