Website Content Marketing For Law Firms

A quality law firm website requires many components, and website content is at the heart of it. To reach potential clients with your message and brand yourself as the legal expert in your practice area, the content on your site must be high-quality.

Yet, it’s also important to have quality content for SEO purposes. Content has a direct impact on search engine rankings, making it a critical component of digital marketing.

So, how can you create good law firm website content that works with your search engine optimization goals and get the right message to prospective clients? The answer lies in creating a legal content strategy for your website.

With a content strategy in place, every piece of content you create for your website integrates well with your web design and your marketing goals. This helps attorney websites and website owners create rich, compelling content that appeals to the readers and the search engines.

Your legal website is your online storefront. It shows potential clients what you offer, who you are, and why they should hire you for their legal needs. It must convey the right image if you are going to grow your firm through online marketing.

Yet, that goes beyond just website design. Website visitors are coming to your site for information. A site that has high-quality content is going to impress. Specifically, law firm website content helps your firm in these ways:

1. Improves your image

The quality of your content has a direct impact on your image to website visitors. If a potential client finds a website full of misspellings and grammatical errors, they will not trust you as a lawyer. Informative, well-written content also brands you as a thought leader.

2. Improves your search engine optimization

The content on your site is what the search engines crawl when deciding rankings, including the title tags, meta descriptions, and the content itself.

According to Moz, website content helps with your SEO efforts in two ways. First, it offers a search-friendly, crawlable resource to help the search bots find your website. Second, it shows the search engines that your site is relevant, important, and useful.

Ultimately, quality content directly impacts how well your website performs in the search engine results.

3. Improves your website’s user experience

Most people come to a legal web page looking for information of some sort. It may be contact information for a law practice, legal advice for their legal problem, or testimonials that help them trust the law firm for which they are searching.

Without content, they won’t be able to get what they need from your website. Content means you get a great user experience on your site, and that, in turn, helps improve your SEO by reducing your bounce rate and other negative metrics.

If you invest time and energy in web content for your law firm, you will want to consider some essential tips. These practices will help your law practice with its content writing goals so that you can support your digital marketing efforts.

Law firm website content will be high-quality content when it follows standard rules for web content writing.

Make it pertinent

You can write content that is quite lengthy, but it may lack quality. Make sure your content is pertinent to the information your readers need to know.

Make it readable

First, make the content readable to the average viewer. Keep in mind that content for legal websites often has terminology average readers don’t understand. Translate this into something most people can understand.

To make your content readable, you also can add headings that make it easy to scan the page and see what it says. Never put more than 300 words per heading to help with this.

Finally, make it short. Sentences should be 20 words or fewer most of the time. Paragraphs should be four to five sentences.

Make it active

Passive voice is a common grammar mistake that many writers (understandably) make. However, you should avoid using it as much as possible in your writing. Instead of saying::

• The lawsuit is scheduled to go to court on Friday.

Say:

• The court will hear the lawsuit on Friday.

Active voice writing is more concise and more direct. These both help the quality of your writing.

Online tools like the Hemmingway App can help you analyze your website for active and passive voice.

Focus on proper grammar

In addition to using active voice, make sure your grammar is strong. Use tools like Grammarly to double-check your grammar and spelling before publication.

Be direct

When someone lands on your site, give them the answer to their question or need right away. Site visitors will click away quickly if they feel that your website’s content rambles without providing the information they need.

If your page will answer more than one question, keep the answers close to the headings. This structure impresses the reader and tells the search engines that your site will deliver what the searcher wants to find.

To effectively use content, you must have an effective content strategy. Without a strategy in place, you will waste your time creating content that does not convert. So, how can you make a content strategy?

Start with keyword research

First, you must perform keyword research. Keyword research involves finding those phrases people will use to search for the type of content you offer.

To perform keyword research, use tools like SEMrush or ahrefs.com. You can also do some searching on your own and see what pops up for your key search terms. Check related searches at the bottom of the page, and see if you can incorporate some of that terminology in your pages.

You can also research your competition by pasting a URL into a keyword research tool. The tool will instantly show you what keywords the competitor is ranking well for, and you can incorporate those into your content.

Consider your marketing goals

Next, consider your marketing goal for your online content. Do you want to gain leads, get new clients, or work on your firm’s branding? Identifying this goal will direct the focus of your content creation.

Write to search intent

When you decide content to write, consider the intention of the people searching for a particular keyword. Write content that fulfills that intent.

For instance, if someone searches “family law attorney near me,” chances are they have a family law concern and need to hire an attorney. You should target this keyword to that particular need, incorporating other keyword strands that would also meet the need of someone with a family law concern.

Schedule your content carefully

Scheduling content to keep your website fresh and relevant is a key component of a content strategy. Create a publication calendar that includes press releases, blog posts, and new website pages so you always have something fresh to publish.

Use content briefs

Finally, using all of the information above, create content briefs. A content brief is an outline that a writer uses to write content. The brief should include:

• All important keywords
• Links that make you look authoritative
• Purpose of the page
• Information about search intent
• Links to competitors you wish to outrank
• Word count

A well-thought-out content brief that has these details will lead to high-quality content that meets your goals.

Consider hiring help

As an attorney, you are a busy professional. It takes a lot of effort and time to run a successful law firm. You may not have the time to write clean, effective content.

Not only that, but your expertise is in law, not web copy. While your legal work does mean you spend quite a bit of time writing, that writing is for a legal audience, not a client audience.

You need a professional who understands web content writing and has the time to focus on your content needs.

Thankfully, you can get help with this task. Professional copywriters and website design firms often provide content creation as part of their overall service offerings.

Unless you are an expert at Google Analytics, keyword research, and writing, you may struggle to write quality law firm website content. Content and content strategy is where Array Digital can help.

We offer content planning and creation as part of our comprehensive SEO marketing packages for law firms.

Our team includes skilled legal writers who can help you build a library of excellent content that will help your marketing goals. Partnering with us allows you to focus on your firm while we focus on building your content.

Because our focus is on digital marketing, specifically search engine optimization, web design, social media and PPC advertising, you have the confidence that the content we create will help you rank well. We also work entirely within the legal field, so we know how to reach your target audience.

Don’t leave your content creation to chance. Partner with the experts at Array Digital to start generating effective content that converts. Use your website content to bring in new search traffic and turn that traffic into new cases.

A well-designed website generates new business. That requires the right content. Call the legal digital marketing experts of Array Digital at 757-333-3021 to speak to a member of our experienced legal team.

Or, use our online contact form, and we’ll be in touch!