High-quality content is the foundation of a digital presence that gets you noticed by your potential clients – and Google. The content on your site should provide helpful information that demonstrates your knowledge and be designed to get readers to contact and retain your law firm.
How do you create content that achieves these goals? If you’re an attorney, you could spend the time learning about best practices regarding length, keyword usage, formatting, linking, and other issues – OR you could hire a professional legal content writer who already knows how to create law firm content that ranks and turns visitors into clients.
Law Firm Content Needs to Be of the Highest Quality
Because the content on law firm sites has the potential to affect users’ well-being, health, or finances, it’s extremely important for content to be of the highest quality and helpful to readers. In fact, Google puts sites that deal with these issues into a category called “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) sites, and it holds the content on YMYL sites to a higher standard than it does for others.
To determine the quality of content, Google looks to see whether it demonstrates experience, expertise, authority, and trust – or E-E-A-T for short (more on this later). The better the content on your site aligns with these principles, the better chance it has of ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
That means that when a person looking for a lawyer searches for a keyword related to your practice areas, it’s more likely they will call your firm rather than a competitor’s.
Below, we’ll discuss:
- What to look for in legal content writer
- What they do
- How to create high-quality law firm content
- The relationship between content creation and SEO
- Targeting your audience
- Why content marketing is important for law firms
- The most important considerations when hiring a legal content marketing agency
Understanding the Role of Law Firm Content Writers
Fundamentally, legal content services involve creating written materials related to legal topics. At Lexicon, our team focuses on creating content that is posted online and increases our clients’ online visibility. That said, our writers also engage in several other important tasks. Some of these include the following:
- Researching the relevant law in your jurisdiction and ensuring that the content is accurate
- Presenting that information in a way that non-lawyers can understand
- Including keywords and keyword phrases at an appropriate density
- Engaging in on-site optimization, such as linking to other existing sites on your page
Legal content marketing should achieve two related goals:
- Increasing the organic traffic to your site
- Getting visitors to contact your firm
How Does Content Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site?
When you add content that directly addresses the legal issues that your potential clients face, it’s much more likely that the pages on your site will appear for relevant search queries. Importantly, getting your content to rank isn’t about adding a keyword phrase to an article a certain number of times; it’s about creating human-first content that provides value to your readers. The more your content appears in the first few search results for relevant search terms, the more traffic you will get to your site.
How Content Can Turn Visitors into Leads
Having people visit your site is great, but it’s important to remember that it doesn’t mean anything unless those visitors are reaching out and hiring your firm.
For this reason, the content on your site should not only address your potential clients’ concerns, but also gently guide them into contacting your firm. Often, this means addressing their legal problem, explaining how you can help, and then guiding them to a form or telling them to pick up the phone and call. Easy navigation and clear calls to action are a critical step in this process.
Tips for Creating High-Quality Legal Content
Crafting legal content that ranks well and converts visitors into clients begins with being aware of what it takes to create helpful content.
Whether you are doing it yourself or outsourcing it to a content marketing agency like Lexicon, your content should clearly communicate your law firm’s services and its experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to readers. Additionally, helpful, high-quality legal content should be:
- Readable – People who are looking for a lawyer aren’t looking for a treatise or academic writing. Be sure to write using clear language that avoids the use of technical terms or legal jargon. As a general rule of thumb, you should be writing at an 8th-grade reading level, which translates to a Flesch Reading Ease Score of 60 to 70
- Informative – Your content should provide important, relevant information to your readers. In addition, your content should demonstrate your knowledge and expertise in your practice area(s) and let your readers know how you can help.
- Engaging – No one wants to read dry, boring content. Make sure that your content speaks directly to your reader. Engage them by directly addressing their pain points or concerns, using a narrative structure, and providing examples or case studies.
- Trustworthy and Authoritative – Make sure that all of the content on your site is relevant and up to date. Doing so requires auditing your content on a regular basis to ensure that your content reflects any legal changes or factual developments that may have occurred since it was published. Additionally, it’s a good idea to link to authoritative sources such as .gov or .edu sites.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-Friendly Legal Content Writing
While you should always write for people first, it’s also important to create content with search engine optimization principles in mind. If you are starting out in content marketing, you need to be aware that search engines have come a long way over the past few decades. The algorithms are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and adding content that is intended to “game the system” and manipulate search engine rankings is much more likely to hurt your site than help it.
