Blogging for Lawyers: 10 Tips for Starting Your Legal Blog

Law blogging has become an essential part of law firm marketing in the modern age. Blogging allows lawyers to showcase their expertise, build relationships with potential clients, and increase their visibility online.

Through legal blogging, lawyers can demonstrate their knowledge of current legal issues, provide updates on relevant legal topics, share industry insights, and provide helpful advice to their readers. 

Additionally, legal blogging can effectively drive organic traffic to a law firm’s website and increase its search engine ranking. With more people turning to the internet for advice and answers, including legal ones, a high-quality blog with exciting content can be an excellent way for attorneys to reach potential clients and establish themselves as authorities in their field.

Without real legal blogging efforts, you lose countless opportunities to engage with prospective clients, as well as potential website traffic that instead goes to your competitors.

In the guide, you will: 

• Understand why a lawyer blog is important
• Get 10 tips on how to start a lawyer blog 
• Learn about the blogs for lawyers and about lawyers
• Find out how to maximize the power of blogging for attorneys

Why Is a Lawyer Blog Important?

Lawyers new to digital marketing firms sometimes ask, ‘Is blogging necessary for lawyers?’ If you have wondered if you need a blog, you are not the only attorney to do so. Our law attorney clients have witnessed firsthand the transformational power of law blogs. Below, we explain three reasons why blogging for lawyers is important. 

1. Law Firm Blogging Helps Your SEO

By regularly providing high-quality attorney website content, a law firm can improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and increase its online presence. Law blogging allows you to target specific keywords relevant to your practice area, which can help generate more web traffic and leads.

There are numerous benefits of engaging in legal blogging while leveraging the power of search engine optimization (SEO).

1. It can help law firms rank higher in search engine results for keywords related to their practice areas and services. 
2. It helps keep readers informed and gives businesses a chance to demonstrate their legal expertise in the legal field.
3. Legal blogs provide a platform for lawyers to get more user time on their websites. 
4. It can help to build links, both inbound and backlinks. 
5. It helps draw attention to your website and services, which can lead to increased web business recognition and growth.
6. It allows your law firm marketing team and readers to share content on various social media platforms.

2. Legal Blogs Attract New Clients

Thanks to the magic of SEO, every post you publish on your lawyer blog is an opportunity to bring new traffic to your website. A lawyer blog can attract potential new clients in a few ways: 

1. Your blog can create a culture supporting your legal services: For example, if you are an estate planning attorney, your blog can offer information and resources for preparing for retirement and leaving a lasting attorney. If you are a dangerous products lawyer, you can create a culture of consumer advocacy.
Examples of blog post topics to establish thought leadership in the legal industry include: 

• The Five Most Important Questions to Ask a Personal Injury Lawyer In Florida;
• Three Possible Defenses to Assault and Battery Charges in California; 
• Everything You Need to Know About Recent Significant Changes to Divorce Law in New York; 
• Three Critical Things To Do To Prepare For Your Bankruptcy Case. 

2. Your blog can represent case studies: Although your lawyer blog is about selling your legal services, it should not seem this way from the visitor's perspective. From settlements and trial victories to volunteering in the community, your blog can allow prospective clients to get to know you. 

3. Law Firm Blogs Build a Trust and a Professional Image

Through educational and informative articles, firms can demonstrate their experience in their respective fields and establish themselves as reliable sources of legal advice. Studies actually show that 81% of U.S. customers trust information from blogs.

Additionally, building relationships through blog comments and social media interactions will also help create a sense of familiarity with the audience.

In addition, Google's Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) criteria come into play when optimizing search engine results. Law firms can use their blog posts to prove their expertise by featuring relevant case studies and success stories, building backlinks to other reputable websites, and ensuring the content is accurate and up to date. 

What actions can you take to make your legal blog more E-A-T-friendly?

1. Publish quality content on your legal blog relevant to the top and provide a unique perspective. 
2. Include accurate citations of sources and links to trusted websites, such as government websites and authoritative legal databases, when referencing legal information.
3. Make sure that your blog writers are qualified professionals in their fields. Include bios, backlinks to relevant qualifications, and contact information for each writer. 
4. Link to authoritative websites when citing information or making claims. 
5. Utilize social media to promote your blog and increase visibility. 
6. Increase user engagement by incorporating polls, surveys, or other interactive elements into your blog posts. 
7. Monitor user comments on blog posts and promptly address any potential inaccuracies in your content.
8. Create a page dedicated to your blog’s E-A-T score, which includes credentials, contact information, and other information about the blog. 
9. Regularly update your blog with fresh content and include an RSS feed for subscribers.
10. Include an ‘About Us’ page on your blog that explains who is writing the content and their qualifications.
11. Build relationships with other legal blogs and websites to increase visibility and reach.

