Effective lawyer blogging begins with understanding why it matters. Often, when faced with legal issues, people turn to search engines like Google for answers. They might lookup phrases like:
- How to get custody of my grandchild
- Can I sue for slander
- How do I know if I need a lawyer for a car accident
Blogging gives you a platform to answer questions that are commonly asked in your legal field. When you do, you draw in more website traffic, which can lead to new potential clients.
Here are our top lawyer blogging tips to help you engage more clients:
1) Choose the right keyword or phrase
2) Educate your target market
3) Include a call-to-action
4) Pay special attention to blog titles
5) Link internally
6) Promote posts more than once
7) Use reviews to your advantage
8) Choose quality over quantity
1) Choose the right keyword or phrase
Effective lawyer blogging begins with finding the right target keyphrase.
If you don’t have much experience with attorney SEO, keyword research can seem daunting, but there are many simple methods to finding great keywords and phrases for your blog posts.
Begin by thinking of frequently asked questions you get during consultations or over the phone from clients. Write down all the questions you can think of, and now you have a keyword bank to choose from for your blog posts.
To narrow those keywords further, or to find a better way of phrasing the question for online searchers, you can head to Google and see for yourself what kind of content is already available for people to access.
To show you how it works, let’s assume you’re a family lawyer located in Phoenix. A question you might get is, “how do I get custody?”
You already know that question is quite broad, and that there’s likely a lot of information out there to answer it.
To narrow down your final keyphrase, we’ll instead lookup “how to get custody a” and see what suggestions Google provides us with: Now you have a list of more specific keywords – but we’re not quite finished yet. We’ll continue by searching the keyphrase, “how to get custody of a child that is not mine” to see what articles have already been written. If there is a lot of high-quality content already, we’ll lookup the other suggestions until we find one with lower competition.
To get even more specific and target your content toward people in your area, it would be worthwhile to use location specific keywords.
The keyphrase “how to get custody of a child that is not mine in AZ” can help those who are in Arizona find your content, whereas using that keyphrase without a location can reach people located across the nation, in states and cities where you don’t practice law.
You want to reach people who can hire you, so by adding location markers like “in AZ” or “in Phoenix” to the ends of your keywords, you can make that happen.
Keywords that are location-specific also tend to have less competition overall, so your content is likely to rank higher and have a higher conversion rate.
2) Educate your target market
Lawyer blogging is most effective when you seek to educate your target market. By educating your ideal clients, you are serving them. And by serving clients preemptively, you build trust with them, which plays into the trust-driven business model.
This model of doing business states that client trust matters above all else. Businesses that are built on a basis of trust see higher retention and referral rates, which is better for business in the long term.
The goal of your blog should be to educate in order to build trust and connect with your ideal client.
Avoid using legal jargon in your posts. Instead, write to your target market. This will look different depending on the type of law you practice and who your ideal client is. You can try developing a client persona before writing, so every time you write, you are writing to the person who is most likely to hire you.
Answer these questions to create an ideal client persona:
- How old are they?
- What level of education have they completed?
- What is their socioeconomic status?
- What does their family look like?
- How do they consume information?
- What industry do they work in?
- What challenges or pain points do they face?
Once you have a client persona, you can write to it. Their age and education level will give you an idea of your blog reading level, while their family and industry information will give you an idea of what they care about, and their challenges and pain points will give you content ideas.
3) Include a call-to-action
At the end of your posts, always tell your reader what to do next.
Should they contact you for a free phone consultation? Leave a comment with a question? Get more information from another blog post? Spell it out for them so they know what to do with the information they’ve ingested.
Aside from including a written CTA at the end of each blog post, it’s valuable to have an obvious CTA sitewide – either in your blog’s sidebar or header. That way, no matter what post a potential client is reading, they can easily get in touch with you. After all, getting more clients is what an effective lawyer blogging strategy is all about.
4) Pay special attention to blog titles
Your lawyer blogging titles will be competing against all the other webpages targeting the same keyword. Your title needs to be unique in order to entice those looking for information to select it.
Before you begin blogging, conduct a search of your target keyphrase in an incognito browser to see what else is out there.
For example, here’s what it looks like to search for “how can a father get full custody in MO:” ;
5) Link internally
Throughout each blog post, you should have links to other blogs or pages you have written. This is a best practice for attorney SEO, but more than that, it gives potential clients more related information they can easily access.
For example, if you’re writing a blog post about how fathers can get full custody, you can link you your main family law page, or another blog post that goes into the different types of custody. Also take this opportunity to link to your contact page when appropriate.
6) Promote posts more than once
Have you ever heard, “if you build it, they will come?”
Lawyer blogging doesn’t exactly work that way. If you write it, and then market it, that’s when they will come to read it.
Right after a blog post is written is when people are most likely to market it. But, that post is usually relevant for months – if not years – afterwards. Don’t let your hard work sit in the archives. Promote it, even long after it was written, as long as it’s still relevant.
Here are some platforms you can use to promote your blog posts:
Google My Business
Social media
Include post links in emails
7) Use reviews to your advantage
Positive online reviews help build credibility and drive trust, which make potential clients who are reading your content more likely to hire you.
Readers will be able to rate your blog post content, making it more appealing for others to click on when you learn how to get Google rating stars on your blog posts, like you see here:
Boost your credibility and set you up for further success by learning how to get Google reviews.
To show you how it works, let’s go through a potential client’s thought process. Imagine your ideal client is faced with online defamation, and they want to know if they can sue for it.
So, they head to Google, and type in: “can I sue for slander on Facebook in AZ.” You, a lawyer based in Phoenix, have written an article that pops up with high-star rating, like the one you see above, so this potential client clicks on it.
They read it and find the information helpful, so they want to learn more about your firm. They search for your firm on Google to see what people have to say, and you’ve got over fifty positive Google reviews.
Can you picture how well that would go over with someone who has already found you to be a helpful source of information?
Get a Free Trial of our online review management tool and Manage your Reviews.
8) Choose quality over quantity
You’ll hear some so-called experts claim that you need to write five blog posts a week to be effective, but this isn’t the case.
An effective lawyer blogging strategy begins with quality, not quantity. If you can only commit to writing two great blog posts a month, then do that. It is much better for your ranking to create quality content, rather than write 100-200 half-hearted words five times a week.
You can stick to a quality-over-quantity strategy by planning out post topics several months in advance. This way, blogging won’t fall off your radar, and you’ll always have well-thought-out topics to write about when you have some spare time.