Google recently updated its Search Quality Rater Guidelines, and the direction it’s taken will almost certainly affect your legal content marketing strategies. The biggest reveals are the new spin Google put on the YMYL category (Your Money or Your Life) and the new emphasis it’s putting on E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and high quality content.
When it comes to legal content and search engine results pages, all of this makes considerable sense, and it pays to pay attention – and to work with a legal content provider that stays on top of the latest developments in content marketing and SEO.
The world of SEO is abuzz about the helpful content updaterecentlypublished by Google. While this latest offering doesn’t seem to be earth-shattering, it is important to familiarize yourself with it – and to generally keep up. As such, there are five basic tips that can help anyone out there who needs to pay attention to SEO, which means any law firm with an online presence. The message driving Google’s latest offering is that you should be taking a people-first approach – rather than writing for bots. When Google embraces its human side, it’s time for businesses to follow suit.
Your law firm’s website plays an important role in terms of marketing and reaching your target audience – and your content matters. Generating relevant and compelling content is the name of the game, but if you find yourself at a loss when it comes to choosing inspiring topics that resonate with your widest potential audience, you are not alone. Many firms find themselves recycling the same, tired titles time and time again, but you can do better, and we have some helpful hints to get you started.
You recognize that content is king, but you may not be making the most of the content that you already have. And this is where historical optimization shines. Historical optimization sounds more technical than it needs to be – the bottom line is that it involves breathing new life into the content you’ve already published, which can do you a world of good in terms of giving your return on investment a bump.
Marketing your legal content seems easy enough – write stellar copy and get it out there where it needs to be. There are, of course, challenges along the way. One of the primary building blocks of solid legal marketing is understanding the terminology that populates its principles and methodologies. Because even major players use terms in different ways – sometimes with newly imagined meanings – it’s important to have a nuanced understanding of the basics. Others may play fast and loose with their legal marketing terms, but once you and your team have settled on meaningful definitions that work for you, you’ll be far better prepared to make your mark in legal marketing.
Whether you are a solo practitioner or part of a large law firm, improving your Google search rankings and online authority should be one of your top marketing priorities. When your audience likes and can relate to what you are publishing online, Google rewards you, as do your prospects when they turn into clients. The best way to accomplish these goals is to draft high-quality content for your website frequently. However, creating compelling content isn’t as easy as it might sound. For most attorneys, wordsmithing tasks become buried by the dozens of other duties they must complete. Publishing excellent content that resonates with your desired audience must be a priority, or your blog won’t be an effective marketing tool. You won’t reap the rewards you desire. In fact, it’s so crucial that we highly recommend creating an editorial calendar that can serve as a guide and will remind you to keep creating content.
Most of us think something is readable if we enjoy it. We want a piece to have a beginning, middle, and end, preferably in that order. If it’s fictional, we want it to be about people we care about or like. Sometimes, it’s a book you just happen to come across or a title or a cover that drew you in, and you couldn’t leave till you finished the story. Sometimes, it’s something so powerful that you simply can’t let it go. However, these qualities aren’t the only kinds of readability.
Although SEO strategy is multi-faceted, content optimization is a big-hitter when it comes to successful marketing. Like other methods that bring traffic to a website, ups and downs are common in content marketing. Unfortunately, many companies using best practices still find that their content underperforms or that it is not reaching as many people as they would like.
If you find this happening with your content, don’t simply chalk it up to a natural waning in your marketing. Content that isn’t performing or working to increase the success of your business demands your attention. It’s a wake-up call that something needs to change. You should start by reevaluating your content to detect what contributed to its poor performance.
If you’re a law firm and you’re unsure about this content marketing you hear so much about, there’s no reason to panic. Content marketing consists of publishing content on various platforms. The content you publish can be blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, or anything else that allows you to connect with your potential clients. When it comes to legal content marketing, the most important point to keep in mind is that it matters. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing for your firm can garner about three times the number of leads you’re likely to bring in with paid searches.
Potential Clients Appreciate a Genuine Approach
The web is full of flashy ads that very few of us actually rely upon. In fact, the average online consumer is bombarded with thousands of ads a day, and the sheer volume alone has a way of dimming their shine. It’s difficult to break through that wall of advertising noise with an ad of your own, no matter how well-produced it is. Your potential clients are looking for professional legal guidance, which means they are looking for authenticity, authority, and accessibility. While online ads certainly have their place, they can’t help you connect with potential clients in the same way that well-written, targeted, and informative content can, and this is especially true for law firms.
2020 is finally behind us, and the best and the brightest in the SEO and content marketing space are weighing in on what just happened. They’re also dusting off their crystal balls and making a few predictions about what we should be on the lookout for in 2021. While the early focus for 2020 was spam reduction, the whole global pandemic tipped that on its head, and things went in a different direction. Google was busy putting out other fires, and spam stayed put.
