There are many components to lawyer marketing and one we always recommend is blogging for lawyers. We have seen for ourselves here at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing how much of a difference blogging makes. When done correctly blog marketing can increase ranking and traffic, if you don’t blog you will be left behind by your competitors that do. In this post, we will go over what a solid blog marketing strategy requires in order to be successful.
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There are numerous blog platforms available today, ranging from free to paid, and vary a great deal in functionality. Some legal hosting companies have their own proprietary platforms but many of these are limited in functionality as well as how much control you have. We prefer to use WordPress because we feel it is the best blogging platform on the market and we build all of our law firm client’s websites in WordPress. WordPress, with an initial release date of May 27, 2003, is also one of the oldest and most reliable platforms available.
If you don’t take the time to set your URLs up properly you can end up with ugly URLs that cause your SEO to suffer. When it comes to creating the URLs for each post, a lot of bloggers mistakenly include every single word in the title of the post in the URL. This bad practice can lead to long, hard-to-read URLs.
Pro Tip:
Try to make your blog URL descriptive of the post, but also short and relevant. Remember to leave out conjunctions such as “and,” “but” and “or” within your URLs. For example:
Longer, non-user-friendly URL:
https://examplesite.com/blog/3-tips-for-sending-your-email-newsletter-at-the-right-time
Shorter, optimized URL:
https://examplesite.com/blog/email-newsletter-tips-sending-right-time/
This is what we recommend as the URL structure for WordPress websites: /%postname%/
By adding this in the permalinks section of your WordPress admin you will get shorter SEO-Friendly URLs like this:
“https://fwd-lawyermarketing.com/seo-for-lawyers-in-2022/”
This should go without saying but you would be surprised by how many people just write about whatever they feel like writing about without doing any research at all. We actually use a number of tools to choose blog topics for our attorney clients.
3. People Also Ask Tool – This tool from Search Response emulates the People Also Ask algorithm from Google that populates in Google search results from the keyword phrases you enter. This is an exceptional tool not only for blog topics but also for coming up with video or podcast topics.
In order to get people searching for content on a specific topic to read yours, you must write effective titles. A title like “An Overview of Personal Injury Law” is dull and boring. A title such as “What You Don’t Know About Illinois Personal Injury Laws Can Cost You” is way more interesting and more likely to be clicked on. Your title should always include the main keyword phrase you are writing the blog post about as well.
Longer Content Produces Higher Search Rankings. Simply put, studies show that longer content dominates page one of search rankings. SerpIQ ran a study charting the top 10 results in search queries by content length. The first result typically has 2,416 words and the 10th result has 2,032 words
Studies show that the more often you update your blog, the more traffic it will receive. Blogging more frequently also helps you move up in search rankings. Google gives higher priority to websites with fresh content, so if you want to get more attention from the search engines, and want the spiders to come back often, write at least weekly. The clients that hire us to write weekly blog posts for them ALL outperform the law firms that do not.
There is a reason that SEO plugins suggest that you use subheadings in your writing. Most recommend that you have subheadings every 300 words or so at the most. You will notice that this post is broken up into a number of subheadings as well as utilizing bullets and numbered lists.
Relevant images with appropriate alt tags and title attributes are a Google ranking factor and all blogs should include optimized images. We also utilize videos from Facebook Live sessions for some of our clients and have had great success with those.
SEO improvements can be made by rewriting and updating existing content and do not always require new website content. Always be on the lookout for ways to update and optimize existing blog posts. Review current content and identify opportunities for additional on-page SEO. Here are some possible optimization techniques for existing blog content:
If you aren’t utilizing internal and external linking you are missing out on big SEO benefits. Internal linking can not only help visitors find more of your content but can also get pages and posts indexed that Google may have missed. External links are outbound links to other websites such as sites that give authority to references you are using in a post. In addition, when you mention another organization or company’s product or service in a blog post, include a link to that company’s page.
Google likes to see outbound links on your site, the company you mention may also notice your post and link back to you. With both internal and external linking be sure to use descriptive anchor text and not just a word or two. Google likes more descriptive text because it is not only easier for the search bots to understand but also for visitors.
These days structured data markup is easier to do than ever because there are plugins that do it for you. It is important because it provides information to search engines about a page, classifies the page content, and in some cases improves the way your page is represented in SERPs.
Sharing your blog posts on social media is non-negotiable. Our clients that share on social media see huge results from it and lots of traffic. We have an entire team that solely focuses on social media management for lawyers. We recommend at the very least that you have your Google Business Profile claimed and optimized and have a Facebook page for your law firm.
Other social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter are more optional depending on the demographics of your clients and what type of practice you have. Make sure you include social sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the other major social networks. Make it easy for your blog readers to spread the word.
The majority of people these days spend a significant time of their day on Facebook. We have found that boosting blog posts shared on Facebook has increased website traffic for our legal clients a great deal. With a budget as low as $20 you can boost a post in your local geographic area for several days!
We hope that you enjoyed this post on blogging for lawyers. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing we believe in taking a “leave no stone unturned” approach when it comes to our legal clients. With that in mind, we employ extremely experienced people in the industry.
Our SEO Director has been marketing online for well over two decades and oversees all SEO tasks including editing content and performing on-page optimization as well as internal and external linking. Our specialty is law firm marketing and SEO for lawyers at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, call us at (888) 590-9687 to discuss how we can increase the revenue of your law firm.
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