Your Law Firm Website Needs Content Marketing

If there’s one legal marketing strategy you should do on your own, it’s writing your law firm’s legal content. In this article, you’ll learn why you should make blogging a priority in your digital marketing plans.

If you’re serious about improving your online visibility to grow your firm’s digital power, you must publish high-value legal content. Many attorneys do not fully appreciate the business benefits of truly engaging, educational (and entertaining) content.

Google is constantly reworking their search algorithms to put more emphasis on delivering valuable, targeted, answer-packed content to its users. If you’re currently paying a company to write content for your law firm, read through a few of their sample articles and ask yourself these 3 simple questions:

1. Does this content help answer the most common questions asked by my clients?
2. Does this content build my online identity as an experienced, knowledgeable attorney at law?
3. Do people consume, sharing and engage with this content?

If you answered “no” to any one of these questions, it’s time to find a new content marketing strategy. We recommend that you write your blog—even if it’s the only thing you do on your own for your digital marketing!

Here are four of the biggest benefits of publishing legal content on your law firm website:

#1 — Generate More Inbound Leads

Companies that publish to a blog generate 67% more leads than those who neglect content-creation. You won’t double your client base overnight, but if you stay consistent to a posting schedule and deliver helpful, informative articles, there are very high chances that you will see favorable results in time.

Think of your blog/newsroom as a television show. Your content should have a theme and flow nicely from one article to the next—providing answers to the most topical questions asked by your target legal consumers. By writing articles that build off off of previous topics, you have more potential for internal linking (i.e. putting links to your already-published articles in new articles), which helps older articles reach more visitors.

By posting your articles on relevant forums and promoting on social media platforms, you are bound to see even more, engaged traffic. This traffic is likely to spill from your newsroom to other pages of your website and even influence visitors to take action. Your funnel starts with awareness, and once people know you exist, your blog page will help nurture your leads by gaining their trust through your diligence, expertise and apparent desire to help legal consumers.

#2 — Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Publishing relevant and targeted content on your website leads to added favorability in Google’s ranking algorithms for the keywords where you choose to optimize. Content is one of the top two ranking factors, as directly stated by Google Senior Strategist, Andrey Lipattsev: “I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it’s links pointing to your site.”

As you build your newsroom, search engines will have more material to crawl and index, helping them determine how well your subject matter meets the criteria of a given search. Before you ever write a word, though, you should do your research and planning.

Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a great way to find out what search engine users actually type into the search bar for a given topic. This tool will provide you with a list of long-tail keywords that you can then directly build into your content body or even use for the title of a given piece of writing. Other great tools include SpyFu, BuzzSumo and Alexa, which allow you to spy on the content marketing strategies of your nearest competitors. You can find weak spots in their keywords and capitalize on them. These tools require you pay a subscription if you plan to use them indefinitely, but mosts offer free trials.

Other great tools and websites include Ubersuggest, Quora, Keyworddit and LSIGraph.

If your main goal in building a blog is to boost your SEO—and it often is—be careful about how your digital marketing team is going about building your rank. Google is constantly working to give less reward to the old-school, blackhat, SEO-hacking methods that won search engine favorability in past years.

A very popular law firm website development company, FindLaw, got in trouble in the past for apparently “gaming Google and selling links to lawyer websites.” This decimated the SEO scores of many of their clients, although they have since been able to rebound.

It’s Google’s mission to provide their users with the best, possible content—and they get better at finding and delivering that content everyday. If you cut corners just to rank higher in the short-term, plan on paying for it big in the long-term. Once you get penalized, it is not easy to recover. Just remember the words of Wendy Piersall: “Google only loves you when everyone else loves your first.”

Check out 20 SEO Copywriting Tips for Lawyers.

#3 — Become A Thought Leader & Build Credibility

Take a look around—every thought leader in every industry releases content in some form or another. Peers will keep an eye out for your new posts and even share your content if it helps their audiences, which will boost your engagement and potentially bring even more, targeted legal consumers.

When your clients see that you’re well-respected by those within your industry and have been featured on notable publications like your local news websites, Forbes, legal journals, etc., they’ll grow more confident in you and your legal knowledge.

If you’re constantly developing rock-solid, informative content that is easy for people to digest (e.g. not a heap of confusing legal terms), people are bound to share your content and link to your articles within their own—this is called a “backlink.”

If your articles win backlinks from high-quality websites, you just earned you will earn some good “link juice.” As mentioned previously, one of the top two factors in SEO is quality backlinks—and that’s on top of the “name-droppping” you can do on your website to impress visitors with your endorsement by a popular publication.

For this reason, it is essential that you release content that will not only draw in visitors, but also keeps them around long enough to read, share, take action and return the next time you publish killer content.

Check out Better Legal Content Writing in 5 Simple Steps.

#4 — Help Legal Consumers

Despite what some may say about lawyers, there’s at least a small part of you that wanted to become a lawyer because you’re genuinely interested in helping people solve their legal problems. Publishing blog articles that provide direction and advice for those afflicted with legal issues is a great way to help them on their journey to resolution—and start them on your buyer journey.

Actively engaging with your audience on forums and news feeds where you post your articles does a lot for your stock in the dedication department as well. You don’t have to be responsive 24/7, but showing up for 15 minutes every other day to answer questions, provide direction and thank people for reading goes a long way. It shows your readers that you are actively seeking to help. Over half of legal consumers are likely to hire an attorney that engages with them on social media.

There are many digital marketing blogs dedicated to helping you achieve business success through content development and content marketing strategies. Blogs like those built built by Neil Patel and Brian Dean publish articles that touch on finding your voice, targeting your audience, boosting engagement, strategizing content for boring industries, boosting your copywriting SEO practices and much more. The team as HubSpot constantly conducts content studies and discusses new ideas that will help your firm build a newsroom that your readers will love and share.

Starting your blog is the most difficult part, but once you start getting love from online visitors, you might even get excited about writing your next piece!

If you found this valuable, check out 5 Free Lawyer Marketing Strategies for Solo Attorneys and Small Law Firms