There are many steps law firms should take to improve SEO and increase traffic to their websites. One of the most important steps is to regularly publish blogs on topics that are of interest to potential clients.
Whether you have published a lot of blogs, or your website only has a few, you could greatly benefit from reading PMP’s best practices on blogging for lawyers. We not only explain the importance of blogging, but also provide practical tips on writing engaging posts that your target audience wants to read.
Why You Need to Maintain an Effective Law Firm Blog
There are so many benefits to consistently publishing blogs on your website. Here are just a few:
Generating Links
One of the many factors in your website’s SEO is the number of backlinks pointing to your website. While your homepage and practice area pages might generate a few backlinks, well-written blog posts can generate a lot more. This is because your blogs can target more specific keywords and provide specific information.
Demonstrating Your Legal Knowledge and Expertise
Some blogs may garner web conversions, as readers may get their questions answered from one of your posts and decide that your firm has the legal knowledge to handle their case. Other times, potential clients come to a law firm’s website to learn more about the firm and their attorneys. When they see that your firm regularly writes blogs about cases like theirs, it helps to show your legal expertise.
Building Your Brand
Blog posts about your firm’s involvement in the community or blogs about your advocacy on important legal issues helps your target audience build an emotional connection. This can help reinforce your brand and give potential clients a positive view of your law firm.
Best Practices For Your Law Firm Blog
PMP has been writing blog posts for plaintiff law firms for more than 15 years, generating significant traffic and backlinks. We know what works when it comes to law firm blogging and we have created a list of best practices.
If you have questions about getting started, or your blogs are not providing the benefits you are looking for, contact us to learn how we can help.
Come Up With Topics That Answer Clients’ Questions
Some injury firms write blog posts about car accidents that happened nearby, or other types of injury accidents that fall under one of their practice areas.
While these types of posts may generate traffic, it will often be short-lived. You may see some traffic for the first few days after the post goes live, but after that it will probably drop down to zero.
It is better to adopt a more long-range strategy by writing posts that answer questions potential clients have about the legal process. For example, people often have questions about what to do after an accident or liability for certain types of car crashes. When you write authoritative blogs on these types of subjects, the posts are more likely to rank higher in search results and provide traffic all year long, instead of for a few days or weeks.
You can mix in shorter blogs about things happening at your firm or other topics, but regularly publishing evergreen blogs is a proven strategy for generating organic web traffic.
Strike a Balance Between SEO and What Your Clients Want to Read
While you need to write what your audience wants to read, you also need to account for search engines. For example, people do not like reading long paragraphs with a lot of long words and jargon. They like content that is easy to read and understand. At the same time, you need to make sure your content contains the appropriate keywords and the page loads quickly.
Create Authoritative Content
Writing a couple hundred words about a topic does not give you much room to fully explain it. At the same time, you do not want to write blog posts that are so long there is little chance readers will ever get close to the end.
Your blog posts should be long enough so you can explain things in sufficient detail. You want readers to get the answers they are looking for, so they can better understand the issue. There is no one-size-fits-all length for blog posts. For example, 700 words on one topic might be perfect, but some other topics may require 800 or 900 words. There may even be some topics that can be covered in detail in just 500 or 600 words.
Write Headlines That Draw Readers In
The meta title is the first part of your blog post readers will see. You need to write a meta title that will encourage readers to click on your page instead of another.
You can do this by balancing SEO and thinking about what might make people more likely to click. For example, the meta title could be a question that people are likely to ask. It is also a good idea to find some way to differentiate your post from other similar posts that are already out there on the Internet.
You also need to consider keywords when crafting your meta titles. Including the appropriate keyword sends a signal to Google that your page addresses an issue people want to read about.
Write Content That Can be Easily Scanned
You should incorporate subheadings and bullet points whenever possible. Subheads break up blocks of text and bulleted lists are easily consumable.
While it would be nice if people took the time to read an entire blog post, they often scan for the information they want to read. By breaking up your copy with subheadings and bullet points, you are giving readers what they want. If people see a long block of text, they are likely to click back to a search engine results page and find another blog they think will answer their query.
Consider Outsourcing Your Blog Posts
PMP writes blogs for plaintiff law firms, in addition to managing other aspects of their websites. You are busy working with clients and handling the many aspects of the legal process. It is hard to find the time to devote to writing in-depth blog posts that provide authoritative information about legal topics.
By outsourcing your blog posts, you can keep your focus on working with your clients to try to secure the results they are looking for.
Use Analytics to Narrow Down the Topics That Work
One of the most important aspects of any marketing campaign is measuring your success. You need to know if what you are doing is working and you need to know how well it is working.
This same logic applies to blogging. You need to review your blogs to find out which ones are getting traffic and which ones are not. You may discover that there are certain types of topics or practice areas you have been neglecting to write about. You may find that certain types of blogs appear to generate significant traffic. These are important insights that can allow you to refine your strategy to write better blogs.
These are the types of things PMP does for our clients to bring traffic to their websites to help grow their firms.
