Writing optimized blog posts for search engines and for people is a skill. And like any other skill, it can be improved by practice.
Despite what many legal marketers think, it’s not a complicated process. In this post, we’re going to dive into the 15 ways you can master writing SEO friendly law firm blog posts. Follow this criteria, and your blog posts will achieve greater visibility, higher rankings and increased traffic from search engines.
Related: SEO for Law Firm Websites [eBook]
15 Tips for Writing an SEO Friendly Law Firm Blog Post
1. Most importantly, your blog post has to be relevant and educational or interesting.
The quality of your law firm’s blog content is one of the most important SEO factors. Don’t make the common mistake of only focusing on the technical aspects of SEO (which we’ll get into) and not the actual substance of the blog. In other words, you shouldn’t expect a blog post to rank high just because you followed the technical steps to make it SEO friendly. When coming up with a blog topic, a good place to start is by making a list of common questions prospective clients would type into Google and then build some content around their answers. Follow this tip and your blog post will be a likely candidate for Google’s featured snippets.
Remember to always keep your target audience and client persona in mind when writing. What are your client persona’s challenges? How can you lessen their worries? What tone of voice do they speak in? What resources do they need?
2. Write with a goal and purpose in mind
You should have overarching SMART goals for your marketing strategy in which you’ve defined blogging as the tactic that will help you reach this goal. For every blog, there should be a clear purpose as to what you want the blog to do. What topic will it educate on? What issue does it help your audience overcome? You should also have a defined goal with an action that you’d like users to take. Make sure to include a call-to-action that leads users to take next steps.
3. Choose the right title
Your blog’s title matters a lot. Research has shown that ‘How to’ blog titles perform better than others and that including numbers in your title helps performance. Hint: even using specific numbers like 10 can help you perform better. You can even use a tool like this one to help you analyze your title.
4. Create a clear structure for your blog post and keep paragraphs short.
For blogs to be SEO friendly, they need to adhere to an intentional structure. The natural flow is an introduction, a body, and a conclusion (similar to writing an essay). Build out an outline before you begin the writing process and consider writing your intro and conclusion after you’ve written the body copy in order to make sure everything aligns. Remember to follow the ‘triangle’ and ‘upside down triangle’ structure for your intro and conclusion, meaning the intro should start broad and get narrow and the conclusion should start narrow and get broader.
Also, there is a good possibility that the majority of your readers are on mobile, so make it easy for them to read the content and avoid large blocks of text. Keep paragraphs short (2-4 sentences long) and take advantage of the various formatting options i.e. bold, italic, underline to make the text more engaging.
5. Use lists
Listicles perform better than any other blog type, especially if you’d like to get featured as a snippet on Google. Structure your blog so it is in a list format.
6. Use keywords in nearly every part of your blog.
Ultimately, keywords should be used in nearly every part of your blog: the title, the body, photos, and headers. However, do not keyword stuff. Not only does it make content cumbersome, but search engines are too smart for that these days. From your list of keywords, insert them in the content only where it feels organic and makes sense. Also, Google can recognize synonyms and other related keywords, so use those when possible to make your writing flow more naturally. To come up with more ideas of related keywords and synonyms, use a tool like Yoast. It allows you to come up with new phrases based on the initial keyword you plugged in
7. Use headings correctly.
A well-optimized law firm blog post follows these SEO rules when it comes to headings:
There is only one h1 tag on the page: This is usually the same as the <title> of the post, although it doesn’t have to be. What is important is to have only one h1 tag and that heading to include your target keywords.
Use headings in a hierarchical mode: The title of the post is the h1 tag and then the main sections should have an h2 and the subsections an h3.
So, the order of the tags should be H1->H2->H3.
The reason that you should have your content organized in this structural way is simple: It helps search engine spiders during the crawling process and makes the blog post easier to read (and scan) for users.
8. Optimize your meta description.
Craft a readable, compelling meta description for each of your posts and don’t forget to incorporate target keywords. Google may choose to show your description in the results so it has to be informative and interesting to encourage users to click your link and visit your blog. Remember to include a keyword in your meta description and avoid writing anything ‘click-bait-ey’. Your meta description should give a good overview of what the blog discusses while making its value proposition clear. Meta descriptions can be any length, but Google generally truncates snippets to ~155–160 characters.
Related: How Law Firms Can Create Compelling Meta Descriptions.
9. Include media
You should work to include different types of media in your blog. Try creating unique infographics, images, and videos, but if you have to, you can also get royalty-free images from a source like Shutterstock. Using media helps break up large chunks of text and allows you to communicate complex ideas in another format.
10. Optimize your images and other media elements with ALT Text.
Images, videos, infographics, and other media elements will make your law firm’s blog post more engaging to read and more SEO friendly. It enhances the quality of your content and helps break up the text. In order for Google to understand the context of your media elements, follow the important rule of adding ALT Text to describe the appearance of the content. The ALT Text of an image is an opportunity to use related keywords in your blog post.
11. Optimize the length of your blog post.
You need at least 300 words to make your law firm’s blog content count, but don’t overdo it. Google tends to favor longer articles, but if your article is too long then it’s likely to deter readers. We suggest creating content between 1,500-2,000 words only if the topic is somewhat complex and you’re confident in your writing skills.
12. Link to other content from your firm’s website.
Whenever you write a new blog, try to ‘associate it’ with already published blog posts by adding internal links. Internal linking is a very effective and easy-to-follow SEO technique that has a number of benefits. For instance, interlinking helps search engines discover new pages on your website and it’s a simple way to give readers an option to click a link and read more about a topic. It’s one of the techniques you can use to reduce the bounce rate and keep users on your website for more time.
13. Include links to influential and reputable websites.
As you build out your blog post, be sure to link to at least one other reputable article or blog. Linking to applicable and reputable websites not only offers blog readers additional reading material to expand their knowledge, but it also shows Google and other search engines that you’ve done your research. And the blogger or writer may even return the favor and link to your site. Refer to our past blog post to learn more about the importance of backlinks for SEO.
14. Update your blog regularly.
Consistently adding content to your website shows Google that your site is active. That being said, don’t post just to post. Post when you have high-quality, informative content. You might put together an editorial calendar so that you can schedule out ideas and material and are less likely to scramble every week. You could also outsource content creation to The Legal Writers Bureau to make sure your blog is maintained consistently.
15. Optimize your URL
Your blog’s URL should be clear and give readers insight into what it’s discussing. Try including a keyword in the URL too to enhance SEO.
Takeaway
Law firm marketers should always aim to write and/or publish blog content that’ll rank highly on Google, and SEO is the bridge that’ll help you get there. Follow the guidelines explained above to write SEO friendly law firm blog posts and if you have existing blog posts that are not optimized, allocate some time to go back and make the necessary changes.
If you need assistance developing a comprehensive SEO strategy that will improve your search visibility and increase the number of visitors to your firm’s website, contact us for assistance.
