We’ve established that SEO content is the most effective (and cost-effective) marketing strategy for law firms to consistently grow their reach and get more clients.
Content marketing works by building your law firm’s brand and reputation organically, with long-term results that multiply exponentially with consistent effort.
The great thing about SEO is that you don’t have to publish ridiculous amounts of elaborate content every single day on every social media platform to see a difference. You can start getting traction with as little as 1 blog post per week or 2 posts per month. Depending on your pace, you should start seeing positive results within 3 to 6 months.
Of course, the success of your content strategy depends on how you execute it. You’re not going to get far if you publish obscure legal jargon without any market or keyword research.
Even though lawyers are taught how to write, legal writing is different than writing to market your services to clients. This is why writing like a lawyer will not succeed online. You need a writer who not only understands the law but writes to convert readers to clients. Ideally, your content writer is a trained marketer with a background in the law.
Before we get to the winning formula, I want to address why I’m sharing this information. After all, I am a legal content writer myself – why would I share my formula for success with anyone?
First, I believe in providing the best possible value for my clients, not gatekeeping information. Second, I know that I bring so much more than just this formula to the table. When clients work with me, they get a refined and skillful approach to the formula below, along with all the knowledge and expertise of my more than two decades of work in search-engine-optimized content marketing.
You can expect success if you follow the formula below. But the trick is in how you actually put these strategies into practice. If you want to talk to an expert about your law firm’s SEO and content strategy, schedule your free consultation with me now!
1. Talk Directly to Your Audience
Your law firm’s website should not actually be about you. Instead, your content should focus on your audience – your potential clients. Talk about what you can do for them and how you can ease their troubles instead of just telling them about who you are and what you do.
This rule is also literally true. Talk directly to your reader, like I’m doing now. Use “you” in your writing for a much more personal and engaging tone. You probably want to take another look at your content if you’re talking about “I,” “we,” and “us” all the time.
Write your website as if you’re speaking to your clients over the phone or on a video call. Do you actually want your clients to call you Mr. or Ms. to your face? (Unless you’re practicing in an extremely conservative area, probably not.) Use your first name instead.
By nature, humans are a little obsessed with themselves. We’re much more likely to pay attention and stick around when something affects us directly. The better you understand your audience, the better you can speak their language and address their greatest concerns and hopes. The more tuned in your content is to your audience, the better it will perform.
Speaking of tone, figure out what type of tone you want to project on your website. Oftentimes, your website is the first impression that potential clients (even referrals) will get of you.
To get started, I ask my clients: what 3 adjectives would you like clients to associate with your law firm? Would you like to be known as aggressive, passionate, compassionate, discreet, pragmatic, relatable, or something else?
Finding Your Audience With Keywords
Knowing your audience also means knowing which keywords to target in your SEO content campaign. This requires some research. What’s your target audience talking about? What questions are they asking? Create content that meets them where they are.
Law firms face steep competition for relevant search terms. Just run an online search for “personal injury lawyer” around any major metropolitan area and you’ll find page after page of web content trying to rank on that coveted first page of Google.
How are you supposed to stand out among this crowd? Especially against bigger firms?
You can start by targeting high-intent, lower-competition long-tail keywords. Just as an easy example, instead of “New York divorce attorney,” you could target the phrase, “How long does a divorce take in New York?” Fewer websites are competing over this long-tail keyword and the intent behind the question implies that the person asking might be facing a potential divorce – i.e., they could use a lawyer.
2. Provide Enough Value to Make Your Content Worth Reading
So you’ve got people’s attention. Now you’ve got to keep it.
Every sentence in your content should make the reader want to read the next sentence. This might sound like a high bar, but it’s simply about cutting out the low-quality filler and packing your content with actual useful information that’s relevant to your potential clients. The rest of your word count should focus on connecting emotionally with your readers.
Don’t be afraid of giving away too much useful information. There is no such thing. Your ideal client is not going to read your blog post about estate planning and decide to write their will on their own. Your ideal client is ready to hire someone to do the work for them – and the more useful information you provide them, the more they will trust you over your competitors.
This is why it’s important that your legal content writer is actually familiar with the practice of law. A non-lawyer knows only so much about how the law works. They can only get so deep into a topic. Writers without legal knowledge end up parroting the sources they find online, which means they’re not likely to add anything new to the topic. With a generalized writer, your content is more likely to sound like any other website out there, which means it’s not likely to stand out in search or elsewhere.
How Long Should Your Content Be?
I always write with 3 people in mind – the skimmer, the deep diver, and Google.
To appeal to the skimmer, you format your content with ease and accessibility in mind (more on that below, in step 3). To appeal to Google, you follow SEO best practices. And to appeal to the deep diver, you give them that meaty information they’re craving.
Think about it this way – how deep can you possibly get into a topic, especially a legal topic, in just a few paragraphs? Not much. You can barely cover the surface – and that makes it much harder to say anything that your visitors haven’t already read elsewhere.
Because of this and the highly competitive nature of the industry, I recommend that your SEO content be 1000 words minimum if you want to rank anywhere near page 1 of search results. This allows you to get deep enough into a topic to satisfy the deep diver that you know what you’re talking about – and convince them to hire you above the rest.
