Cat lawyer with spectacles wants to write better legal content. — Effective Legal Marketing Requires Better Legal Content

7 Easy Ways To Boost Your Legal Blog Engagement And SEO Results.

Create Better Legal Content

9 min readFeb 9, 2021

*Originally published on Linkedin December 1, 2020.

Are you an attorney who writes blog posts for your law firm website? Would you like to see better results from your marketing efforts? Create better content for your readers and increase your search engine rankings by including these marketing tips in your blog writing strategy.

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Let’s face it. You want a steady stream of clients but there’s a lot of competition out there. And effective internet marketing is not well understood by most attorneys. If you’re a sole practitioner or a small law firm you may find it hard competing with the big guys that have the budget to hire people to handle their content marketing.

You know you need to get more eyes on your website and get those eyes to become clients of your firm. You know you need to rank higher in search results in order for people to see you. You’ve heard you need to give value when you advertise. Give more to get more. People need to know, like, and trust you before they become your clients.

Writing blog articles for your law firm website is a logical marketing move. Give people the information they’re looking for and help them to understand it. Become that trusted resource people go to when they have legal questions. When your readers are ready to hire an attorney they will think of you.

Won’t they?

If you aren’t using some kind of software (like Google Analytics ) to track what people do when they land on your website, your marketing efforts are a lot of best-guess work.

But here are seven things you can do that will increase the likelihood your efforts will improve your results even if you’re not currently tracking your marketing metrics.

1. Be Consistent

Decide how often you are going to post and make sure you stick to your schedule. If you have a blog and someone goes to it the last thing you want them to find is your last post was in 2017. You don’t have to post all the time. Decide what frequency makes the most sense with your schedule and that you are most likely to be able to stick with. Give yourself enough time to produce the kind of quality work product that you want to be known for.

Don’t think of writing your posts as an unpaid chore in your practice. Think of it as using your knowledge and experience to let your clients know you are the one with the answers they need. If your content persuades clients to work with you then it is very much worth your time.

2. Make Your Posts Easy to Read on Mobile Devices

A lot of your potential clients are consuming their content from their phones. Anyone who is not optimizing their content to grab attention on a phone is losing business.

The best way to get an idea of mobile visibility is to pull up your website on your phone and look at your blog posts. Is the print too big? Too small? Do you have a wall of text or is it broken up with subheadings that can be skimmed to give people an idea of what you’re writing about?

Ask colleagues, friends, and clients to take a look at your content on their phones and get their feedback. Then you can make changes so your content is better received by mobile viewers.

3. Inject Your Content With a Little Bit of Empathy

People can get information from anywhere these days. Why do they want to get the information from you? Why should they?

Because you care. Because you’re not just listing a bunch of cold facts and cold results. Because you put a little bit of you in every post you write. Let people in on a little bit of what makes you the answer to their legal problems. Don’t talk at your audience. Reach out and pull them in with your words.

Why do you do what you do? What is it about you that your audience can connect with?

Do you have an example you can share that adds a bit of a story to your content? Over the years you must have come across situations that you can share generically and that people will identify with.

4. Use Internal Links

If you are writing blog posts about specific topics you will likely have occasion to reference collateral topics that you have written a separate blog post about. You want to link those resources together so that the reader can easily learn more about a specific topic without leaving your website. The longer a reader spends on your site the more familiar he or she becomes with your content and services.

When choosing the text that you want to link to another page of your website you want to select the text that most accurately describes the content that is being linked to. The text you attach the link to is called the anchor text.

So let’s say you are writing about what is required to get your license back after a DWI and you mention that a person will need to obtain high-risk auto insurance — referred to as SR-22 insurance. And you have written another post specifically about SR-22 insurance. You will want to make the anchor text ‘SR-22’ or ‘SR-22 insurance’.

5. Check Your Grammar and Word Choice/Sentence Structure

Writing about legal matters can get technical with a lot of jargon and acronyms. Formal language does not enhance the reader’s experience. A legal blog is not expected to read like a romance novel but there are ways to make the content more clear and reader-friendly.

If you have done your best a good way to get a second pair of eyes (so to speak) on your work before you publish it is to run it through Hemingwayapp.com. It’s a free editing tool that will let you know the reading level you are writing at (aim for 7th to 9th grade) and point out certain word choices and sentence structures that you may want to polish up a bit.

