Imagine you're a busy law firm partner with a higher caseload than a skyscraper. You know you need a killer website to attract new clients, but who has the time to create all that content? You're already billing 60 hours a week, and the last thing you want to do is spend your precious time writing blog posts or tweaking web pages.
How can you create effective law firm website content that drives billable hours without sacrificing your already limited time?
Don't worry! There are methods to improve law firm website content utilized by top law firms, and this article will explore some of the best ones. We'll reveal the top law firms' techniques and strategies to create website content in clear and concise language.
Why Does Good Content for Lawyer Websites Matter?
When visitors navigate your website, they seek more than just legal expertise. They yearn for a sense of reassurance, a glimpse into your firm's values, and a demonstration of your unwavering commitment to their needs.
But it doesn't stop there. Good law firm website content is the fuel that drives organic discovery. Search engines crawl through the digital landscape and seek relevance, quality, and engagement. Well-crafted law firm website content, infused with strategic keywords and optimized for search engine visibility, propels your website to the top of search results, ensuring potential clients find you when they need you most.
Main Objectives of Law Firm Website Content
The main objectives of law firm web content are to improve search engine rankings, increase brand awareness, and convert more prospects into clients. Furthermore, content helps visitors determine if the firm fits their needs and addresses frequently asked questions.
Objective #1: Improve Search Engine Rankings
Your law firm website content is written for the human eyes of your target audience - prospective clients who will visit your website while researching their legal issues.
But the content on a law firm's website is also written for a second audience, Google's Spider crawler, the program/algorithm that electronically tracks your website and indexes the content for Google.
Although Google officially does not “penalize” duplicate website content, it will filter pages with identical content.
Objective #2: Increase Brand Awareness
Potential clients will be more likely to contact your legal practice if they know who you are. Lawyers can promote brand awareness and web presence by establishing their position as subject matter experts in their area of practice and their law practice as the go-to firm for legal representation.
Some law firms hesitate to invest in brand awareness because it does not immediately translate into cases. It is also one of the more challenging marketing objectives to measure, although not impossible. Client surveys and social media engagement are two ways to measure brand awareness campaigns.
Working with a law firm digital marketing strategist allows attorneys to maximize the value of their law firm's website content and increase brand awareness in conjunction with accomplishing other marketing objectives.
Objective #3: Convert More Prospects into Clients
The content on your website (and the content published on other websites that's attributed to you or your law firm) is an extension of you. For your content to help you convert prospective clients into retained clients, your content should reflect the high quality of service you provide.
You should have enough content on your website that clients can stay as long as they need to learn about your law firm and research their legal matters. On top of that, if your content strategy builds trust with potential clients, they'll have confidence in your skills and abilities before you even sit down with them.
Outlining your objectives allows you to create high-quality, useful information that will allow your target audience to find you and then lead them to fill out a contact form or pick up the phone and call you.
Objective #4: Help Visitors Determine Whether Your Firm Is a Fit For Their Needs and Address FAQs
While you never want to discourage people from calling you, you want the leads contacting you to be qualified. Your firm website content should explain to your potential clients or audience the types of cases you handle. It should be educational.
You can use long-form content to present a great deal of information to your audience. For example, a defense lawyer could use long-form criminal defense lawyer website content to explain common defenses to specific crimes.
Long-form content is intended to be read (vs. just skimmed) and meant to be useful. Law firms often use practice area pages as long-form content and include comprehensive FAQs.
How We Create Successful Law Firm Websites: Tips for Quality Legal Website Content
Lawyers cannot expect success in organic search engine results with substandard legal website content. If your content is filled with meaningless jargon that is hard to read and understand or written by an AI bot, it will fail to gain traction with search engine crawlers. Nor will it convince human website visitors to contact your law firm.
Below are eight steps for creating content that is high-quality for your lawyer's website.
Step 1: Research Your Audience
Your ideal clients are a narrow portion of your local community researching their legal problems and searching for information on legal services. In some cases, your website audience may not be your actual clients; they could be family members, friends, or close contacts seeking representation for someone else.
To create successful law firm websites, you need to understand your audience. Conduct thorough research to understand their demographics, interests, characteristics, and legal needs.
Are they individuals or businesses? What age group do they belong to? Are they tech-savvy or more traditional in their approach? Understanding these factors will shape your website content's tone, language, and presentation.