How to Start a Lawyer Blog: Blogging Tips for Lawyers

If you're new to blogging for lawyers, you are not navigating uncharted waters. There are thousands of legal blogs, including 4,500 in the ABA Law Journal Directory. Starting your legal blog is as simple as:

• Picking a descriptive name for your blog that makes sense to your audience
• Coming up with ideas for content
• Researching relevant keywords
• Writing your legal blog, sharing insight, and explaining legal concepts
• Determining an optimum publishing frequency and creating a calendar
• Selecting a blog publishing platform like WordPress or Wix
• Publishing your content and promoting it
• Measuring and analyzing your law blogging efforts and adjusting as necessary.

Below we delve into 10 blogging tips for lawyers for getting started creating a successful one:

Tip 1: Choose Your Legal Blogging Niche

Your blog will likely center around the types of law you practice or otherwise related to the kinds of cases that you handle. But you can, and should, make your blog even more specific - to a local area or a micro practice area.

Every blog you publish will support your initiative and goals. By zeroing your blog on one specific area, or one area of a demographic area, you are establishing yourself as a subject matter expert in town. This has SEO benefits and conversion benefits for your website visitors. 

Tip 2: Communicate With Your Audience

Creating relevant and interesting content is important to ensure your audience is engaged. There are several ways to keep your blog interesting and informative. FAQs are an excellent starting point, as they allow you to address common questions and concerns your readers may have by providing basic and concise information. You can also use your blog to share legal news, such as:

• A new court decision or state laws that could affect your clients. 
• An ongoing court trial involving famous personalities. 

You can also use legal opinions to explain complicated topics in a more digestible format and share your insight on a case: ongoing or closed. Consider creating an ‘Ask a Lawyer’ series, where your team answers reader-submitted questions through written interviews.

Tip 3: Review Your Content Ideas Through Keyword Research

Keyword research is essential to any content creation process because it helps you understand which keywords and phrases your target audience uses to search for information. This knowledge can help you create content that more accurately meets the needs of your readers, helping you rank higher in search engine results. 

How do you go about it? Just add your keyword to tools like Semrush or Ahref, and you will get suggestions like ‘personal injury law firm.’ These tools rank the keywords in ascending or descending order based on criteria including: 

1. The keyword volume represents the typical monthly number of searches for a particular keyword over 12 months. The result can be displayed in ascending or descending order using the sort icon.
2. Keyword difficulty indicates the extent to which it would be hard for a website to get an organic ranking in Google's top 10 results for the given keyword. High rankings will be more difficult to obtain when the percentage is higher.
3. Cost Per Click, or CPC, is the average amount that advertisers pay in US dollars when a user clicks on one of their ads as a result of a specific keyword, e.g., ‘personal injury law firm.’

Some display the competitive density and the number of URLs shown in organic search results for the specified keyword.

Furthermore, you can use keyword research to create a cluster-pillar content system, which involves creating clusters of related keywords around specific topics and using those as the foundation for deeper pillar content. By doing this, you can ensure that your content works together to strengthen your law firm SEO efforts and provide a better overall experience for readers.

Tip 4: Create Cluster and Pillar Content Topics

Pillar content and cluster content categorization involve writing a main, comprehensive blog post around a subject area (pillar content) and then writing supporting smaller, supporting blog posts about related topics (clusters). You can do this for any area of law and any practice area. A huge benefit of having a large volume of content about a specific practice area will establish your authority on the subject. 

Example: Corporate Law Firm Legal Blog Covering Tech Startups

The above fictional example of topic ideas shows how legal blog topics can be related to (and link to) one main topic. The possibilities for cluster topics are endless, and you can add to your topics regularly. 

Cross-linking is a key component of your blogging for lawyers' content marketing strategy. After you write your blog post, spend time adding links. Aim for both external links and internal links. 

Cross Linking With Internal Links 

Internal links, sometimes called inbound links, are links to pages or posts inside your website, such as: 

• Practice area pages
• Case results pages 
• Client testimonials pages 
• Contact Us/Consultation request pages. 

You want to keep your website visitors on your website as long as possible. Once your page is indexed, your target audience can find it within seconds of typing in a search term in Google. Internal backlinks also help your website get crawled and indexed faster. 

And suppose you want to link your website to other websites that you can use to direct visitors to other sources of information related to what you have on your blog. In that case, that is where the next part comes in. 

