6 Essential Steps for Elevating Your Law Firm Through SEO Blogging

If you’re looking for a simple way to increase your law firm’s discoverability through Google without paying for ads, you should be focusing on search engine optimization. Firms can leverage SEO to improve their visibility and reach more potential clients who are actively searching for their services without spending thousands of dollars on advertising.

Why Blogging and SEO Are Important for Law Firms

While legal marketing utilizes many of the same content marketing strategies as other industries, there are unique challenges that come with designing a marketing plan for a law firm. Those challenges multiply if your firm limits its practice to just one state or jurisdiction.

SEO allows you to target the people who are searching for your services in your area. By using keywords — terms your ideal client uses in their Google searches — in your website copy and blog posts, you can make your website easier to find. If you follow SEO best practices, your website pages can consistently rank at the top of search results allowing your client to click through to your website before going to your competitor’s site.

Many law firms make the mistake of making their website look and sound like a digital brochure. It highlights the practice areas and attorneys and pushes the website visitor to call or schedule a consultation. While this is fine if the person who lands on your website already wants to work with you, it will not sell the person who is carefully vetting their future attorney online.

Instead, you need a website filled with both authoritative and educational content that can help potential clients understand who you are and how you can help them. By publishing blog posts optimized for search engines, you can demonstrate to prospective clients that you are knowledgeable in your practice area, trustworthy, and experienced enough to help them navigate their legal challenges.

A Simple Guide to SEO and Blogging

Now that you know why SEO and blogging are important components of your law firm’s marketing strategy, continue reading for a step-by-step guide to building out an SEO strategy that works.

1. How to Choose Your Blog Topics

Blogging for law firms can be relatively simple. One way to source topics is to compile a list of frequently asked questions from your clients and target audience.

By answering these questions in your blog posts and using the appropriate SEO keywords (more on this below), you can reach potential clients who are typing those same questions into Google.

You can also write blogs about relevant legal updates, firm news, awards and accolades, or other topics that your target audience may find interesting. Your blog is a place to demonstrate your legal knowledge and gain the trust of potential clients before they book a consultation with you.

2. Conduct Keyword Research

Next, research keywords- strings of one to three words commonly used in searches – to ensure those blog posts are easily found on Google. By placing these keywords in your blog posts and website copy, it signals to Google that your content is focused on these terms.

Many people over-complicate SEO, but it is as simple as showing Google that your content is what users are searching for.

You can find the right keywords by investing in an SEO tool like SEMRush, or start typing questions and topics into Google. The dropdown in the search bar will recommend relevant common searches those are the phrases and keywords that you want to include in your posts to ensure that they show up at the top of search engine results.

Another place where you want to include these keywords, especially if they include your location, is on your Google Business Page. For example, if you’re promoting a personal injury lawyer in Charleston, SC, you might target the keyword “Charleston Personal Injury Lawyer” include the same keyword on your website, about page, in blog posts, across social media.

3. Consistently Create New Content

Google prioritizes content from websites that are consistently updated. To start, create an attainable  content calendar.  

Aiming for one to two posts per month. As you increase your marketing efforts, up the frequency of your blog posts- uploading at the same time each month so your schedule is predictable for Google.

4. Include Internal and External Links

A key component of an SEO strategy is including links within your blog posts and website pages. In every blog post, you should include a link to a relevant attorney bio page, the practice page, or additional resources.

By connecting those pages, you not only demonstrate to search engines that you are an expert in that area, but also encourage website visitors to seamlessly navigate from one page to another so they can learn more about your firm.

In addition, including links to credible external sources such as relevant statutes can improve the overall credibility of your blog post.

5. Promote Your Content

It can take anywhere from 3-6 months to see results from SEO and blogging. In the meantime, share links to your blog posts across social media sites, and with your email lists, and look for opportunities to write for other publications to help drive traffic to your website.

Writing articles for relevant websites can help you increase your overall SEO. These articles should include links back to your homepage, attorney bio pages, or even other blog posts.

Google will be more likely to push your content to the top of search results if it is already getting a lot of traffic. This signals that your content is valuable to readers and Google’s primary goal is to make it easy for users to find what they are looking for.

6. Monitor Your Website’s Performance and Adjust Your Strategy

Once you update your website with relevant keywords and start blogging consistently, you’ll need to monitor your analytics. You can use Google Search Console to see how much organic traffic is going to your website and Google Analytics to see how much traffic your social media and email marketing efforts are driving.

On Google Search Console, you can see the terms that people are searching for on Google that bring them to your website. The best thing you can do from here is to create even more content around those topics. By sharing new blog posts and linking them to the landing page or blog posts that are bringing in traffic from those search terms, you can make it easier for website visitors to find your new content and spend more time on your website.

SEO and blogging are strategies that can constantly be refined and improved to generate better results. Once you start blogging consistently, you will be amazed by how much more free and targeted traffic you drive to your website.

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