Step 2: Get Your Law Firm Website SEO Optimized
Before you start adding pages and pages of long-form practice area pages, blog posts, press releases, and FAQ pages, your law firm website should be SEO optimized. Your website should:
- Load quickly;
- Navigate intuitively;
- Fully utilize SEO tools like title tags, header tags, and meta descriptions;
- Have pages that link to other pages;
- Work well for any device (desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone).
Suppose you are not a digital marketing expert. In that case, an SEO agency for law firms can help you review your website structure and either implement improvements and upgrades or build a new website that is adequately optimized for adding content.
Step 3: Create a Content Strategy
Your KPIs are how you measure your progress towards reaching your SMART goals. Achieving measurable success in law firm marketing is difficult without establishing KPIs. Your KPIs could be a mix of things provided in your website analytics and things that you manually check:
- Rankings on search engine results pages
- Number of outbound/inbound links
- Organic click-through-rate (CTR)
- Average session duration.
— Choose the Types of Content
Your strategy should list out the types of content you will be posting, including:
- Practice area pages
- FAQ pages
- Press releases
- About us / Meet the Team pages
- Case results / Case studies / Case outcomes
- Blog posts
- Client testimonials and reviews.
— Choose Publishing Channels
Your law firm website is the obvious place for publishing your content. Still, you should not make the mistake of only publishing content on your website. You may also publish content on:
- Social media channels
- Youtube
- Lawyers.com
- Hg.org
- Avvo.com
- Medium.com
If you publish your law firm website content on other websites and directories, you can add valuable backlinks to your website. This can bolster your website's domain authority and generate traffic.
If you publish on a third-party website, it's possible that you could rank in search engines multiple times for a targeted keyword. For long-tail search keywords where potential clients are searching a longer search term, you can establish yourself as an authority on a legal subject when your potential clients find multiple websites where you are addressing a legal issue.
Step 4: Analyze Your Competition
Discovering your competitors is simple: type your top keywords into Google and note the domains of your main competitors. There are several search engine optimization competitive analysis tools available besides Google:
You may think you know who the big competitors in your local market are, but these might not be your primary SEO competitors. For example, if you are a solo personal injury attorney in Miami, trying to rank organically for the first page of Google for “Miami personal injury lawyer,” your competition will be the big law firm players that rank on Page 1 of Google for this search term.
Meanwhile, the very successful solo attorney down the road — who you believe is your competitor —handles the same type of cases as you do. This attorney has a steady stream of fresh clients from their constantly updated accident and injury blog. Instead of targeting “Miami” SEO terms, they focus their SEO efforts on more localized neighborhoods of Hialeah, Pembroke Pines, and Miramar. That attorney is not your direct SEO competition. However, their strategy may be more cost-effective and successful, generating more than enough cases to stay busy. In this example, the lawyer down the road likely defined a different ideal client and targeted many different search terms.
Step 5: Conduct Keyword and Topic Research
You are probably familiar with keywords, the phrases people type into search engines when looking for legal information. You can use tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs for keyword research for your local market - or have a content marketing agency do this research.
Keywords can vary widely, as your website audience may be looking for:
- Lawyers that handle a specific type of law (personal injury, immigration law, bankruptcy, estate planning, etc.)
- Information about laws specific to a city, county, or state
- News coverage of an actual event, such as a major traffic accident on a local freeway, a recent arrest, and a criminal charge.
You should perform keyword and topic research, but do not assume that ranking for popular keywords will get you more traffic. Keywords with low keyword difficulty scores may be the most effective if you can quickly rank them organically with lawyer website content or on your blog.
Step 6: Develop a Content Plan
Your content plan can be created in a spreadsheet, like Google Sheets or Excel, or in productivity apps like Trello, Monday.com, or ClickUp. Ideally, you can access your content plan in a shared file so that your writing and editorial teams can access the editorial calendar and update progress on writing, editing, and publishing.
The plan should include:
- A list of monthly relevant legal topics.
- Specifications for each topic and content type (title, keywords, desired word count).
You should:
- Consider writing about high-interest themes and commonly searched terms
- Stay aware of legal advertising rules and ensure compliance to avoid disciplinary action.
- Review and refine the content plan quarterly to optimize topics and refine production based on the latest performance and audience data.
Step 7: Develop a Content Production Process
When you have your content plan, it's time to develop and refine the system and your editorial calendar for content creation. Your content production process will include:
- List of content to be created for the following month, such as 3 new practice area pages, 2 new service area pages, 6 blog posts, an updated “Meet the Team” page adding newly hired attorneys, and an updated “Case Results” page based on 2 new settlements.
- Create content briefs for writers, assigning competition to review, desired word counts, keywords, and headers.