It is a myth that people do not read long content. People read long content when it’s good and relevant to their interests. And when visitors spend a long time reading your content (“long time” could be just a few minutes), Google and other search engines notice.
Remember: Google is a robot trying to figure out what humans like. Search engines are way more sophisticated now than simply counting keywords on a page. Instead, they look at human behavior on a page to figure out how it should rank – how long people spend on a page, whether they interact with any elements on the page, or whether they click links to multiple pages on the same website. This is also why internal linking is critical for a robust SEO content strategy.
Don’t be afraid to go longer on meatier topics. 1000 words is the bare minimum for SEO blog posts and articles, especially for law firms in competitive practice areas. I’ve written pages on employment law and workplace discrimination that were 8000 words long, with great results. As long as your content is formatted well and easy to read, people want that valuable information.
3. Make Your Content Easy to Read and Understand
How many 4- or 5-syllable words are in your first paragraph? Your first sentence? Does reading your website feel like bashing your head against a large wall of text? Are there simpler words you could use instead to get the exact same point across?
Reading and writing case law is one thing – but it’s definitely not how you write marketing copy. And your law firm’s website exists not just to inform but also to market and convert clients.
The way attorneys are taught to write in law school does not actually translate to writing online content, which people read on their phones or in between meetings. The best content is easy to read and requires your reader to exert as little effort as possible to get your message.
This doesn’t mean you have to dumb down your content. But it does mean writing in a way that is purposeful, clear, concise, and engaging. This takes training and experience to get right.
Lawyers must also simplify the law for potential clients, many of whom are laymen. You could talk about a “preliminary injunction” (say that five times fast) or describe it as a “court order to keep the status quo.” The latter is far more accessible. Even if your target audience expects a certain level of technical expertise, you can include industry lingo in a natural way.
4. Use Formatting to Your Advantage
Formatting is an incredibly useful tool for both readability and SEO – and I rarely see websites taking full advantage of all the formatting tools at their disposal. When I do see good formatting, I can tell the content was written by a professional who knew what they were doing.
Formatting for Readability
First, smart formatting is important for good readability. The harder your content is to read, the faster people are going to bounce away somewhere else.
Break up long paragraphs into multiple, shorter blocks. Use bulleted and numbered lists. Make your content easy to skim – that means using descriptive headings and putting important phrases in bold.
This goes without saying, but make sure your website is accessible, responsive, and easy to read as well. Avoid dark backgrounds and small text.
Formatting for SEO
Search engines pay attention to your content formatting, too. Google gives greater weight to words and phrases in bold and in headers. So you can put keywords naturally into an article and then bold that text with <strong> brackets to emphasize it to search engines.
Headers are marked in order of importance for search engines as well. Your H1 or page title will get the greatest weight, followed by H2 and H3 headers. Not only do these headings break up your text to make it easier to read and skim, but they’re valuable real estate for SEO keywords.
5. No Matter How Often You Publish, Be Consistent
Whether you’re posting 1 blog post per month, 2 posts per month, or a blog post each week, just be consistent with it. Updating your website monthly is much better than never.
If you start out publishing 2 blog posts per week, you could see your rankings shift in as little as 4 weeks. For a single blog post per week, give it 8 weeks. A blog post every other week – 3 to 6 months. And so on. You can be the turtle or the hare as long as you keep showing up.
The best part about SEO is how consistent effort pays off big with multiplicative effects, as you can see in the graph above. Quality content can keep performing for you for years.
6. Include Clear Calls to Action
You don’t want to sound pushy, but calls to action are absolutely necessary to actually convert your website readers into legal clients. And that’s the whole point of content marketing.
Calls to action do not have to be complicated. A phone number and a link to your contact form will suffice, with a simple message to call or contact you now. You want to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to reach out to you. If your readers have to hunt through your website for your contact information, you’re going to miss out on a lot of warm leads.
For law firms writing blog posts, I recommend putting a short call to action at the tail of the introductory section plus another call to action at the end of the post. If you’re going for more of an op-ed tone in your article, just put in a single call to action at the end.
Don’t forget to track your conversions so that you know your content is working. You can do this by tracking contact form submissions and using unique phone numbers on your website to track calls.
7. Repurpose Your Content Whenever Possible
The best part about creating content for your law firm is how much you can repurpose content for the maximum possible impact. Once you have a blog post, you can:
- Take snippets to share on social media with a link back to the post
- Create images and infographics based on the information
- Cover the topic in a YouTube video and link back to the post
- Embed the related YouTube video into the post on your website
- Cover the topic on a podcast and link back to the blog post
- Build a “content cluster” of related blog posts all internally linked to each other
Again, you don’t have to take all or even most of these steps, but each will strengthen your content strategy. Pick the one you enjoy the most and engage in building a solid following on a single platform where you know your target audience spends a lot of their time.
Click here for answers to the most frequently asked questions about legal content marketing, SEO, and posting on social media for law firms.
Want to talk about your law firm’s content strategy? If you feel like you’ve been spinning your wheels with SEO, I can help you get traction. Schedule your free consultation with me now and let’s chat.