For potential clients to find, remember, and trust your law firm, quality blog content is a must. Read on to find out why blogging is essential for effective law firm marketing.
Blogging is absolutely essential for getting your law firm’s website to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). Here’s why.
These days, sprinkling keywords across your law firm’s website isn’t enough. Long-tail keywords (think phrases rather than words) are much more valuable to potential clients—and, therefore, search engines—because they have more intent.
What is intent? It’s what someone is trying to do when they head to Google.
For example, when someone types “divorce lawyer” into a search bar, the search engine doesn’t have a lot to go on to try to pull up relevant results.
Does this person need to hire a lawyer…or are they trying to remember the name of one they saw a commercial for? Maybe they’re just curious how many divorce lawyers there are in the area.
The problem is that—as smart as it is—Google doesn’t know the searcher’s intent. In fact, when a search engine doesn’t have a lot of info to go on, chances are it will just resort to supplying information on what “divorce lawyer” means.
Translation? The more general the query, the more general the results.
On the other hand, typing “Little Rock child custody divorce lawyer reviews” tells us—and Google!—a lot about the searcher and their intent.
With this query, we can infer that:
- They want to see someone in a specific area
- They have at least one child that will be affected by the divorce
- They want to read feedback from past clients
Because Google has much more information in this search, it can provide results that are far more relevant to the searcher.
And the best way to let Google know that your law firm is relevant to the searches your ideal prospects are making is to have a blog that says so.
Pro Tip: With voice search on the rise, it’s becoming more important for law firms to write like people talk (instead of just using keywords that imitate how people type). For example, the searcher in the instance above may ask their artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, “Who are the top-rated child custody divorce lawyers in Little Rock?”
Click here to learn more about voice search for law firms.
We’ll be honest: your law firm’s blog is probably never going to be a place that people keep coming back to for updates.
That’s not the purpose of it.
Rather, the purpose of your law firm’s blogging content is to provide valuable information to those who need it.
(Any marketing agency who tries to sell you on the idea of making your legal blog an online hotspot doesn’t understand what lawyers need!)
Legal blogs serve as a reference point for potential clients when they need help—meaning, your firm’s blog isn’t going to be a bookmarked page someone checks up on as they drink their morning coffee.
In other words? While your blog may not be a place that people come back to over and over just to hear your thoughts, it’s entirely possible that prospects may find themselves coming across it a few times when they’re looking for legal information, advice, or guidance.
That’s where the technical side of a law firm blog comes in.
When a searcher has cookies enabled, the web browser they use can store your website’s information. Then, the next time this person searches for legal services, the web browser is primed and ready to return the prospect to your blog because it knows they’ve been there before.
That’s the lasting power of a law firm blog with valuable information: keeping you top-of-mind for the prospects who have already come across you.
And the ones who are returning are further down the sales funnel—that is, more motivated to hire.
Pro Tip: Legal blogging is best used in tandem with other online marketing strategies, including digital advertising and social media. Retargeting is a fantastic way for your law firm’s digital ads to “follow” searchers around the internet, reminding them that you can help them.
Learn more about digital advertising for law firms here.
Your blog is the best place on your law firm’s website to show prospects why they should hire you.
What that doesn’t mean: You should try to impress readers with writing excessive legal jargon on your law firm’s blog.
What that does mean: You should use your legal blog to…
- Give simple, easy-to-understand overviews of topics you come across a lot in your position
- Offer your thoughts on relevant news items
- Answer FAQs about your area of the law
This type of blogging content for law firms not only shows people that you know what you’re talking about, but that you’re able to translate the most complicated aspects of the law into layman’s terms.
Remember: offering bite-sized advice is much less overwhelming to a stressed prospect than bombarding them with complicated rules of the law and hard-sell tactics.
When a prospect is researching their legal options before moving forward, educating them on your blog assists them on their journey…and it helps them feel confident that you can help them in their next steps, too.
The more blog posts your firm’s website has on the areas of the law you serve, the better. Whether someone is simply looking for an answer to a legal question they’re curious about or they need to hire an attorney immediately, your law firm’s blog can be a trusted resource for them.
And finally, a helpful law firm blog makes a bigger impression than a competitor’s blog that has only a few low-quality posts that spend more time advertising than being helpful.
Pro Tip: When someone realizes they need to hire a lawyer, they’re typically under a lot of stress. Make prospects more likely to trust you during this difficult time in their life by presenting your attorneys as real people, not imposing figures in suits and ties.
Learn how to humanize your law firm here.
Conclusion
Starting to wonder how you can possibly find the time to come up with blog topics, optimize them for search engines, and publish them regularly?
Don’t panic—you’re in the right place.
At Kirkpatrick Creative, we know how to write effective blogs for law firms because we’ve been doing it for years.
Did you know that the American Bar Association’s 2019 Legal Technology Survey Report found that 41% of the law firms they surveyed never access the analytics related to their blog?
With Kirkpatrick Creative, you’ll never be a part of that 41%
Data is absolutely essential for knowing what works for your law firm, what doesn’t, and where things can improve. Using this data to constantly refine what we do for our clients is what we like to call advertising engineered to work.
Contact us today for law firm blog content that puts you squarely in the path of your ideal prospects when they need you.
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash