Lawyers are a smart group. They are educated and have extensive knowledge on a range of industries and they have a wealth of intellectual insights from which to draw. But boosting your Law Firm SEO requires writing the kind of comprehensive stories that non-lawyers can easily understand.
That means writing like a journalist.
No, you aren’t delving into salacious topics or slapping on sticky headlines. If you truly want to improve your law firm SEO (search engine optimization), your content has to be accurate, fair, timely, credible – and well-written. Every journalist knows their main objective is to serve their audience. It’s the same for improving law firm SEO.
For lawyers, that means approaching your content marketing strategy from a perspective of thought leadership, as opposed to advertising. Read More ›
Spring has sprung, which means it’s the perfect opportunity to dust off your law firm content strategy and implement some fresh new ideas to your SEO approach.
Too often, we see law firms that keep the same stale content on their site for months or even years. In order to keep your SEO (search engine optimization) at high levels, you have to provide readers with content that is not only relevant and thorough, but timely and accurate.
If the information on your site is dated, readers will pick up on it pretty quickly, and you’ll pay for it with clicks – and new leads. The good news is, there are some fairly easy ways to boost your law firm content so that you can avoid some of the most common pitfalls. Read More ›
Strong law firm content marketing must provide value to its readers. It needs to engage, inform and deliver an effective call to action.
Unfortunately, it has become tempting for a fair number of content providers – including those in the legal arena – to use bait-and-switch tactics. These tactics are intended to lure readers and garner clicks, the hope being that this will boost the site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and push the site higher up into the ratings of Google, Bing, Yahoo and the others.
There are two problems with this. The first is that when you cheat your audience of the kind of meaningful content you promise, they are unlikely to stay long or to return. That hurts your SEO “bounce rate” – the rate at which readers “bounce” off your page, which is going to ratchet down your SEO score. And beyond that, Google and other search engines have become increasingly deft at identifying “click bait” and “bait-and-switch” techniques, which are sometimes referred to as a kind of “black hat trick” in the SEO world. It’s not going to work as well as it once did, and the goal of search engines is to make sure it doesn’t work at all. Read More ›
Employment prospects for new law school graduates have been abysmal in recent years. Newer and smaller law firms may wonder why they should invest in legal marketing when budgets continue to be tight.
The answer is: You can’t afford not to invest in legal marketing. It’s one of the best ways you have to carve out an edge against larger, more established firms. In particular, online legal marketing is one of the best tools to boost your search engine ranking and online profile, which in turn helps expand your potential client base.
Plus, there is evidence the job outlook for new lawyers is improving. The American Bar Association reported in 2014 that 60 percent of all law school graduates that year were employed in full-time, long-term legal jobs that required bar passage. More recently, a study by the National Association for Law Placement revealed major law firms extended job offers to 95 percent of all summer interns.
Still, competition remains high for smaller law firms.
At Law Firm Ghost Writer, we offer legal marketing in the form of quality legal blog writing that has proven a major SEO benefit to law firms of all sizes. By organically raising your online search engine ranking with exceptional, recurrent content, we can help your law firm achieve its goals. This may include gearing up for growth or simply maintaining the client base you have.
Some law firms make the mistake of assuming that if they do good work, clients will automatically come to them. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true. In order to build your reach, you have to increase visibility.
The Pew Research Center revealed in a January 2014 study that 87 percent of adults use the internet, 90 percent of adults in the U.S. own a phone and 58 percent use a smartphone. Those figures continue to increase.
If you want to get your firm’s name in front of your target audience, you have to increase your online standing. This will require online legal marketing, and the most reliable way to do this is with continuous legal blog writing.
Another critical element of your website that probably needs attention is the copy contained throughout. It’s the first thing people see, probably before they even look at your blog. It should be polished and professional, yet easy to read and understand. It should offer insight and depth and give your target audience options to further explore topics of interest right on your site.
For example, if you are a personal injury lawyer, you might have a single page dedicated to the types of injury cases you take on. But it’s much more beneficial for your target audience – and for search engine rankings – if you offer a drop-down menu that breaks down each of these individual areas. So you might have one page each for topics like car accidents, bicycle accidents, premises liability and product liability.
