Do You Invest in Creating The Best Content For Your Practice Areas?
Creating and promoting content is arguably one of the most important, yet underutilized, tools lawyers can deploy to generate more leads.
Imagine how much more you can grow your practice if you position your law firm in front of prospective clients who are doing internet searches on Google and Bing.
Writing web copy may be one of the most effective ways to market your law firm without buying ads, but to do it right, it helps to have some proven tips and tricks.
We have put this content creation and marketing guide together to help lawyers like you write compelling content that not only gets better rankings but converts more readers into clients.
Quality Content Gives You Authority
Yes, you may be a lawyer, which automatically gives you authority.
However, if your website doesn’t highlight clearly the legal areas you cover or the questions that potential clients want to be answered, then you have a gap in your authority and your marketing strategy.
So what is content marketing?
Content marketing involves creating, publishing, and distributing content to an online audience.
Examples of digital may include:
- Webpage content
- Blogs
- Whitepapers
- Ebooks
- Press releases
- Interviews
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Images
- Videos
Here is an example of the type of content GetVisible has on our site:
At the high level, your content has one unique purpose – to get people to call you or refer your business. At the ground level, the best content either informs or entertains the reader.
Let’s break it down together.
Can Blogs Actually Help My Law Firm?
The short answer is yes.
The long answer is that when you create weekly or bi-weekly blogs, you are opening your website up to be found by so many more potential clients than ever before.
Here’s an example to show you how a carefully crafted blog post can attract a new client.
Say your friend was in his car and got into a car accident. To make things worse, the other driver who hit him didn’t have insurance. What is your friend – who is not an attorney – going to do next in case he thinks he got seriously injured?
Most people will go to Google and start doing searches. One example may be a query like, “car accident other driver has no insurance.”
If you are the aggressive car accident lawyer marketer, then you want to have a blog post showing up first in the Google search rankings when that search query is used.
You might have a blog post called “What to Do if You Get into an Accident Where Someone Doesn’t Have Insurance.” If this blog post gets highly ranked (for this and other relevant searches), the chances are greater that they will click on your blog post to learn more about what they can do.
This is the type of person who could be a potential lead.
If your content provides enough information to validate that there may be a cause of action, which could also provide compensation for the injury, the reader may be inspired to fill out a form for more information.
Not everyone who is searching for information after an accident knows what they are looking for when they start doing Google searches. To the extent your content is credible and informative and gives them confidence that they need to pursue a case, they are more likely to call you about your legal services.
Another component of writing blogs is optimizing them for Google’s algorithm. Google and other search engines “crawl” websites and determine how often content is posted. There are a variety of factors that influence rankings.
Typically, longer posts are more desirable – especially because it means more opportunity to insert keyword phrases. The more often you post, and the more links you include inside those blogs, the more rankings you will be able to obtain.
How to Get Started Blogging
This part is pretty simple.
How to Pick Searchable Topics
- The first step is to come up with blog topics. Take a look at your practice areas first.
- Make a list of the questions clients typically ask you related to the problems they are experiencing.
- Then do a quick internet search to see what other lawyers are writing about in relation to these questions. If you find relevant articles, see if you can do better.
If you are lucky, you will find a lot of greenfields (e.g. open) territory because lawyers don’t invest enough in writing effective content – if they are creating it at all.
Usually what you find online is too short, uninformative, and too shallow to address the real questions. You should also avoid creating blogs under 500 words. This should be your absolute, bare minimum.
We call this “flat content” – and if you find a lot of it, then consider this as a signpost for you to start writing better content.
Be sure to include images, infographics, and videos when available, and always incorporate your keywords into the blogs!
Creating Content for Web Pages
According to a study done by Brian Dean at Backlink.io, the average article length for a quality web page is about 1447 words. This includes your service pages, your homepage, and your about us page. Not all internal pages need to be of this length. However, whatever you write should be as descriptive as economically possible.
The main focus for keyword-rich content should be on your homepage and your service pages. This is where you will get the most visits.
Some examples of content that you can add to your internal pages include:
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Checklists
- Legal Libraries
- Case Studies and Reviews
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently asked questions pages (FAQ’s) are great additions to your service pages.
The FAQs page gives the reader a chance to find answers to lingering questions they may have after reading your blog posts and core service page content.
A properly coded FAQs page can also be optimized and get featured on the search engine results under the “People Also Ask” section. Google often prioritizes these listings as they represent answers to commonly asked questions that relate to the person’s search.
Here is an example of the People Also Ask section in Google.
Checklists are Great Content Devices
Checklists are a great way to show people exactly what they might need or the steps they might need to go through to move forward with a case.
Checklists give them a visual and provide extremely helpful information.
To create a useful checklist, think about a list you would give to an existing client and make a version you would be ok to share publicly.
Look at https://app.trybonsai.com/ to see a free checklist builder.
Have You Heard of a Legal Library?
Law is a complex subject area.
For the average person seeking legal advice, legal jargon can be quite confusing to understand. When they are trying to find the best solution to their problem, reviewing previous court cases can be quite confusing.
This is where a legal library would come in handy.
Legal libraries help you become the ultimate legal authority to your potential client. You can create short, easy-to-read legal briefs of cases that your firm has handled or cases in your niche (personal injury, medical malpractice, wrongful death, etc.). This would allow your potential client to see your success and how you can handle a case while simultaneously getting a brief understanding of their potential case.
Case Studies
Case studies are a huge part of every profession.
They allow future clients to see how you have helped someone else before you. Case studies can show how effective your legal skills are to a potential client and give them confidence before hiring you.
Although a case study can take some time to put together, it is worth it in the long run. Case studies can help build your authority and inform your reader, showing them that you are the best choice.
SEO for Content Marketing
One topic we haven’t explored deeply is search engine optimization and its correlation to content marketing.
Search engine optimization (SEO) for content marketing, in a nutshell, is inserting contextually relevant keywords in your content that you want to get ranked.
Say your blog topic is “What Happens When My Doctor Prescribes Me the Wrong Medication?”, you would then relate it to one of your services, as we discussed above. If your services include medical malpractice, you would want to ensure that the words “medical malpractice” appear inside the blog post. Remember that even if this is your main keyword, you can’t overuse it because too many mentions of one phrase can negatively affect your rankings for that phrase.
Your writing style should also sound natural.
For your internal pages, you will need to choose keywords that relate to your business and the content that will be made.
You can use tools such as Keyword Surfer, a free tool that allows you to see how many people are searching for the term you are trying to rank for. This allows you to see how relevant the term is, how competitive it is, and how many people are searching for that term.
If you notice, there is a flag with the number 14,800. This means that 14,8000 people are searching for the term “medical malpractice.” The $25.24 next to it is the “Cost per click for Google Adwords campaigns.” This is when you pay Google to have your company as an “ad” when someone searches for that term. You literally “pay per click” on the link.
When using Keyword Surfer, you will get information about the keyword on your page’s right-hand side. It gives you alternative keywords that you can use, how often they are searched, and how similar they are to the one you searched. This tool is extremely helpful for those who are new to SEO and aren’t sure how to get started with keywords.
Get Visible
Here at GetVisible, we know that “content is king.”
Content plays a huge role in online marketing, and we believe that all law firms should be able to attract their clients from a quick internet search versus spending ad dollars on ineffective traditional marketing tactics like billboards and radio commercials.
If you want to learn more about content marketing or any other services offered at GetVisible, please contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!
