When implementing SEO for law firm marketing, content is a crucial factor. If you don’t have high-quality, organized, and well-optimized content, your law firm’s pages won’t have the highest chance of ranking. The most popular examples of Lawyer SEO content are blogs and online articles, which rank much easier in the SERPs and are generally great for getting organic traffic.

Of course, this would be of no concern to a professional legal content writer who knows both the law and the rules of SEO. However, if you’re just getting started on digital marketing, it might be challenging to incorporate complex legal concepts with the rules of creating a perfectly-optimized web copy. For one, web copies prioritize simplicity and ease of reading, which are difficult when discussing the specifics of law and policies.

So, how do you make great, informative, and well-explained legal concepts without reducing their value? How do you show off your skills and knowledge without sacrificing your SEO? How do you make legal blogs accessible to the average reader? Let’s discuss some tips to help you and your law firm marketing strategy:

Tip #1: Write For The Layman

Before we delve into the more technical side of SEO, let’s talk about the actual writing first.

When implementing SEO and content marketing, your main goal is to reach potential clients. Instead of finding people through ads, you’re attracting people who already have an interest in the subject you write about through high-quality content.

If you write great content that helps or is valuable to people, they’ll not only be drawn to your law firm’s website, but you also build trust. On the other hand, if someone finds poorly-written and highly-misinformed content, they will associate those poor qualities with your law firm. So, in short, you’ll want to attract people with high-quality and helpful content.

Content that people can’t read or fully understand will not help them. For example, if someone is looking for “what to do after a car accident,” they’ll want advice that they can apply to their own lives. If they can’t understand a word you’ve written, then it doesn’t help them in any positive way.

In other words, make user-friendly legal content that’s understandable to non-experts. After all, most of your clients aren’t legal experts, so they’re coming to you to know more. Avoid using legalese, niche slang, and very technical legal language. You don’t have to remove the tricky parts of your legal guide just to make them simpler. Just use simplified language to cater to the average individual.

Tip #2: Incorporate Keywords

A considerable part of Lawyer SEO revolves around keywords. After all, optimizing for the right keywords is how you will rank in the SERPs.

Each law firm (and website) should choose and incorporate keywords wisely. For example, using too-competitive keywords might get your small law firm’s blog posts buried in the SERPs. Likewise, too niche keywords might get you so little traffic that it hardly matters. In other words, you need to decide which keywords are best to target with your current SEO goal.

That said, if you can’t figure out your current keyword strategy at the moment, you can read some free online guides or hire an SEO expert to help you. In most cases, legal SEO writers work alongside SEO experts who handle the more technical side of SEO, such as keyword research, strategizing, auditing, and indexing.

Still, even if you’re not an expert in the more technical details of SEO, you still need to know how to incorporate keywords into your writing. For example, you should avoid keyword stuffing, decide on appropriate anchor texts, and strategically use ranking keywords throughout your blog posts.

More importantly, don’t force keywords! Instead, find other ways to incorporate them if they don’t make sense grammatically or feel awkward in the text. After ranking and getting clicks, you still want people to consume your content. Most people can’t get past bad grammar and forced keyword use, and they’ll bounce off and find what they need somewhere else.

Tip #3: Mind Your Layout

While the first tip talks about how to word your blog posts, this one will discuss how to layout, organize, and present your blog posts.

When we talk about “layout,” we’re talking about how your paragraphs, sentences, margins, and other blog elements are arranged. You can be using accessible language that’s understood by your target audience and still present it messily.

The biggest no-no for formatting blog posts is large walls of text. Imagine how this post would look if it had no spaces between paragraphs or images to break the text up. Doing so makes it hard for readers to find what they need when skimming or going back to portions they want to reread.

Other ways to easy ways format your blog posts include:

• Bullet points and numbered lists instead of separating thoughts with commas
• A pleasant color scheme that makes it easier on the eyes
• Images, infographics, videos, and logos to break up the long paragraphs
• A lot of white space to avoid crowding page elements

The above methods are easy to implement but can boost user experience tenfold. Even if you had great content that’s easy to understand, people still wouldn’t be able to read a crowded, eye-straining wall of text. The most likely thing that will happen is they’ll get frustrated, click off, and find another blog that’s designed and formatted better.

Bottom-line

Content marketing and Lawyer SEO work hand-in-hand. For your blog posts to rank high, you need them to be high-quality and posted consistently. For anyone to see your content and for the lead generation process to happen, you need to optimize for keywords and implement other Lawyer SEO tactics.

That said, content legal blogging requires a lot of planning, management, and auditing. You need to know what works and fix what isn’t. You also need to continuously find ways to create original, high-quality content that is helpful to your target audience and great for the search engines.

Whichever types of legal content you’re planning to create, take note of the above suggestions each time you want to publish a new post.

Author’s Bio

JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.