Create Content that Demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust
Google wants to provide results that are helpful to its users. According to Google, once it identifies relevant content, its systems work to prioritize the most helpful content – in other words, it places the most helpful content at the top of the search results.
To identify the content that seems most helpful, it evaluates whether the content demonstrates experience, expertise, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T). Of these criteria, trust is the most important. Importantly, experience, expertise, and authority all contribute to trust.
Demonstrating E-E-A-T is particularly important for law firms. Google assigns more weight to content that demonstrates E-E-A-T when the content could significantly affect users’ health, finances, safety, or well-being. Google calls these “Your Money or Your Life” topics, and legal websites certainly fall into this category. Here’s how law firms can demonstrate each element of E-E-A-T in their content:
- Experience – Ensure that your content discusses your relevant experience. Discuss how many years your firm has been in business, how long you have practiced law, notable settlements or trial outcomes, or a track-record of success.
- Expertise – To demonstrate expertise, include information about things like your education, publications, certifications, speaking engagements, media appearances, and other credentials.
- Authority – You can establish authority by regularly publishing high-quality, informative content that is helpful to your readers. This, in turn, will earn backlinks (links to your site from other sites) and mentions from other sites, broadening your reach and increasing your authority even more.
- Trust – To demonstrate trustworthiness, the information on your website should be accurate and up to date.
A Note about Google’s March 2024 Update
In March of 2024, Google announced a core algorithm update that targeted low-quality content in an effort to reduce the amount of spam in the search results.
The update addressed the proliferation of “scaled content abuse” – the practice of creating large amounts of content at scale in an effort to manipulate the search engine rankings. According to Google, while it has long had a policy against using automation to create content at scale, it’s grown harder to determine whether automation was involved. In an effort to address these techniques, it’s now focusing on the behavior of producing content at scale to increase rankings, “whether automation, humans or a combination are involved”
While Google maintains that it strives to surface high-quality, helpful content regardless of how it is produced, the update resulted in the deindexing of sites that had used AI to create content at scale. While this doesn’t mean that you can’t use AI in your content creation process, it does mean that you shouldn’t use AI to mass-produce content.
Why Considering Your Audience is So Important to Successful Communication
It’s vital to consider who you are writing for when creating law firm content. Identify your target clientele and consider their pain points.
- What are their concerns?
- What do they want to know?
- What are their legal goals?
- What information can you provide them with that will help them decide to hire your firm?
Answering these and similar questions will help you create client personas that allow you to understand your potential clients better and match your content and messaging to meet their needs.
Why is Content Marketing So Important for Law Firms?
The legal marketing industry is extremely competitive, and legal consumers rightfully expect their attorneys and law firms to be experts in their areas of practice.
Demonstrating expertise is best done through publishing content, making content marketing an integral part of law firm marketing. Here are some of the specific reasons why content marketing is so important to law firms:
Law Firm SEO is Extremely Competitive
Hundreds – if not thousands – of law firms in your area are fighting to get to the top of the search results for those lucrative high-volume and high-conversion search terms. The best way to get there is by regularly creating quality content that algins with E-E-A-T and that is helpful to your readers.
Importantly, once you get your site to the top of the results for a given search term, you can’t just rest on your laurels, as you can be sure that at least one of the firms below you in the SERPs is creating content to unseat you.
High-Quality Content Can Expand Your Firm’s Reach
Creating engaging content that is sharable can expand your firm’s reach on social media and other channels.
Remember that law firm content does not need to be formal or stuffy. The more engaging and shareable your content is, the better chance it has of being picked up by people and shared with their own networks.
You can make sharing your content simple by ensuring that your blog and other posts have share buttons that allow readers to share them to their social media accounts with a single click.