Grammarly is another free app that will take a look at your spelling and punctuation. You may not always agree with the suggestions but sometimes things are caught that you didn’t see. Your writing itself makes an impression independent of your subject matter. A spelling or grammatical error can damage your credibility and cause prospective clients to look elsewhere.

6. Be Strategic With Keywords

Everyone knows that SEO is how you get more eyes on your content. In order to increase your ranking in search engines, you need to include certain words in your writing that people are likely to search for.

For any blog post, you want to pick keywords that describe your services and that describe your blog topic. A descriptive phrase is going to be more targeted than just a couple of words.

Let’s say you’re a criminal defense attorney in Casper, Wyoming. Your specialty is defending DWIs. Your audience includes people who have gotten DWIs, people who may be concerned about getting a DWI and people who know people who have gotten DWIs.

For keywords describing how you help try using

‘criminal defense attorney in Casper, Wyoming’ instead of ‘defense attorney’.

You can be even more specific by including a particular practice area such as

‘DWI criminal defense attorney in Casper, Wyoming’.

When you are more specific you won’t come up as often overall but you will come up more often for persons looking for exactly what you do and where you do it. And those folks may be the ones most in need of your services right now.

When selecting your topic be specific and try to stick with just one aspect of your practice. So maybe you’re writing about how to defend a DWI by challenging the breathalyzer results. The keywords for your topic might be something like

‘how to defend DWI breathalyzer results’ or ‘defenses to a breathalyzer test in Wyoming’.

If you know the kinds of questions your clients typically ask then you can use that information to help you decide how they might search for help. The closer you can match the terms that your potential clients type into the search bar, the better your results will be.

There are free keyword research tools — like Ubersuggest or Google Keyword Planner — that you can use to help figure out the best keywords to use. You can type a topic in the search bar of those tools and see what other variations of your topic people search for and how often. Then you can add some of those words into your keyword mix.

You don’t need to keep using the exact same keywords over and over — and it’s not recommended. You can use alternative words that have similar meanings. For instance, if ‘attorney’ is your keyword you can use ‘lawyer’ as an alternative. Instead of ‘DWI’ try ‘drunk driving’.

When it comes to keywords you want to sprinkle not stuff. In practice, that means be aware of places you can use your keywords but don’t just stick them in for the sake of using more of them. You want to be strategic but the quality of your content always comes first.

7. Have a Clear Call to Action

A call to action gives your reader direction. It lets the reader know what their next step is. You want to make it easy for your reader to move forward with you as their attorney. Although I’ve seen legal blog posts with a call to action embedded within the body of the post, I think it works well to save the call to action for the end of the post.

Deliver the information in a way that lets the reader know you are the expert that can help them with their situation. Tell them why you are the one to help them and how they can contact you. If you have a page on your website that is your personal bio this would be a good place to add a link to it.

This is also where you might offer a free consultation to ‘hook’ your reader. Depending on who your target clients are you might want to consider using a word other than ‘consultation’. It may not be immediately understood by your reader what that entails and it could be off-putting.

Try something like,

Call today and speak with an attorney free for half an hour.

Or,

Contact us here to book a complimentary call to discuss your circumstances with attorney Lotta Legal.

You can help your reader make a decision by including what the person can expect if he/she contacts you for the consultation. For instance,

During the half-hour call you will explain your situation to the attorney and receive general guidance as to your options and a recommendation for what to do next.

And if you’re a little more tech-savvy and have some automation in place you perhaps offer a free resource in exchange for an email address. Not everyone will be ready to hire an attorney right away. They may still be researching and gathering information. Now you have given more value and have a way to keep the conversation going with someone you know has an interest in what you do.

Final Thoughts Before You Go …

The world of internet marketing can seem daunting because there is so much to know and the rules keep changing. But you don’t have to know everything to create great legal content that gives people what they are looking for and lets them know you are the one to help them.

Remember you have the solution to someone’s very real problem. Clearly communicate why you’re the one who understands what your reader is going through and how you’re the one to solve his or her legal troubles. Helpful as it is, technology is not a substitute for human connection. If your readers believe you’re there for them, they will become clients.