You can take it another step further by delving even deeper into these topics. For example, your car accident content may offer links to content that specifically applies to drivers who have been rear-ended, struck by a large truck or hit by an uninsured motorist.
The bottom line is that in order to improve your odds of success in an increasingly competitive legal landscape, you have to provide frequent, quality content that addresses the needs and expectations of your target audience. We can help.
Contact Law Firm Ghost Writer to learn more about our legal marketing and legal blog writing services at 1.888.901.3939.
Attorneys are skilled researchers, writers and orators who craft brilliant legal arguments to win their cases. But when it comes to internet marketing for lawyers, producing regular online content can be more of a challenge.
For many, it’s not that they aren’t capable of writing the material. It’s usually that they don’t have time. The people they employ don’t have time. And even if they did, the learning curve for search engine optimization (SEO) is substantial.
Legal blogging, content writing and internet marketing for lawyers must be consistent to work well with search engine algorithms. Material has to be fresh, relevant and insightful. If you only post a blog or two a month, you probably aren’t going to see satisfying results. You need to create content that’s worth sharing. Read More ›
There was a time when law firm blogging was considered option. Today, it is an essential marketing tool.
The reality is the tech generation expects free information up front. A blog is one of the best ways to do this, and it’s imperative to be able to reach potential clients wherever they are and whenever they need it.
Further, updating your blog post regularly with quality, relevant content is going to organically boost your search engine optimization (SEO). That means you will show up higher in the search results for your target area on platforms like Google, Bing and Yahoo. The people who are looking for your services in your area are going to be able to find you much faster – and hopefully before they eye the competition. Read More ›
Years ago, if someone was injured in a traffic accident or accused of a serious crime, they would turn to their trusty Yellow Pages and flip through to find a listing for a local attorney. They might even look for a certain attorney specifically by name after having heard a radio advertisement or a quote within a local newspaper.
Those days are gone. The internet has become a resource for a whole host of answers, and it’s usually the first resource people tap when they are looking for a law firm. Yes, people still rely on word-of-mouth, to an extent. However, a survey conducted last year of 1,500 people who recently hired a lawyer revealed almost 20 percent found their attorney via search engines. That’s compared to 13 percent who got the name from a friend, and less than 2 percent who found legal help via the phone book. Another recent study indicated there are 6.1 million searches in the U.S. every month for the keyword “lawyers.”
If your law firm has any hope of edging out the competition, you must have a strategy. Read More ›
When I was in college, my layout and design class was the first to switch to Adobe and away from old-school pagination. We got high-speed Internet in the dorms at The Ohio State University in 2000 (about the same time OSU went to court to formalize that ‘The’ in its name). We were cutting edge, and among the first places in Ohio to have it (high-speed Internet, not Proper articles of grammar).
During my first year at my first newspaper job — Mansfield News Journal — we got our first website. So you can say I started working in newspapers before they had websites, if only by a changing of the seasons.
Old-school newspaper paste-up pagination to Adobe, dial-up Internet to smartphones, yellow pages to a robust Internet marketing strategy being vital to the success of law firms large and small.
A dozen years, give or take.
I’ve now been writing legal blogs since 2006, or more than 7 years, which likely dates me as among the oldest law firm website writers still going…and going…
Which brings me to my recent post Evolution of Legal Blogs Continues to Impact SEO, and how what we do today resembles very little of what we were doing in the dark ages of 2009.
Pedestrian safety tips are no longer going to cut the mustard. We made the change several years ago but so many writing legal blogs continue to do the same old thing, while expecting positive results.
It’s the rest of the world that has moved on.
An old associate doing SEO work in Miami called this morning to say as much. He was looking for court cases and other shareable content. He wants what Google wants, which is to provide his client with something worthwhile to say. In some cases, that might include a mainstream health and safety study, or information from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And it’s not to say basic safety advice — from Halloween to Fourth of July — is not still a sharable, viable interaction with your audience. But it does mean that telling me a motorist is ACTUALLY 23 times more likely to get into an accident while distracted EACH AND EVERY year, is likely, blessedly, mercifully, dead on arrival.
