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 ›