The Lawyer’s Guide To Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to build your online awareness, web traffic and SEO. In this article, you’ll learn how to successfully find and capitalize on high-value guest blogging opportunities.

Why is Guest Blogging Valuable as an Attorney?

High-value blog articles can help your on-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO), improve your perceived credibility as an attorney and has been shown to boost lead growth.

On-site SEO refers to optimization techniques done directly on your website—in this case, directly within your content. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is comprised of items you do outside of your law firm’s website.

Guest blogging is an off-page SEO strategy that is good for two reasons: 

1. You typically get a backlink to your website (which is great for SEO)
2. You are building your firm’s awareness to by grabbing attention from a potentially high-traffic site with dedicated readers.

Check out out product pages to learn more about Lawyer SEO.

Content and backlinks are the two most important Google ranking factors. Just like every other marketing tactic, you should plan your approach before knocking on doors to get blogging opportunities:

1. Find Websites To Guest Publish Legal Content

Great content is only great if you put it in front of the right audience. Find websites that have a reader base that overlaps with your target audience. Consider your local news websites, websites pertaining to your legal focus and (more strategically) find sites in which your competitors have published pieces.

To find websites that have linked to your competitors, use the ahrefs Backlink Checker. They offer a free trial, allowing you to type in your competitors domains to discover websites that have linked to their sites. If you find a site that links to several of your competitors, there’s a good chance you will be able to reach out for an opportunity.

Another way to find where your competitors have been published is to do a Google search for: 

link:competitordomain.com -competitordomain.com “guest post” 

In the above query, replace “competitordomain.com” with your competitor’s domain, which should yield results that link to the competing law firm’s website.

A website SEO score developed by Moz, called Domain Authority (DA), measures a website’s strength in ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Look for websites with high DA, as high scores are given to websites with more ranking potential. Download and install the MozBar for your chosen web browser.

It’s worth noting, given that  most legal consumers are looking to hire a local attorney, try to find websites with local intent, such as local news sites, community forums/blogs, etc. Landing local backlinks can help with Local SEO.

2. Develop Legal Content Topics & Formats

Once you’ve gotten a list of websites where you would like to publish guest blogs and gain backlinks, research their existing content. To find top-performing content, use BuzzSumo—simply type their domain into the BuzzSumo search bar and it will return the top articles based on social sharing.

The goal is to write content that resonates with the site’s current audience but also relates to your law firm’s legal focus. Remember, great content delivers value to the reader—write with purpose, provide a takeaway and make it entertaining. Promotional content does nothing for the audience.

Before you begin writing your articles, simply plot out some of the main points you’d like to address. Develop points that are absolute interests to the site’s audience and come up with a topic pitch.

3. Build A Relationship With The Website Owner

Before we jump the gun and ask for a guest spot on someone’s blog, show them you care about their audience’s interests and prove your value. To do this, leave comments, share on social media and connect with the authors on Twitter and LinkedIn. Once you’ve engaged them, it should be safe to send a personalized email to ask if you can guest publish on their blog.

Once you make your move, chances are the blog owner will check out your own website’s content. They’ll want to get a taste of your voice, check your body of work and verify it’s on par with their audience’s needs and desires. For this reason, it’s important to have a healthy amount of personalized content already published on your firm’s website or personal law blog.

In your email contact with the website owner, lead with flattery. Show them you’re a fan of their work. 

Mention an article or two of theirs in which you found value. Once you’ve buttered them up, ask them if they accept guest blogs and pitch a content topic that benefits their audience. Here’s a sample guest blogging outreach email:

Good Afternoon Daryn,

I’m a huge fan of The Legal Marketer’s Bible blog, especially your content on legal practice management for solo attorneys and small law firms. Your article “Law Firm Automation Practices and Efficient Client Onboarding Strategies” really helped me understand common operational pain points—and they inspired me to build document automation guides.

In fact, I plan to publish an article titled, “The Ultimate Guide To Legal Document Automation” that I feel it would greatly compliment your existing blog content and help expand your audience. Are you accepting guest blogging writers at this time?

Eager to chat,
Sam Crawford

Don’t be too verbose—tell them you love their stuff, offer to high-value content and end it with a question. More often than not, websites are open to having guest writers contribute content, as it’s free and adds to their website’s on-page SEO.

4. Write Your Guest Content

As stated, great content caters to the audience, not to your business goals. People don’t read for the sake of reading; they read to discover new information.

When writing and structuring content, refer to existing content on the blog and try to make yours consistent with theirs. Do they start with a short anecdote? Do they have a pre-defined introduction style? Are articles mostly made up of lists? How long are the paragraphs? Do they make use of headers to separate sections? How often do they link to outside or internal content?

Learn how to write better legal content in 5 simple steps.

Showing some love to the blog you are writing for with internal links is a great way to prove to the website owner that you are familiar with their content and to help them get more traffic on other web pages. 

Manually finding the best articles within the same topic on websites that have a ton of content already would be very difficult and time-consuming. Luckily, you can use Google Search with this query structure:

site:domain.com intitle:keyword

In the above query, replace “domain” with the URL of the website you’re writing for and “keyword” with the category or focus keyword that best describes your content.

5. Write Your Guest Publisher Bio

This is your chance to brag about yourself and your legal services—so make it count! Include your name, legal focus, location and several links to your website and social media profiles. In most cases, you will want to link to your website’s Home page, but this ultimately depends on the content and size of your law firm. Here are the top backlink options:

• Home page. Sending visitors to your law firm’s home page is the most general route, and often makes the most sense.
• Attorney Bio page. If you belong to a large firm that offers many practice areas and your content is very specific to your particular legal focus, link
• Specific Practice Area page. Whether you practice as a solo attorney or at a large law firm, if you’ve written a piece of content pointed to a very specific legal problem or practice area, you may want to link to your Practice Areas page for that service.
• Blog page. Given that your new visitors found you by reading your content, sending them directly to your blog page can put more of what they want directly in front of them.

Although the ultimate goal is to turn visitors into leads, don’t send them directly to the contact page. Send them where you can best educate and nurture them through your website—if interested, they’ll find your Contact page.

On top of basic information about your legal services, add some personal information to display your warm and inviting human qualities. Here’s an example of a great guest blog bio:

[Hannah Guerrera educates attorneys on cutting-edge law practice management technologies and efficient business strategies. She writes about automation, legal marketing and any software that can help make lawyers jobs easier. She loves rock-climbing and finds it difficult to end conversations about fine whiskey. Add image and links.]

6. Share Your Content & Measure Traffic

Get as much exposure as possible by sharing the link on social platforms and in your firm’s newsletter (if applicable). It’s likely the blog owner will share the content as well to get the most web traffic possible. Before sharing, use Google URL Builder to create Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes to capture traffic data.

By measuring the traffic you get to your own site directly from your guest blog opportunities, you’ll gain insight as to which website guest blog opportunities are worth future time investment. You can also send an email to the website owners to ask how the traffic is doing for each of your posts—look for more guest post opportunities for the websites that land the most traffic.

By following these steps, you’ll garner a more relevant audience, build your online visibility, increase web traffic and boost lead-in efforts. Once you’ve established yourself as a legal content titan, don’t be surprised if you receive inquiries for others to guest publish on your website—more to come on that topic in the future.