December, 2022 | Article
7 Steps To Follow To Create SEO Content For Your Law Firm's Website
In the modern era of ubiquitous technology and social media, lawyers are presented with a myriad of new opportunities to reach their target audience. It is not uncommon to see that lawyers are not leveraging their law firm website to the fullest extent, which limits their ability to reach prospective clients. For this reason, translating website traffic into real clients is often an arduous task. Using SEO effectively can help overcome this limitation by allowing lawyers to become more visible and authoritative across search engines.
7 Steps to Creating SEO Content for Your Law Firm Website
While there is no one-size-fits-all for creating SEO content for a law firm website, there is a tried-and-true process for creating content that attracts visitors and generates revenue for your business. Having spent years working with lawyers to improve their law firm SEO, we have boiled this process down to a 7-step framework. When implemented strategically, these 7 steps can have a major quantitative impact on your business.
1. Identify Relevant Topics
Regardless of whether you are just beginning your SEO journey or are a seasoned content writing maestro, identifying topics does not always come easily. It can be difficult to assess the type of information that prospective clients are looking for online. This, in fact, is the foundation of your content strategy: what questions are prospective clients asking and how can we most effectively answer these questions?
In order to engage prospective clients, you first must be relevant. To be relevant, you must create content that resonates with your ideal clientele’s struggles, challenges, and most common dilemmas. When brainstorming ideas, consider the three primary components of effective content:
A Note on Evergreen Topics
When navigating topic ideas, it is important to consider which content will be continually relevant over weeks, months, and even years. Evergreen content is that which will remain fresh and pertinent long past its date of publication. With time, evergreen content will continue to attract audience attention and generate traffic, making it incredibly essential for SEO purposes.
For law firms, evergreen topics are oftentimes broad industry concepts that may be confusing for prospective clients. For example, the topic “how is property divided following a divorce?” will be much more relevant long-term than a commentary piece on a recent political event.
2. Utilize Keywords Effectively
Once the topic has been identified, it is time to start building content. Keywords are the pillars of good content, allowing the user to identify which web pages will answer their question most effectively. In essence, when a user searches your keyword or phrase, your webpage will appear in the list of results, indicating that your content is relevant to their query. Keywords are important, as they are one of the primary factors that Google looks for when ranking your web page.
Using keywords effectively can be difficult, however, and many people fall into common SEO pitfalls when it comes to keyword utilization. When using keywords in your content, consider the following:
There are a plethora of online tools available to help identify which keywords will be the most relevant for a given topic. Google Trends provides information on the most trending current searches on the Google platform, while Answer the Public is a fantastic tool for understanding what users are organically searching. These tools, among others, can be beneficial when developing your initial keyword strategy.
3. Format Properly to Improve Readability
Search engine optimization is a complicated, multi-faceted process that goes beyond written content. Many times, formatting is an overlooked aspect of this process. It is important to note that on-page optimization must be tailored to search engine crawlers and prospective site visitors alike. To accomplish this, consider the following:
It should also be noted that formatting for simplicity and clarity is often a valuable strategy. Using fonts that are easy to read and limiting the use of color in your text can be helpful. Moreover, when formatting content, be sure to consider how the web page will appear on mobile devices as well as standard computers and laptops.
4. Understand Word Count for Different Types of Content
We often encounter questions regarding whether or not word count is important for SEO. The answer is undeniably, yes. Typically, the optimal number of words that should be included in a piece of content depends on the purpose of the text. Evergreen content, like service pages, perform well when they are between 500 and 800 words. Blog posts, on the other hand, should hover between 1,000 and 2,000 words. Naturally, social media content should be kept shorter, between 300 and 600 words to ensure that the text is shareable.
5. Leverage Ingoing & Outgoing Links
Links are a key component of an effective SEO strategy. Ingoing links, which are backlinks from another website pointing to your web page, bring more authority to your site. Having high quality ingoing links from trusted, well-ranking web pages can be a major ranking factor for your law firm website.
Outgoing links, which are backlinks found on your own website that point to other web pages, also operate as votes of trust for other sites. Leveraging a few, strategically placed outgoing links on your law firm website can help improve your search engine rankings.
6. Prioritize Originality
The importance of prioritizing originality when creating law firm website content cannot be under-emphasized. This is for two reasons, which can be summarised as follows:
Original content can be an overview of established legal topics, new takes on relevant legal issues, or your professional opinion on a particular topic. All in all, crafting written content that reflects your law firm’s culture and ethos is a more effective approach than regurgitating information from other web pages on your law firm website or from your competitors’ websites.
7. Promote on Social Media
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Meets demand: to ensure the greatest return on investment, it is necessary to find a topic that is of-interest to the widest possible audience. There are several factors that influence demand, including geographic region and customer demographics, which must be accounted for when generating content ideas. If your law firm already showcases content on its website, take note of which topics generate the highest amount of traffic.
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Demonstrates expertise: for a topic to be effective, the audience must glean insight and knowledge from the content. Consider the type of questions that your current and prospective clients are asking and answer these questions concisely within your law firm website content.
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Matches intent: Search intent becomes increasingly important as users become more and more reliant on mobile devices. With mobile device users, intent can be broken down into four categories: learning, going, doing, or buying. As such, your content will be either informational, navigational, transactional, or local.
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Moderation: overusing your keyword or phrase will signal to Google that your content is unreadable and, in the worst cases, spam. “Keyword stuffing” is a major issue that can result in your web page being ranked lowly or even removed altogether.
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Organic use: ensure that your keywords appear logically within your text. Forcing keywords into sentences where they do not make sense is a fast way to signal to Google that your content may not add any real value to users.
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Readability: finally, utilize keywords strategically within different parts of the content. Consider using a keyword once within a heading, in the introduction of your text, and in the URL slug and meta description, for instance.
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Headings: using headings frequently throughout a text is a valuable way to break up the content and increase readability. Headings also provide an opportunity to utilize keywords for the back-end of SEO.
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Concise paragraphs: readers and bots alike are less interested in consuming a large wall of text than they are smaller, more concise paragraphs.
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Bullet points: another way to break up text and increase readability is by using bullet points and numbered lists.
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Search engine crawlers do not view duplicate content favourably. In fact, Google has made it clear that duplicated content is not considered quality content on their platform. Google’s algorithms eliminate duplicated content immediately, making it important to produce original and unplagarised content.
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As previously mentioned, garnering ingoing links on your written content can have a good impact on your search engine rankings. To earn these links, it is essential to produce high-quality, authoritative content. More often than not, this coincides with originality. If your content is original, other websites will be more likely to cite your web page as an authoritative source in the industry.
As the population becomes more and more reliant on social media for news and information, it is essential to leverage these platforms to your advantage. Many lawyers disregard the power of social media, missing out on the critical opportunities that it provides. Marketing your content across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok not only increases brand recognition, but enhances your brand’s reputation. Moreover, the likes, comments, and shares that your content earns can signal to search engines that your content is useful to your target market.
Consider Contacting an Experienced Marketing Agency
Crafting high quality SEO-friendly content can be time-consuming and difficult, requiring hours of work and consistent dedication. For this reason, understanding the quantitative impact of this effort is imperative. Fortunately, optimizing your content for search engines has the potential to attract wider audiences, thereby generating revenue for your law firm.
When adopted to suit your law firm’s needs, these steps can increase the number of prospective clients who visit your website and improve your visibility across major search engines. To learn more about how we can help create SEO-friendly content for your law firm, consider contacting Law Quill today.