5 Blogging Tips For Small Law Firms

The Basics Of Lawyer SEO Blogging For Beginners

When you consider a content marketing strategy for your law firm, you might have heard that a legal blog might be the easiest way to do so. Small and new law firms can feel intimidated by the thought of competing with more established firms in Lawyer SEO, but if you do your basics right, it will be easy to build on top of them later on.

1. Do Your Keyword Research Before Starting A Blog

While popularity doesn't define the quality of blog posts, you also wouldn't want a well-written post to go to waste. After all, for people to consider your blog posts valuable, they have to be able to read them. If users can't find them in the search engine results, they will not be able to read them.

Keywords are what get your blogs and pages found. So when you choose a keyword, that's where you're aiming to rank high and compete with other law firm websites.

However, you can't just make up and randomly choose your keywords. You would have to consider their search volumes, localization, and user intent. Doing keyword research not only lets you discover the most popular or competitive keywords, but also clues you in on what searchers are looking for. When you know what people are looking for, you'll find out what you need to write to give them what they need.

2. Write One "Foundation" Posts To Link From Related Entries

One important rule in content marketing is "quality over quantity". Instead of writing multiple short posts that discuss sections of a larger theme, you should write one long comprehensive post that gives searchers everything they need to know about a specific topic.

Remember: Dedicating one post to cover an aspect of a law-related topic will most likely end up with an entry that's too short or thin. Unfortunately, search engines like Google tend to consider short and thin content either useless or spam, so they don't do well in the rankings.

So instead of making three separate posts about the definition, evidence involved, and damages related to Personal Injury law, you should write a complete legal guide that goes through all those elements (or more).

If there are any updates (like changes in litigation) of special cases (like one-offs), you can write them and link them back to your "foundation" legal guide. This helps you avoid having to discuss very complex concepts or terminologies each time—just link people to your complete guide.

3. Write For Human Readers

When you're starting to apply Lawyer SEO to your blogs, it's easy to get caught up in using all your keywords in the body of the text. However, while keywords help you rank, you still need people to read your blog.

Users being able to read and understand your content is necessary for conversions. Not to mention, if users click off and avoid your content because they're hard to read, these will be reflected on your stats. If the algorithm discovers a high bounce rate on your site, it can negatively affect your rankings.

So when you encounter keywords that make no grammatical sense (i.e., "lawyer los angeles", "consultation divorce lawyer", etc.), put them elsewhere. You can use them on images (alt texts, captions) and tags.

You should also avoid stuffing too many keywords into your blog posts. Both search engine algorithms and human readers don't want to see sentences like "Consult a California Labor Lawyer for your California Labor Law Case".

4. Set A Regular Posting Schedule

While you shouldn't force yourself to write exhaustive blog entries daily, you might want to avoid leaving your legal blog stagnant for months on end. If it takes you a week to write a thoughtful, high-quality blog entry, stick to that schedule.

Interested readers might check back on your legal blog from time to time, and if it's been months since you posted anything new, it will look like you've abandoned it. Not to mention, fresh content only means new opportunities to increase traffic.

5. Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

When many of your blog posts or articles compete for the same search terms, it leads to keyword cannibalization. This tends to happen when writing about related topics or writing about subtopics under the same broader theme. This can also happen when you divide a more general topic among different posts.

If you optimize multiple pages for the same keywords, that means those pages are going to compete with each other. So when doing your keyword research, make sure you assign specific keywords to different pages and topics. If you're planning to write more, make sure you find other related keywords instead of repeatedly using the exact same ones.

Remember: This isn't to say that some keywords cannot be present in multiple posts or pages. However, each page should have one primary keyword to optimize for.

Additionally, if your entire website and all its pages are optimized for the same exact keywords, you might lose out on the opportunity to expand your online presence. The more keywords you compete for, the more people can find you.

Why Should You Let LawyerLeadMachine Help You?

Attorney SEO can boost traffic and conversions on your Law Firm's website. You can implement these tactics on your legal blog, link to your important pages, and drive traffic to your site.

If you want to learn more about SEO and the basic strategies, you can look through our Free Lawyer SEO Guides. If you need more advanced assistance, you can review your options here.