Cross Linking With External Links 

Cross Linking With External Links

You should link to websites that rank high and are related to your content topics. For example, suppose you are an Ohio personal injury lawyer. In that case, you might link to the Ohio Revised Code section about Ohio's statute of limitations. A California criminal defense lawyer blog about burglary defenses may link to the California Penal Code. 

External links add to the value of your website. If Google sees that you're linking to other websites that rank high, it will look at your website more favorably. It should go without saying - do not link to other competitors' websites. 

Tip: Insert links as naturally as possible - don't overwhelm your website visitors with links in every sentence. About 3-5 links per 1,000 words of content is a good aiming point. 

Tip 5: Make a Posting Schedule for Your Legal Blog

Google likes websites that are constantly adding new, unique, relevant content. You should also go back and update your old posts, as it is no secret that Google crawls websites looking for updated web pages. If you think no one is reading your 3-year-old posts, Google is still crawling them. Fortunately, you don't have to be a one-person show. Your blog can have multiple authors, or you can have ghostwriters craft quality content for you.

Tip 6: Write engaging Legal posts

There are so many laws and regulations, and the language and terminology used can be difficult to understand. However, you can follow some simple tips to ensure your legal blog posts are engaging and informative. 

1. Create compelling headlines that pique your reader's interest by applying the suggestions of headline analyzers.
2. Focus on the key points – each post should contain detailed information about a particular issue or problem if you have multiple topics to cover, break them up into separate posts for clarity. 
3. Use visuals like pictures, diagrams, tables, or infographics to break up the text in the piece. The post will be simpler to read and more visually appealing.
4. Use simple language that is easy to understand. Avoid using overly technical terms and jargon since readers may not be familiar with them.
5. Incorporate keywords and phrases relevant to the topic and audience to make the post more search engine friendly.

Tip 7: Use SEO Tools to Write Better Attorney Blogs

Below we have listed our favorite apps for writing, editing, and optimizing legal blog content: 

Hemingway App

Below we have listed our favorite apps for writing, editing, and optimizing legal blog content: 

The Hemingway App is the best-kept content editing secret that's not secret. The web version of this app is free (there are no ads and no login required), or a desktop version is available for $19.99. The Hemingway App allows you to copy and paste your content and quickly determine the following:

• Word count 
• Readability level 
• Number of adverbs (with a goal based on number of words). 
• Instances of passive voice 
• Hard to read sentences
• Very hard to read sentences 

The editing tool is the brainchild of writer brothers Adam and Ben Long. They say the tool they created is inspired by Ernest Hemingway's short, declarative sentences.

Surfer SEO

If you want to get a target keyword on the first page of google, Surfer SEO is our go tool to plan your content - and optimize it. It provides recommendations for keywords to use (and how often), ideal word count, ideal paragraph count, and even the number of images to use. If you want to bridge the gap from a content idea to dominating search engine results pages (ahead of your stiff competition), don't leave this off your list.

Ahrefs

Another popular SEO tool, Ahrefs main strength is in analyzing backlinks, including other law firms who are your competition. Ahrefs also is great for:

• Content topic research (a great place to start writing)
• Keyword research 
• SEO auditing

If you sign up for Ahrefs, maximize the program's benefit by taking the Ahrefs certification class. It's about a day's worth of material, but very helpful in understanding many terms and metrics, including URL rating, domain rating, CTLD distribution, keyword difficulty, and more traffic potential.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a cloud-based typing assistant, which many writers use as an editing tool. It takes good content and makes it great - and checks your work for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. It also has a plagiarism detector, which is excellent if you're checking or editing another writer's work.

It is so much more than spell check, as it uses artificial intelligence to suggest an appropriate replacement for errors, and allows you to customize your desired style, tone, and context. If you write in Google Docs, a browser extension is available. 

Grammarly has a freemium model - there is a free version available, but most writers agree that the premium version is well worth the investment. Monthly, quarterly, and annual plans are available, with significant cost savings offered for the annual plan. 

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is an easily installable tool to measure information about your audience. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be found in three main sections:

• A - Acquisition - Data to understand where your audience is coming from. 
• B - Behavior - Data to understand how your audience interacts with your blog, such as which pages they land on, and which pages they are on when they exit your website. 
• C - Conversions - Data to understand how many of your website visitors are meeting your goals, such as filling out a case evaluation form. 

In our, and most digital marketers', opinion, using Google Analytics to measure and track your results is a must. 

