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