- Update publishing calendar/productivity app with content tasks for writers.
- Have the assigned editor review written content and make initial edits before the attorney review.
- Have the designated attorney review the proposed final piece for approval/additional edits.
- Publish content within one business day of approval.
Step 8: Don’t Forget about Regular Content Analysis
Legal content marketing has evolved greatly in the last 20 years. When Google issues a major algorithm change, marketing priorities can change, sometimes very quickly. You should regularly analyze your content (and other law firms) for validation purposes and adjust your website content focus and strategy as necessary.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool to analyze your content's performance using your website's Google Analytics data. You can create performance reports, evaluate key performance indicators, and compare a recent time period (such as the last month) to the time preceding it:
In the queries section, you can analyze which queries received the least and most impressions (viewed in search results but not clicked on) and actual clicks. You can select which queries you want to strengthen by updating your content here.
Other Tools Like Ahrefs or Semrush
Third-party SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you check backlinks, understand your marketing opportunities, and generate keyword ideas with a few clicks.
Types of Content Law Firms Should Have on Their Website
Law firms must have a variety of website content to attract and engage potential clients. Each type of content discussed below has a specific purpose and helps establish a law firm's authority.
- Practice area pages: Law firms should have dedicated pages for each practice area they specialize in. These pages should provide comprehensive information about the cases you handle. Incorporate compelling content like infographics and law firm videos to make the pages more engaging and shareable.
- Service area pages: If your law firm serves multiple cities or regions, consider having separate service area pages. These service pages should address the legal needs of each specific location and include relevant information about local laws and regulations. Ensure the content on these pages is unique and not duplicated from other parts of your website.
- Case studies provide real-life examples of the firm's successful legal representation. These studies should highlight the challenges faced, the strategies employed, and the outcomes achieved for clients. However, obtaining the client's permission and avoiding disclosing identifying information is crucial. Case studies can be presented in various formats, such as written narratives, video testimonials, or infographics, to make them more engaging and shareable.
- Contact page: Create a dedicated page that displays your contact information, including a phone number, email address, and contact hours. You can also include a contact form for visitors to submit their information and inquiries whenever suits them. If you have specific consultation fees or policies, clearly explain them on this page.
- About Us page: The About Us page provides an opportunity to introduce the law firm and its team members to potential clients. It should include relevant information about the firm's history, values, mission, and notable achievements. Regularly review and update this content to reflect changes in your staff or any significant updates to your firm's profile.
- Blog posts: Maintain an active blog on your website to regularly publish new educational content. You should also implement the Cluster-Pillar Model, which involves creating pillar pages that cover broad topics and cluster pages that cover related, more specific topics.
In addition, it's important to mind your posts' E.A.T. (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Google values high-quality content that demonstrates expertise in a particular field, is authoritative, and can be trusted. To meet these criteria, include author bylines on your content, link to reputable sources, and ensure that the information provided on your website is accurate and reliable.
Last Questions: Who Should Write Legal Content and How to Simplify The Process?
Many lawyers are excellent writers and have all the skills to write the volume of content on their law firm's website. However, lawyers should not make the mistake of believing they are the best candidates to draft legal website content. Similarly, lawyers should not personally review, edit, and proofread every piece of content on their website.
Lawyers can simplify the content production process by outsourcing content writing. Do not hire “cheap” ghostwriters overseas or use AI content bots. Writers should be actual, experienced, knowledgeable writers who specialize in content writing for law firms. They should understand how you handle cases and be able to explain the basic legal process for your cases. Some law firms employ full-time content writers, but many contract with writers through digital marketing services.
Start Developing Your Law Firm Website Content Today!
Throughout this article, we have explored the strategies employed by top law firms to create website content that captivates visitors, converts them into clients, and establishes their expertise. From crafting informative practice area pages and thought-provoking blog articles to incorporating real-life case studies and testimonials, these help establish credibility and visibility.
Now, it's time to take action. Start developing content for law firm website today and unlock the potential for growth and success. Whether you're revamping your existing website or building one from scratch, remember the key elements that make content compelling: clarity, relatability, and a focus on addressing the needs of your target audience.
To further enhance your digital marketing efforts and maximize the impact of your website content, partner with a trusted agency specializing in law firm growth. We recommend reaching out to Grow Law Firm, a leading digital marketing agency with a proven track record in helping law firms achieve their business goals. Our website development, SEO, and content marketing can propel your firm's online presence to new heights.
Get a clear picture of your firm's performance- Boost your online presence
Get a clear picture of your firm's performance- Boost your online presence
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