Tip 8: Get High-Quality Backlinks for Your Attorney Blog

Backlinks are incoming links from other websites to a page on your website and help improve its search engine rankings and organic traffic. They also help boost your search engine rankings and make it easier for people to find your blog.

To maximize the effectiveness of your link-building efforts, it is essential to follow these targeted strategies to generate quality links from authoritative websites.

1. Develop relationships with other legal professionals and websites. Reach out to them and provide quality content that they can link to. 
2. Creating resource pages with valuable content can help attract more external links from other websites.
3. Leverage social media to promote your blog and build links. 
4. Reach out to influencers in the legal industry and ask for a link exchange. 
5. Utilize guest blogging for law firms as an opportunity to get more exposure for your legal blog. 
6. Take advantage of local SEO opportunities like directory listings, citations, and reviews. 
7. Use natural link-building techniques like broken link building and link reclamation. 

Tip 9: Promote Your Content Far and Wide

Promoting your law firm's blog posts is a great way to spread awareness of your services and increase traffic to your website. It exposes your blog to more people. You just have to add the link or an excerpt to the post or content and a CTA button to drive clients back to your blog. 

There are a variety of methods to promote your content far and wide. 

1. Social media: Many individuals use various social media platforms, and your potential client may be scrolling through one. Create accounts on popular platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and use them to share your content with a wide audience. You should also consider using targeted ads to reach specific audiences.

Also, don't forget to use relevant hashtags to reach more users. Leverage relevant hashtags and keywords to maximize exposure and interact with other users in order to build relationships and increase engagement.

2. Email campaign: Sending out emails to your subscribers or customers is another great way to promote your content. Create and segment your contacts list and create emails tailored to each contact's interests. Include links to your blog with excerpts introducing the topic in the emails and encouraging readers to forward it to their acquaintances.

Ensure the email's subject line is engaging and has a compelling call to action. The language should be straightforward and use attractive visuals to break the message while drawing readers’ attention. 

3. Guest posting: Even though it has been mentioned several times above, it is worth putting it in this section again. Reach out to bloggers and website owners who share legal content similar to yours and offer to write guest posts for them. While writing, add important and working links relevant to the topic you are writing on to the post. 

Not only will this help you reach more people, but it will also give you a chance to establish yourself as an expert in your field. 

4. Influencer marketing: Very few people can locate your blog or are patient enough to go through those lengthy legal posts on search engine results pages (SERPs) to find a blog! This is where legal influencers come in. Work with influencers in your legal niche to promote your content.

Reach out to influencers with a large following, make posts about blog content, and see if they would be willing to share your content or collaborate with you on a project.

Tip 10: Measure Your Success

Google Analytics

Yes, we mentioned Google Analytics in Tip 6 related to improving your lawyer blog production process, but GA really is important when it comes to measuring your blog's success. To use Google Analytics, you must create an account and add a tracking code to your website. Once set up, you can use Google Analytics to track metrics such as page views, time on site, bounce rate, and more. To measure the success of your legal blog, you need to set up goals and track key performance indicators (KPIs).

For example, 

• You can create goal conversions for newsletter signups or track page views to measure the number of people accessing your blog. 

• You can also set up custom segments to examine user behavior, such as the types of devices visitors use or the countries they are from.

• You can view reports and dashboards to gain insights into your blog's performance and make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts.

Blogs About Lawyers and for Lawyers

There are various legal blogs in the legal field, both about lawyers and lawyers. With topics ranging from the latest legal developments to advice for managing a small practice to tips for passing the bar exam, there is a blog for every lawyer. Many blogs also provide valuable insights from experienced attorneys and other legal professionals.

Additionally, some of these blogs offer resources such as checklists and sample documents that can be used in the legal arena. They may often feature interviews with leading lawyers in various fields, allowing readers to gain knowledge from the experts.

Maximize the Power of Blogging for Lawyers

From this article, you might have gotten a grasp of how powerful a tool for lawyers' blogging is. Simply put, it allows them to share valuable information, such as relevant legal news, tips, and advice while establishing themselves as legal experts in their field.

Blogging for law firms is easy and cost-effective for building relationships with readers, creating a positive reputation, and increasing web traffic. 

However, if you are still unsure of how to maximize the power of blogging for your law firm or need professional help, an experienced law firm digital marketing agency, Grow Law Firm, can help.

As a comprehensive digital marketing agency for lawyers, we have years of experience in legal marketing for law firms. We are ready to go to work for your law practice. Our internet marketing experts can design your law firm blog, generate valuable content for your blog posts, help your law firm website rank higher in search engines, and get the leads you need.