Lexicon Legal Content is pleased to announce that it will be featured in DesignRush’s upcoming press release titled “Experts Share Affordable Content Marketing Strategies for Businesses on a Tight Budget.” Stay tuned for more!
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.
Continue reading “10 Legal Content Marketing Terms You Should Get to Know”
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.
Sometimes it’s less about prioritizing your blog and more about fresh ideas. Far too often, lawyers give up on their blog because they run out of topics they want to talk about or think their audience wants to hear. Generating new content doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming—consider these tools to help keep your content up to date and innovative.
Research what people are asking about online. Garner ideas from questions people are asking about in your area of practice. TextOptimizer is one tool that can help you get inside your readers’ heads. It allows you to research what questions are being asked about specific topics. Simply type in a keyword on the “Find Content Ideas” page. For instance, typing “personal injury” reveals these results:
For more detailed results and tools, you can pay for the subscription service on the site. Its additional features can help you narrow down content suggestions and find keyword combinations that meet search engine requirements.
Many people turn to the internet daily for answers to their questions. If your website can provide a reliable answer, it will see more traffic and reach higher rankings.
To help specify your topics even further and keep them relevant to your potential clients, consider asking your intake team to document your prospects’ questions and concerns. This step can provide you with insight into what your audience is looking for when it comes to legal information and help.
Apps such as Slack or Google Docs are an excellent way for them to record the questions they receive on intake. Such a database will provide a convenient way to view them easily in one place when you are ready to do so.
While keywords are typically thought of in terms of SEO, they can serve other purposes. Taking the time to research relevant keywords can give you some valuable insight into your prospects’ questions and interests. Check out these tools:
Your audience experiences many of the same things you do, including seasonal trends such as:
Suppose you practice family law. In that case, you may want to focus on parenting topics and shared custody during the Christmas season or summer vacation. If your practice focuses on estate planning, make it a point to discuss tax topics during the first quarter of the year.
You may also want to focus on what is nationally recognized on certain days or weeks of the year. For example, if you are a business attorney, publish a blog about National Small Business Week a week or two before it’s recognized.
Making your blog timely and relatable to what is going on will also help draw traffic to your site. Your prospects also pay attention to the news from various sources. As such, if there have been recent news stories or changes to the law that impact your area of expertise, be sure to address these matters in your content. Not only will it help increase your online traffic, but it can show your audience that you stay up to date and are an authority in your area of practice.
It’s easy to get bogged down when it comes to publishing fresh and timely blogs on your law firm’s website. Whether you find it challenging to make room in your schedule to write and post your blog or to keep your readers coming back for more with fresh content, our team of attorney-led writers can help. Call us today at 877-488-8123 or contact us online. Our seasoned marketing professionals are happy to address your content needs and show you how we can help.
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.
When it comes to getting your law firm website to rank, content readability is an important factor. Search engines analyze readability and reward it. In other words, they rank (and put at the top of the SERPs) the articles that have the features the engine thinks will make a reader stick to the end. Aside from all the other things the contributed to readability, being current and up-to-date is one of the most important factors. Keeping your firm’s website current and up-to-date with content that people want to read will go a long way to keeping you high on that first results page.
One of the ways a search engine defines readability is by determining how long a reader stays in place before sliding on to the next result. It doesn’t just matter how many people click on your page; it matters how long they stay after they get there. There are ways to encourage them to stick around, such as with video and audio content and eye-catching graphics. Paying attention to these things takes more time than simply reading – or not reading – whatever copy you’ve offered. Still, words are usually far less expensive than sound, pictures, and graphics, so it is very much worth your time to offer the best and most readable content you can provide.
Factors that Google will focus on when deciding the readability of your page include:
Sentence Length & Variety
You want short sentences but with some variation in their length and style. Avoid unnecessary or overly formal words. Additionally, it’s better not to crowd your text with words like “actually” and “usually,” which give you no value for the space. Avoid using too many adjectives and consider breaking up long, complicated sentences.
Structure & Style
Again, short sentences are vital. Each sentence should have a subject and a verb – preferably in that order. Make sure to include graphics and video here as well. They are supporting tools and hold your visitors. Avoid fussy fonts.
Paragraph Length and Formatting
Use short paragraphs made up of short sentences. Readable paragraphs are usually 5 or 6 lines long. Use a title and subtitles. Bullet points are your best friends, and you should always try to include at least one. Don’t forget to include keywords. You’ll want to put them in subtitles as well as in your paragraphs and try to repeat them without sounding like you’re just adding keywords.
All of these factors and more can make your website attractive and engaging to readers. You can contact us to help you provide the most readable copy for your website. We will even provide a free sample, marketing written expressly for you to help you decide how best to move forward with your legal content.
The benefits of blogging for law firms and lawyers are indisputable. So, now that you’ve set up your site and are ready to go, what are you actually supposed to be writing about? As a practicing attorney, most of your written communication is likely directed at other attorneys and judges, and this is exactly the style of writing that you should avoid when blogging. Remember, you are blogging in an effort to connect with your potential clients, and (perhaps just as importantly) so that your site is noticed by Google and other search engines. For this reason, content that looks like a legal brief or law review article is NOT what you should be posting.
For many people, finding blog topics is harder than putting pen to paper. Here are 40 ideas to get you started generating content for your law firm’s blog
Continue reading “40 Law Firm Blog Ideas”
When attorneys contact us for help with their website content, one of the more common issues we hear is that they simply do not know what they should be writing about. Of course, lawyers are highly-trained professionals who often engage in writing, whether it be a brief, a motion, or written communication with a client or an adverse party. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of writing that makes for good blog entries.
Your Legal Blog is a Powerful Marketing Tool
What is the point of blogging? Ultimately, your blog should be generating new business, and will do so by driving more traffic to your site. Regular blogging can drive new traffic in two distinct ways:
As a result, your blog topics should be informative, targeted at your potential clients, and have a title that makes people want to read more. To come up with ideas for what you should blog about, just think about the questions your clients regularly ask. Of course, these will be different for every practice area, but some examples of good topics include:
If you clients have asked you these questions in the past, chances are that potential clients are currently asking Google the same question. By providing answers to these questions for free, you can increase the chances that people will retain you for further counsel and representation.
Finding topics for your blog is just one aspect of maintaining an effective legal blog – you also have to write the entry, optimize it, post it, and distribute the post so that people actually have an opportunity to read it. This can be extremely time-consuming and pull you away from actually practicing law. Fortunately, we are here to help. Our team of legal copywriters can manage every aspect of your blog on your behalf and regularly work in jurisdictions throughout the United States across all practice areas.
To learn more about our services and for samples of our work, call Lexicon Legal Content today.
