5-Step Lawyer SEO Checklist For Blog Posts

An Easy Lawyer SEO Checklist For Legal Blogs

If you're running a legal blog as a content marketing strategy, you need a reliable system that enables you to regularly produce thoughtful, high-quality, and well-optimized blog posts. Additionally, you need to maintain a consistent posting schedule, which can be challenging for small law firms just starting out with Lawyer SEO.

To help you get into the habit of writing, editing, and optimizing your legal blog for SEO, here's an easy-to-follow checklist to help you out:

1. Always Start With Keyword Research

Keyword research has always been an essential part of SEO. After all, keywords are what you choose to be found for. If you don't choose the right keywords, you might not get the right traffic and target audience to see your content.

Remember: You'll want your blog posts to rank in the search engines to ensure that it reaches your target audience.

When your audience is looking for a product, service, or information, keyword research can help you determine which words or phrases they use. Because the terms you use may differ from those used by your audience, conducting keyword research allows you to develop a list of relevant keywords or key phrases and allows you to create content that ranks.

2. Research And Preparation

As a lawyer, you already know quite a lot about the law. So you can technically just write what you know and share your expertise.

However, you still need to figure out a few things before writing your blog post. Some of those include the following:

• Structure

• Formatting

• Information

• Examples

• Wording

• The use of relevant information and citations

This may seem like an unnecessary step, but it's crucial to remember that proper preparation improves readability and SEO and saves you time later in the writing process.

Begin by making a list of the topics you wish to cover in your article. Then you may group related topics together, and your structure will start to take shape. Now you can decide on the sequence in which your subjects will be presented, whether chronologically, didactically, or in any other manner that best matches your blog post.

3. Writing Your First Draft

In this stage, don't be too concerned about awkward sentences or errors, as this will take you out of the flow of writing. You'll be able to fix and rewrite them later.

What you need to think about right now is the flow of the ideas and the words. Ask yourself the following while you write:

• Is the structure logical?

• Am I using too much legalese?

• Can this be understood by an average reasonable person?

• Do I need a few examples to flesh out my points?

You need to think about laying down the essential parts of your blog posts. Note that we're still going to edit and optimize this content later, so don't get too caught up in going back and forth to correct all your errors each time.

Remember: It is important to note that most of your readers aren't going to be lawyers. They come to you because you're the legal expert here. So avoid using legalese, niche terms, and specialized language. If you really have to use them, then provide a digestible explanation of them as soon as they're first introduced.

4. Edit For Errors And Readability

After you've finished your first draft, go over it again for any errors or awkward wording. Then, take the time to carefully read and re-read your blog article, making changes as needed to improve it even more.

Look out for the following:

• Grammatical errors

• Spelling mistakes

• Running sentences

• Large walls of text that needs to be broken up

• Logical leaps

• Missing information, definitions, and explanations

• Citations

Focus on how the reader might be able to digest your content. The save more time, you can ask a colleague or one of your friends to proofread the post for you. Other people are most likely to spot mistakes than you, the author.

5. Optimize For Lawyer SEO

Now that you have a well-written and well-structured blog post, you now have to optimize it for search engines.

Remember: No matter how well-written a blog post is, it's not going to get found on the SERPs if it isn't well-optimized. Of course, you can just promote your blogs on your social media, but that isn't the point of SEO, isn't it?

Here are a few pointers to remember when you're optimizing your posts:

• Use keywords wisely (don't force them in irrelevant content, links, and anchor texts)

• Compose a well-optimized meta description

• Link your sources.

• Use proper heading tags (i.e., H1, H2, and so on)

• Use proper font style, size, and formatting (avoid fonts that are hard to read)

• Add images

• Add image captions and alt text

• Write an optimized headline.

• Write the appropriate tags and categories.

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