Law firms are beginning to realize there are more ways to get clients than just through paid ads. The Internet has opened up new avenues of digital marketing for law firms. One underdeveloped but growing strategy for law firms is content marketing.
Content marketing is an effective way for law firms to build a following and to get more clients consistently. Content marketing for law firms can take many forms depending on the platform and the content marketing strategy, but if done well, it’s an investment that can produce traffic for years.
Why Is Content Marketing for Law Firms Important?
Content marketing is creating articles, images, and other creative assets to drive traffic. Law firm content marketing helps lawyers connect with their audience and, over time, gets them leads by providing users with insightful information.
By helping people understand personal injury or criminal defense law, a law firm can build a reputation among people looking for law firm services.
Share on the internet in blog posts, social media posts, YouTube channels, newsletters, and more this content will get the attention and attract potential clients with the ultimate goal of increasing your caseload.
And the best part of content marketing is that it can be done without constant spending to remain relevant. A good blog post or article can stay relevant in search engines for years. Content marketing for law firms is an investment.
How Content Marketing for Lawyers Works
The process of making good content that’s optimized for search engines sounds simple but gets complicated quickly.
Creating content for your law firm website goes like this:
First, you brainstorm and analyze the market for keywords. Keywords is a search engine optimization term for search phrases. It’s what you type into a search engine. A content marketer usually looks for engaging content and competitors for ideas on what keywords to create content around.
After getting an idea of what to target, there comes keyword research. You use a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush to do keyword research. They’re similar SEO tools that tell you information related to searches. They tell you things like: how many people are searching for that keyword, who ranks near the top, how many backlinks the top results have, and how hard it will be to be a top-ranking search result.
These SEO tools are invaluable to doing good keyword research.
After doing market research to find content ideas and validating those ideas with keyword research, you must write the content. The goal is to write high-quality content around one or several keywords you discovered in your research. This way, when people Google those keywords and phrases, your article will show up near the top, and you’ll get organic search traffic.
Here too, there are help SEO tools you can use to ensure your content is in line and better than the content already showing up in search results. Two popular tools for creating high-quality content are SurferSEO and ClearScope. Both tools use AI to analyze what makes for valuable content. Generally, the tools take a keyword or a cluster of keywords as input, and then using that information helps you craft an article.
So now you’ve done your research and written a compelling article using the proper SEO tools, but you’re still not done. You need to publish the content to your law firm’s website. While it can be as simple as copying and pasting what you wrote and clicking publish, there are ways to optimize a post so Google and other search engines can find and deliver it more efficiently.
An important aspect of publishing your content is making sure that it follows Google’s ever-changing best practices. For the most part, you want to make sure your article loads quickly and is accessible.
A few ways to do that include using next-gen image formats. Large images like PNGs can slow down a site. You’ll also want to ensure all your images have alt tags and that your headers have a clear hierarchy. SEO tools like Yoast are helpful if you have a WordPress site. Once you’ve optimized the page as best you can, then you can hit publish.
As you can see, keeping up with on-site SEO best practices can be a full-time job. Content marketing for law firms can initially sound easy, but the industry is highly competitive since it’s such a great way to generate leads. If you’re interested in content marketing and not interested in doing all this work yourself, AttorneyClicks is here to help. Please reach out, and we can begin to help you with your content strategy.
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Understand Your Law Firm’s Potential Clients
A key to good content marketing is understanding your law firm’s target audience. It’s tempting to say my target audience is anyone with a legal question. Unfortunately, that’s too broad. And if your audience is too broad, you don’t have a target audience.
Instead, choose a target audience related to one of your firm’s areas of expertise. For example, a personal injury law firm should create content related to personal injury law; it would be even better if they created content about a specific area within personal injury law. The more specific, the better. People have specific problems, and you want to create content that solves those problems.
Why understanding your target audience is more important than ever
You want to have a strong understanding of who your target audience is when you’re doing keyword research. The internet has been around for a while, and most obvious Google searches are difficult to rank for. The organic traffic around those keywords is so competitive that any small or midsized law firm doesn’t have much of a chance showing up as a Google search result.
However, there are plenty of what are called long-tail keywords for which you can rank. A long-tail keyword is a less obvious keyword that usually has less volume, but it is much easier to rank for. At this point, it’s almost impossible to rank nationally for the search “personal injury lawyer.” However, you can rank fairly easily for “Grand Rapids personal injury lawyer specializing in medical malpractice.”