Content Can Establish Your Firm as the Authority in Your Practice Areas
As a lawyer, your knowledge, experience, and expertise are what make you valuable in the marketplace. What better way to demonstrate these characteristics than by regularly posting high-quality, in-depth content about important legal issues?
Regularly posting content can make you the go-to source of information in your practice areas, building trust with potential clients, other attorneys, and the general public.
Hiring a Legal Content Writer: Key Considerations
When you are evaluating a legal content marketing provider, there are certain things you should be sure to consider before making a hiring decision. The most important of these include the following:
Skills and Expertise
It’s critical that anyone you hire to create legal content has excellent writing skills and expertise in content creation. The quality of the content on your website has a direct impact on how well it will rank – and it reflects your firm’s professionalism, acumen, and gravitas. Additionally, content writing with SEO goals in mind requires knowledge and skills beyond being a “good writer.” Some of the issues that a professional legal content marketer will consider when crafting your content include:
- Your target audience
- Writing to an appropriate reading level
- Keyword usage
- Internal linking opportunities
- Outbound links to authoritative sources
Legal Experience & Background
Any law firm content writer you hire should have a background in the law. When it comes to posting content on your law firm’s site, there is just too much at stake to hire a generalist and hope they get up to speed on a subject that you have spent years learning about. When you hire a legal content provider with significant legal experience, you can rest assured that the content they provide will be well-researched, accurate, and in compliance with your state’s advertising rules.
Creativity and Writing Proficiency
Finally, it goes without saying that your content provider should have exceptional writing skills and the creativity required to produce content that will stand out. Google does not reward content that just regurgitates existing content, so you need a writer who knows how to tell a story that will resonate with readers and add new information that will be helpful to readers.
FAQs about Legal Content Writing
Can Legal Content Marketing Attract New Clients?
Yes! Legal content marketing can certainly attract new clients. Some of the ways you can get more clients through content marketing include:
- Improving your site’s visibility in the search results
- Engaging with potential clients
- Targeting long-tail keywords
- Establishing your firm as an authority in your practice areas
Who Needs Legal Content Writing Services?
If you are using your website to get new clients, you need legal content writing services. In addition, if you have a digital marketing agency that services law firm clients and does not have an in-house writer with the necessary background, skills, and expertise, you should hire an outside legal content marketing agency.
What Does High-Quality Legal Content Look Like?
As mentioned above, high-quality legal content demonstrates experience, expertise, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T). In addition, it’s well-written, engaging, and legally and factually accurate. Perhaps most importantly, high-quality legal content is helpful to your readers, meaning that it provides information that helps them address their concerns and connect with a lawyer or law firm that can represent them or provide actionable counsel.
How Much Content Should I Post?
There is no magic number regarding the amount of content you should post, but seeing what has worked for others in your practice area and market can be a good place to start. That said, publishing tons of content – whether human-produced or using AI – can result in adverse action from Google as a result of their scaled content abuse policy. Finding the “goldilocks” content posting frequency can be a matter of market analysis and trial and error.
How Do I Find the Best Legal Content Writing Team for Me?
To find the best law firm content provider team for your firm or agency, you should consider your goals or your needs. For example, an agency looking to outsource its legal content writing needs will have different metrics to consider than a solo practitioner who needs help maintaining their blog. In addition, it’s important to consider the area of practice for which you are seeking content. It will likely be easier to find a content writer for an area of practice like personal injury or criminal defense than it would for, say, aviation law or Qui Tam actions.
Bringing it All Together
To sum up:
- High-quality legal content can improve your rankings, increase traffic, and turn visitors into leads.
- Law firm content writers are professionals who create optimized and accurate content for law firms.
- Your content should be readable, informative, engaging, and trustworthy.
- Law firm content needs to demonstrate experience, expertise, authority, and trust to rank well on Google.
- When evaluating a contractor or legal content writing team, consider their skills and expertise, legal knowledge and background, and writing proficiency and creativity.
Working with the right legal content writer or legal content marketing agency can increase your firm’s visibility, improve its reputation, and provide a tremendous return on investment. To discuss your law firm’s or agency’s content marketing needs with an expert, contact Lexicon Legal Content today.
