Tips For a Well Written and Optimized Attorney Biography Page

If you’re like most professionals with an online presence, you put a lot of thought into the content that goes on your website. You’re aware of what potential clients are looking for, and you’ve got some ideas about SEO. You know that attracting new visitors and leads is about a lot more than just churning out any kind of content you can think of and putting it online.

One thing you probably haven’t thought about, though, is your online biography. Your bio page can be an absolute goldmine when it comes to search engine optimization and generating free traffic back to your firm’s website. In fact, in the case of lawyers, up to 80% of the traffic coming from search engines can be attributed to bio pages.

What does your attorney biography page look like? If you’ve just more or less copied and pasted your resume, it’s time to take a step back and rethink the possibilities. There’s much more you can do with your online bio, and much more that it can do for you and your firm.

Why You Should Write A Professional Bio

Putting together a professional bio can be time consuming, but in the end, it is well worth the effort. Once it’s completed, you’ll find that it keeps on giving back, and probably in more ways than you expected.

Your Bio Can Take Many Forms In Many Places

For your own website, you should write a full length biography that goes over your education, experience and personal attributes. It doesn’t stop there though. Using your original bio as a starting point, you can create shorter, custom bio entries that can be used in a number of different ways. For example, you can use some form of your bio on:

• Social media pages
• Professional forums and message boards
• Professional directories
• Event/Conference/Webinar information pages
• Web or print content contributions

All of these different channels provide an opportunity for you to highlight your professional qualifications and encourage visitors to come back to your own website. In the cases where you can include direct links, those links will also help a bit with SEO.

A Well Written Bio Page Is Naturally Full Of Keywords

Your biography page is a great way to get all kinds of keywords relevant to your services and the problems you help to solve into a single web page. As you’re talking about yourself, you’re naturally going to mention the services you provide, your education, notable past cases, etc.

Even a short bio is going to be rich with the keywords that your target audience will enter in a web search. When it comes to SEO, these pages have a very good chance of ranking well for large numbers of different keywords and phrases.

Bio Pages Help To Instill Trust

In many cases, when someone sees content from you or your firm that they like, their next step will be to look over the author’s bio to glean a bit more information about the person who wrote it.

A well written bio will make that person feel like they’ve gotten to know you better. It will take the level of trust up a notch. If the reader likes what they see, they’ll often go looking for more content written by the same person as they move along the path from anonymous visitor to bonafide lead.

Points To Include In Your Online Bio

The key to putting together a good bio page is to demonstrate your knowledge and skills without sounding over the top or self-promoting. With that in mind, here are a few things to consider as you’re developing your online biography.

Keep Your Target Audience In Mind

Just like any other content you produce, make sure you’re writing with your target audience in mind. Especially if you’ve got limited space, make sure you get the most relevant information included first.

Tell A Story

Cold, dry facts that read like a resume are boring, and we all know what boring content does to Internet readers. Wherever possible, try to add a bit of the “why” behind the facts. For example, “I then decided to apply Harvard Law School because…” or “I decided to focus on family law because…” Statements like these help to humanize you and keep readers interested in what they are reading.

Leave Them Wanting More

Your bio should contain interesting information, but don’t lay everything out in detail. You’re walking a fine line. You want to give the audience an idea of who you are, but you also want to leave them curious enough that they will seek out more of your content, or better yet, a consultation.

Make It Easy To Connect

Perhaps the most important part of an attorney biography page is an easy-to-follow invitation to connect. Make it easy for the reader to get in touch with you. Where it makes sense, include phone numbers, email address and/or a link to an online form where the viewer can send a message or make a request.

It should be obvious by now that your biography page is one of the most important pages to appear on your website — and even on other websites. Take your time writing it. The effort you put into it will be well spent. When done well, your online biography will not only help attract new visitors, but help convert them into new clients too.

Check out the Legal Writers Bureau for help with crafting a great attorney biography for your website.