If your goal for your law firm’s website is to increase traffic and attract new clients, you’ll want it to rank highly in search engine results. However, getting it to do so is often easier said than done. One of the best ways to improve your law firm website’s SEO performance is by publishing high-quality and informative blog content.
In this article, we’ll explain why content is crucial to SEO, go over best practices for writing legal blog content, and give examples of law firms whose blog posts earned huge increases in page views.
Why is Content So Important to SEO?
Search engines like Google want to provide search results that are valuable and relevant to the user. Therefore, when you regularly publish content that is helpful to your audience, your rankings will likely increase, and more people can find your website in their search results.
The phrase “content is king” exists for a reason. In terms of SEO, high-quality content is the number one factor Google uses when ranking search results. It’s important to note that while high-quality content can improve your site’s SEO performance, poor-quality content can do the opposite.
What does it mean for content to be “high quality”?
Producing high-quality content is about creating pages that increase user time on a page, lower bounce rate, and provide valuable content to the user. When determining the quality of search results, Google uses a principle known as “E-A-T,” which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
- Expertise refers to the author’s qualifications and credentials. If you are an attorney writing about an area in which you practice, your blog post will likely be deemed more credible by Google’s search quality raters.
- Authoritativeness refers to the overall industry reputation of the author and their website. When assessing your authority, Google search quality raters may look for reviews, references, recommendations by other attorneys, news articles, and other credible information you’ve published.
- Trustworthiness refers to the legitimacy, transparency, and accuracy of the website and its content. You can strive to prove trustworthiness in your blog posts by citing credible sources and providing factual information to your readers.
The more you incorporate E-A-T into your law firm’s marketing strategy, the better your website’s SEO performance will become.
Tips for Creating SEO-Friendly Blog Content
You could publish a new blog post every day and still not see an improvement in your site’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking, because while consistency is important, search engines like Google value quality of content over quantity. Below are a few pointers on how to create blog content search engines will love.
Use keywords to answer people’s legal questions more effectively.
Your blog posts should cater to your audience’s needs, and that means providing them with the answers they’re searching for in a direct and succinct manner. In contrast to practice area overview pages, blog posts allow you to answer specific legal questions people commonly ask. For example, if your firm focuses on divorce and family law, you could write a blog post that outlines what a person should do if their ex-spouse is failing to make child support payments.
How do you know which questions to answer? A great way to start is by performing a Google search of your targeted practice area's keywords (ex: “drug laws in Tennessee”) and seeing what autocomplete terms show up. Another place to look is the “People also ask” box found on the results page. Once you have an idea of what questions people are asking, you can start writing blog posts that answer them.
Be careful, however, not to oversaturate your post with keywords. This practice, known as “keyword stuffing,” makes content awkward to read and doesn’t provide a good user experience. Search engines know how to look for keyword stuffing and will likely penalize you for it by lowering your search results ranking.
Add alt text to your images.
Alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user's screen. Not only does alt text allow search engine crawlers to better index and rank your website, but it also makes your content accessible to more users, as it helps screen-reading tools describe images aloud to users who are visually impaired. Alt text should be a short, but descriptive sentence that includes the keywords you’re targeting. For example, “Man and woman seated at desk signing divorce papers.”
Write compelling meta descriptions.
Meta descriptions are found beneath the page titles on a SERP. These one- to two-sentence summaries give users and search engines an idea of what the page’s content is about. Meta descriptions show up in rich snippets, so including them can provide an accurate description of your website to search users.
Link to other pages on your website.
Incorporating internal links in your blog posts encourages users to explore your website in a way that feels natural to them. This tactic tends to keep people on your website longer and reduces bounce rates, which tells search engines like Google that your site is providing users with valuable information. When adding internal links, be sure to choose anchor text that is relevant to the linked page instead of an obvious callout. For example, if you want to include a link to your bankruptcy practice area page on one of your blog posts, link text that says something like, “experienced bankruptcy attorney,” rather than “click here.” That way, both the user and search engines will know what kind of page will open once they click on the linked text.
Regularly update your blog.
If you're looking to boost your law firm’s SEO performance, it’s not enough to publish a handful of blog posts and call it a day. You need to consistently update old posts and add new ones in order to increase your chances of earning a higher SERP ranking. This is because the more frequently you update your website, the more frequently search engines’ site crawlers will index it and re-arrange your site’s ranking.
Examples of Blog Posts That Led to Major SEO Improvements
We’ve discussed how the best legal blog posts establish credibility, improve site visibility, and generate high-quality leads. However, we also understand if, as an attorney, maintaining your law firm’s blog is not necessarily your top priority. Consider delegating the responsibility of your blog to a professional content-generation service so you can focus on running your firm and assisting your clients. Below are two examples of law firms whose outsourced blog posts resulted in serious improvements to their SEO performances.
MC Criminal Law
MC Criminal Law’s blog post titled “What to Expect at a Title IX Hearing” is the top result for a Google search of the term “title ix hearing.” They rank first nationwide, not even in just the firm’s city of Dallas, Texas. There are many reasons why this post performs so well, one being that it gives the reader the exact information they are looking for. The blog post breaks down what happens before, during, and after a Title IX hearing and mentions how an attorney can help. It also weaves industry-related and geographical keywords into the content in a seamless way and does a great job of breaking up content with section headings.
The Heritage Law Group
The Heritage Law Group, a real estate law firm in San Jose, California, had a blog post on easement disputes perform so well, the firm had it taken down because it was generating too many leads for them to keep up with. The firm’s website also contains valuable real estate law information that likely contributed to its blog post’s successful SEO performance.
Start Using Your Law Firm’s Blog as a Powerful SEO Tool
Don’t make the mistake of overlooking your blog’s potential. Use it to create SEO-friendly content that improves your website’s SERP ranking, stands out among your competitors, and earns you more leads. The sooner you start publishing high-quality blog posts, the sooner your firm can be discovered by more potential clients.