This is why it’s important to understand your audience and who you want to target. You need to learn where your audience lives, what type of law services they need, and how they look for those law services. Most older people use Google, but it could make sense to focus your efforts on social media posts if they’re younger.
Knowing your audience’s search intent and understanding your area’s legal industry can make you one of the great success stories.
What Content Should Law Firms Create?
There are so many different types of content these days. There’s video, long-form, short-form, and content for social media platforms. It can be difficult for a law firm to know where to direct their marketing efforts. The answer is you want your content marketing efforts to go toward content that will get you more potential clients.
This is why a sound content marketing strategy involves understanding your target audience. But another aspect of creating content is understanding what legal services you feel comfortable creating content for. The most effective content marketing strategy is the one you can do for years. Content marketing for law firms is not like traditional advertising. It requires consistency to build a reputation and for the search engines to send your website traffic.
A great place to start with content is with commonly asked questions. Understand your legal expertise and consider questions prospective clients will have. Law firm content should primarily aim to answer questions. Many people think legal content marketing revolves around sales copy. And while you want to sell your content, most of your law firm’s content marketing should be helpful.
The other form of content you can make are success stories. In your law firm content marketing, you can highlight success stories you’ve had, highlighting specific cases. People will be searching for related cases, so showing prospective clients that you have won cases relating to theirs is a great way to get more leads.
Explore Content Types to See What Resonates
SEO Optimized Articles
Video content
Podcasts
Short Form Video
Google Business Profiles
Interviews
Ebooks/Guides
Infographics
Case Studies
Why a Great Website is Crucial for Content Marketing for Law Firms
Google is always looking to give its users the best possible experience. This means they’re looking to give users content that’s on a fast and easy-to-use website.
Potential clients are looking for answers. And if they’re looking for legal services, it usually means that they’re stressed. Few people go looking for lawyers when they don’t need one. So it’s vital to make your law firm content as easy to read and as accessible as possible.
If you have an old or slow website, your content marketing strategies won’t be as effective.
It’s possible to make the most valuable content in the world, but not one of your potential clients will see it because your law firm has an old website.
A good website can be a major hurdle for law firm content marketing, as many law firms set up websites decades ago and need to remember about it. Creating a blog post about legal marketing content on a bad website won’t lead to successful content marketing.
But at AttorneyClicks, we can help. We have developed several law firm content marketing specialized website templates that look great and are fast. We work with law firms to update their websites so that the content they create or the content we create for them will perform and drive new website traffic and potential clients.
SEO Optimization
Law firm content marketing is sometimes oversimplified. The common advice is to generate some content ideas and then create engaging content around those ideas. However, it’s not that simple. Law firm marketing is competitive. And creating valuable blog posts isn’t enough. You need to optimize your web content for search results.
As a general rule of thumb, however long you spend writing a piece of legal content, you’ll spend half of that optimizing it for search results. This includes sourcing images, including relevant keywords and related keywords, optimizing the HTML on landing pages, and more, so you can appear near the top of search engine results.
SEO optimization can be tricky, and it’s always changing. It’s a time-consuming process, but it can be what sets you apart from other law firm content marketing.
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FAQ
What is content marketing for law firms?
Content marketing for law firms is creating articles, videos, social media posts, and various other forms of content to serve and attract potential clients. There are many forms of content to experiment with, so it’s important to understand your audience. It’s also important to ensure the law firm content is high quality and answers questions people are searching for.
What is an SEO at a law firm?
An SEO is a marketer specializing in law firm content marketing, specifically creating articles and blog posts optimized for search engines. Search engine optimization is creating content for search engines to show in their results.
SEO is one of the top ways for a law firm to get high-quality organic traffic which is more likely to generate leads.
What should be included in content marketing?
There are many different aspects of content marketing for law firms. But high-quality content answers a specific question thoroughly from a place of expertise in a way that is easy for the user to understand. This often includes having high-quality images and infographics and a fast website that’s easy to navigate.
How long does Content Marketing take to work?
Content marketing for law firms is an investment. Unlike traditional advertising, which works as soon as you start paying for it, content marketing can take months to produce traffic. Many factors determine search engine rankings, and they tend to reward content marketers with a history of consistently producing.
That’s why we call content marketing for law firms an investment. It’s something you’ll invest time and resources into that will eventually pay off in the future. In the long run, it is the more efficient way to get clients and build a brand. But it requires patience and a willingness to invest.