Today we use Justia US Law, Google News Alerts and other resources to stay abreast on the latest topics of use to our clients and their audience. It’s what we want, it’s what our client wants and it’s what Google wants. Because if you’re going to write, you should first start out by having something to say.
When it comes to hiring professional legal blog writers and website content writers, just look for the
I had a chance to compare some of our legal blogs published in 2009 v. 2014 and the comparison is startling.
When we started in 2007, you could publish a legal blog and see it three times on page 1 of Google — the blog, the homepage and the blogfeed often all returned as separate results.
Ahh, but those were the good old days.
Looking back, those blogs often said very little and did very little, other than to unabashedly plug the firm. While confidentiality and duplicative content issues keep me from republishing those blogs here, you can see by the screen captures to the right that the old-school blogs contained relatively little text and had half-a-dozen links back to the firm.
By contrast, today’s blogs and articles produced by our legal blog writers are 500-750 words, Copyscape tested at least 85 percent original, and focus on informing the reader as a way to bring traffic to the firm.
People always ask us: “How do we show up in Google search results?” And we always say: “Post regular content updates to your site and have something to say.”
Cheap website content for lawyers is not hard to find. We can point you toward several resources where it’s as little as $10 page. If you have a $10 law firm, we suggest you buy $10 legal content.
In other cases, a law firm gets a quote for $25 or $30 legal blogs and inquires about whether we will match those rates. On at least three occasions, they have sent me samples from these content farms, and I have tested them only to find they are being sold word-for-word to multiple law firms. In other words, law firms are paying for content to improve SEO, and the discount writing houses are selling them duplicative content that will be ignored by search engines and may even result in their site ranking being reduced!
And these are the blogs these companies are sending to lawyers as sample work product!
Again, people always ask us: “How do we show up in Google search results?” And we always say: “Post regular content updates to your site and have something to say.”
If your legal blog writers are busy plagiarizing themselves, why in the world would a search engine choose your firm’s “content” as desirable to display to their customer, who is conducting a web search in the hopes of finding worthwhile information?
If you want to know you are getting what you are paying for — if you want Internet marketing results you can count on in 2014 — look for the
Top executives from Facebook, Ford and Adobe met in Las Vegas this week at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. The interplay offered a fascinating look into the dynamic growth of the marketing industry in the digital age.
Those using 2014 to get serious about their law firm Internet marketing efforts can take heart from the general consensus: Despite a decade of rapid expansion and forced change upon the more traditional mediums of print and television, online marketing remains in its infancy — a wide-open opportunity with significant growth and return on investment for those who continue to invest and innovate.
The conversation among the three executives and Fortune Magazine was particular interesting. Carolyn Everson of Facebook, said the company has barely scratched the service of revenue possibilities. Specifically, “multi-touch attribution,” or credit for brand recognition or other benefits of Facebook content or advertising that, in conjunction with another advertising platform, such as television, induces customers to act. Meanwhile, Ford’s Jim Farley and Adobe’s Ann Lewnes, spoke about the challenges of transitioning to digital media. Even Adobe, which has long been a technology company, has struggled in finding the proper personnel and online marketing strategies for the 21st Century.
Internet Legal Marketing Requires Comprehensive Approach
Multi-touch attribution is of interest in Internet marketing for lawyers for a number of reasons and is something we often counsel attorneys about when developing marketing plans. Historically, firms would use metered phone numbers in yellow page or billboard advertising and track calls back to the firm. Google analytics and other advances have changed the Internet legal marketing landscape and often show potential client traffic from legal blog writing or website content, even when an attorney is unsure of positive results. Billboard advertising, for instance, may help with name recognition in search results. Or a client may see a commercial on television and use a law firm’s website as validation before calling for an appointment. Is that potential attributable to billboards or the Internet?
The answer, of course, is both.
Ford’s Farley brought up another important point, according to CNN Money: Brand managers too often want to play it safe when introducing a new product, and so rely heavily on TV buys and other traditional forms of media. They know the DVR and other media advances make those buys worth a fraction of their former value. But they also know it’s the safe play and so the resulting marketing plan is inferior and return on investment lags as a result.
When it comes to your Internet legal marketing effort we are here to help. Just look for the
