Content marketing has proven to be extremely effective marketing tools. Whether you call it content marketing or blogging for lawyers, the result can be dazzling if done correctly.
Tips on how to implement content marketing for your law firm.
Lawyers can find it challenging to create engaging and inspiring content that adheres to SEO guidelines and encourages potential clients to hire them.
As a lawyer who has used content marketing and correct SEO, I can tell you it is worth every minute you put into it. Your law firm SEO and content marketing have considerable benefits. The benefits include developing a strong relationship with prospective clients and ensuring that people can find you online organically.
Looking for tips on how to best implement content marketing for your law firm, and what not do? Here are five reasons why SEO and content marketing is vital for your law practice.
1. Shows Your Understanding of Your Audience
There is no doubt that excellent content marketing and search engine optimization are those that respond to your target audience’s diverse needs. So, the content you generate must solve your audience’s problems and addresses their needs.
What does this mean? I have seen so many lawyer blogs that describe a case that they recently won. This is hardly the type of information a leas will want when they perform an online search. More often than not, they put in some word or sentence related to the problem they are facing and push enter. These words, or sentences are the short or long tail keywords that you must incorporate into your writing.
You prospective clients want to find a lawyer who knows his stuff related to that keyword. So, do yourself a huge favor. Write about what your clients ask you with some degree of regularity. Start there and then, if you find it necessary dazzle your reader with one real-life example. Remember that if you write to your prospective clients’ needs, and this shows you understand your audience. You will stand above a lot of other attorneys who write about what they like, rather than what they readers need.
Successful SEO and content marketing for lawyers involve observing, assessing, and tweaking until you achieve the results that you need for your law practice. You must create a strategy for your law firm’s content before you set out to write.
2. Blogging for Lawyers Must Include Mapping The Service Buyer’s Journey
As a lawyer, you know that selling sophisticated legal services is often not a one-step process. In other words, more often than not, it takes visits to different lawyers before a prospective client retains an attorney. This is usually a slow and sequential process. And it is no secret that the establishment of trust and confidence is one of the precursors to engagement.
Note that before a prospective client hires your law firm, they want to get to know your firm. This is why content marketing and SEO are excellent ways to empower prospective clients to familiarize themselves with your law firm first even before they have their first meeting with you. Why not dazzle them with your knowledge and authority in your field?
You will allow your prospects to seamlessly opt into your funnel and stay engaged if you are publishing engaging content. As a result, you will not have to hit them up with the typical hard sell. You have in a way commoditized yourself.
Don’t forget to then also display your blog posts on your social media sites such as Instagram, as I have described in my other posts.
3. Show Your Expertise and Authority With Content Marketing For Lawyers
To commoditize yourself you must first become an obvious authority in your field. Blogging for lawyers is one way to do this. But, this doesn’t happen just through writing blogs, but through writing whitepaper articles, books and speaking engagements also. But, since as a lawyer you are a writer by nature, you should begin there.
Start with what you already know about your particular niche. What are the frequently asked questions you hear all the time from your clients? Write extensively about each of those questions. I suggest you start with a blog format and keep your posts to about 500-600 words. This allows you to write a number of them since a 500-600 blog is like a 20-minute conversation reduced to writing.
If an area is complicated and you feel that a good scholarly answer should be longer than a regular blog post, then make that a longer whitepaper. u should then use these whitepaper articles as evergreen material. Subjects that don’t change, or change very little, by the passage of time. You should display these articles prominently on our website.
Do content marketing for lawyers, correctly and regularly, and soon you will have enough material to compile into a book. Once you have a book, a nice graphic showing the Book must be prominently displayed on your website. This book will become a very valuable tool, which I will discuss in other blogs.
4. Save Time
You are a busy lawyer doing your client’s work most hours of day and night. I know this because I have practiced law more than 25 years and have a face that shows my sleep deprivation. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Not all of your content needs to be written by you. You should definitely review and edit every piece of writing that will have your name on it, but that does not prevent you from having help in writing. There are plenty of people out there who can be trusted with research and writing assignments if given proper instructions. You can then edit, and supplement to your heart’s content. Blogging for lawyers is a task that can be done collaboratively.
Do an online search. There are general sites like upwork.com, chuck full of hungry writers that will only be glad to help ghost-write for you. I say “general” because you can find all kinds of freelancers on a site like upwork. There are also sites that do nothing but content writing. Writer Access and nDash and two such sites. If you work with these sites regularly with your content marketing, to lighten your workload, you will soon identify some writers that you like to work with. They become your team and soon giving than assignments becomes less of an ordeal because they know what you need and do it correctly.
5. Higher Return on Investment
In the fiercely competitive legal space, SEO and content marketing can help your firm get ahead of the competition without breaking the bank. This is because SEO gives you a higher return on your investment than other types of digital marketing, as does relevant content.
There is no better activity that will propel you and your law firm forward and make you the go-to lawyer in your field than demonstrating your knowledge and caring, through content writing. You will be rewarded many times over if you devote time and energy to it.
