Content Marketing for Law Firms: What It Is and What To Do

Creating quality content is probably not at the top of a lawyer or law firm’s list of objectives. Instead, a lawyer may want to focus on real-world cases — not coming up with a content marketing strategy. However, marketing your law firm will likely help generate leads and reach the potential clients necessary for a healthy caseload.

A law firm marketing strategy will undoubtedly include a blog, which, in turn, must adhere to proper SEO best practices to maintain visibility in search engines, and attract readers with well-informed articles — letting them know that you and your firm are representative of experts in the field and can be trusted to navigate a potential client’s legal matters.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the strategic creation and distribution of content that is geared toward your target audience. At its core, content marketing involves carefully crafting digital content to attract prospects to:

● Generate leads/turn those prospects into customers;
● Expand a company’s customer base;
● Create brand awareness and loyalty;
● Provide information to (potential) customers;
● Increase online visibility and engagement;
● Encourage sales.

A strong content marketing strategy will be deployed across several media sources — news, email, photos, blogging — and should include social media marketing (SMM). While social media is vital to your content marketing strategy, a blog containing content that is optimized for search engines can reach your target audience while increasing traffic to your law firm’s site — that is, if you are writing the right kind of content for your audience.

What Should I Write For My Law Firm Blog?

It’s one thing to have a blog for your law firm, but developing ideas for your next blog post can be difficult — and who is to say that the topic will land with your target audience? Furthermore, if you aren’t optimizing your blog post for search engines, it may not be displayed in the search results when someone types in a query closely related to the topics you’re covering. To create quality content for your law firm blog, a content writer will need to incorporate keyword, competitor, and audience research.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is an element of SEO that can illuminate such information as:

● What is your target audience searching for;
● How they are searching for these things;
● Where these searchers are.

This information can help a law firm come up with topics for their blog that will interest their readers, while at the same time signaling to search engines that this information is expertly presented, authoritative, and hosted on your law firm’s website. For instance, if a potential client were to search for “what to do after a car crash,” but your content only contained keywords pertaining to “personal injury lawyer,” you may be missing out on an opportunity to capture a reader via your blog – and therefore, a qualified visitor to your law firm’s website.

By doing keyword research, you can write timely pieces to capitalize on readership as well. For instance, a new law may have just been proposed through your local city council. By providing insight on this new proposal (with a blog post containing the proper keywords) a law firm will attract readers who are searching for related information. From here, you can prompt readers to visit other blog posts on your domain and/or seek other legal advice through your firm.

Keyword research requires a critical look at your target audience, proficient SEO skills, and the proper SEO tools. As lawyers may not have the time or know-how to facilitate this type of SEO strategy, hiring a third-party agency to run an SEO campaign has become a popular option for firms that want to stick to what they do best — law. An agency which specializes in SEO can better help you develop a strategic plan for on-page and off-page SEO, as well as provide insights into the technical SEO that works behind the scenes of your website.

Audience and Competitor Research

Audience research should at least be touched upon during your keyword research, but you may want to dive extensively into this facet of the content strategy. Gain a comprehensive understanding of what your audience wants to read about, and conduct research to distinguish your target audience demographics to determine their preferences.

When strategizing content creation, come up with topics that will be both interesting to your target audience and relevant to the services your law firm provides. Additionally, you can take a look at content that is doing well on competing law firms’ websites and gather topic ideas from there.

The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto principle has been applied to economics, time management, and even sports. People who apply the 80/20 rule to economics, for example, state that 20% of a country’s population holds 80% of its wealth. This same principle can be used for most any blog post a law firm writes and publishes.

Generally, and in this context, the rule-of-thumb should be to aim for 80% of your blog to be informational, while 20% of content can be promotional. Advertorial content may be directly beneficial to your blog and law firm, but readers can view it as annoying and may be turned away by it. Highly informational content with actionable advice, on the other hand, can help keep readers stay engaged and be excited to read the next blog post written by your law firm.

Incorporate Social Media

As stated above, social media plays an essential role in your content marketing strategy. Once your blog post is written and published, you can then begin to promote it on social media platforms — increasing awareness of the article and maximizing the effectiveness of the post.

A competing law firm who has developed a content marketing strategy may end up gaining more clients than a firm who is better qualified but is not engaged in content marketing. Correcting this misstep and developing a plan of your own, or enlisting in an agency to provide professional marketing services for you, may keep the competition from getting clients they don’t deserve.