A law firm blog is a great way to connect with potential clients and be more approachable to visitors to your site. However, many law firms do not have a blog or they have one and it isn’t getting enough qualified traffic to warrant the work. Here are some tips to make your law firm blog better starting right now.
Find out what people are asking.
You want to include relevant information in your blog, and you want people to be able to find it, so first you need to find out what people want to know. You should be an expert at this, just think about the most common questions your current clients ask you. Put yourself in their shoes and compile a list of words or short phrases that they might be typing into their search engines.
When you pick your next blog topic, choose one of these words or short phrases. This will be your keyword. Use it in the title of your blog post and at least a couple of times throughout the body of your post. You can find tools online to help you decide what headline will yield the best results.
These keywords are what search engines look for so when a potential client types in “what to include in a will” on Google, your blog post titled “Top 5 Things to Ensure you Include in Every Will” will have a better chance of being one of the first results he or she sees. This is one of the more important parts of search engine optimization (or SEO) to implement for each blog article.
Break your blog post up a little.
We see this all the time at Sting Marketing. Blog posts that contain great information but aren’t reader friendly. People have a lot of choices when they open their laptop, or pull up your site on their mobile device and fire up their search engine. If your blog isn’t easily scannable and appealing to look at, most people are going to hit the back button and try another source that will give them the information they are searching for.
To make your blog more readable, break up long paragraphs and include subheaders when you switch to a new idea. You can also use bold and italics to emphasize especially important ideas. Just make sure you don’t overuse either of these, too much can actually make your blog harder to read.
Write your post like you are talking to a client for the first time, because you kind of are.
We know that it’s impossible to write a law firm blog without including at least a little legal jargon. What’s important is that you explain the legal jargon in a way that any average person on the street could understand. If your blog is written in a way that is too technical, it will steer most people away. You don’t want them to have to leave your website to google all the terminology from your blog that they don’t understand.
On that same note, however, you only have a limited amount of words that you are working with (a good length starting point for a blog post is no less than 750 words, 1000 or more is even better) and you don’t want to use too many of them explaining words, phrases or ideas that aren’t directly related to the key word you have chosen.
This is a perfect time to use links. If you have a legal terminology page on your website, hyperlink the word to the definition on that page. If you don’t have a definition or explanation for something you mention in your blog, you can also link to an outside source. One to two links to a credible website other than your own can actually boost your SEO and make your blog post even more likely to show up in potential clients’ search results. Just make sure the link is opening up in a new window so people will be able to easily return to your site and pick up reading where they left off.
Include a photo.
This is so important. People are more likely to read a blog with a picture than one without a picture. But to find that perfect picture, you can’t just go to Google images and pick any one you want. It’s a good rule of thumb to assume that a photo or image is copyrighted unless you see that it says otherwise. Luckily there are sites that you can go to in order to find high-quality images that aren’t copyright protected. Pexels.com has high quality images that are free and you can use without attributing a source.
You’re Done! Almost.
Once you have written an amazing blog post free of grammatical errors, have given it a relevant title, added in some relevant links and have picked out a high-quality picture, you are ready to post! Make sure to post a link to your blog with a captivating description on all of your social media channels.
This next part is optional, but recommended. While it’s definitely important to write new blog posts regularly–we suggest writing at least 1-2 new blogs a week–you should also occasionally be re-sharing blog posts that you’ve already written. After all, as you gain more followers on your blog and social media you want to make sure they are seeing the great content you posted last month that they missed. Don’t make more work for yourself. Keep all of your content organized in a file on your computer where it is easily accessible and categorized.
Depending on how often you write new content and how many new followers you are getting, you can re-share an older blog once every few months as long as it is still relevant. Don’t re-post the blog post on your blog, just re-share it on social media with a new description.
If your blog needs a little love or you want to start one but don’t have the time, let Sting Marketing help. In addition to designing websites for businesses, we also help law firms get more out of their online marketing efforts by creating awesome blog and social media content. Call us today at 602-900-8998 or book a free strategy session online.
