Content marketing is a great way to attract potential clients, it is important to understand that this strategy hardly works in 2019. Why? Because an average user sees 500+ ads on a daily basis.
It means that your ad will be buried somewhere in the cluster and people may never even see it. In fact, the majority of consumers don’t pay attention to these ads and that’s why paid marketing is no longer considered as effective as it used to be.
Today consumers prefer authority and authenticity over everything. People want to connect to the business before they purchase their services and this is true for every industry, including the legal market.
Displaying fancy ads across different platforms of the Internet will no longer bring clients to your law firm. Instead, you’ll have to focus on utilizing strategies that help you connect with the customers.
One of the easiest ways to nurture a healthy relationship with your clients and provide value to them is to use content marketing. Like any other business, content marketing can be an effective way to connect with your customers and climb the search engine ladder at the same time.
Since both Google and site visitors prefer valuable content, there’s no harm in including content marketing in your SEO for lawyers’ campaign.
However, it is worth noting that content marketing is not just about publishing a bunch of blogs. If you want targeted traffic, it is important to develop a dedicated content marketing strategy for your law firm.
In this guide, we’ll help you understand the process of developing a content marketing plan that generates leads and boost the overall conversion.
What is Content Marketing and Why You Need it for Your Law Firm’s Website?
Content marketing is the practice of generating and publishing valuable content that engages site visitors. Unlike traditional marketing, the goal is to provide value to the clients and resolve their issues rather than simply selling your services.
In the case of law firms, an effective content marketing plan would help you build trust with your visitors and turn them into long-term potential clients. As a result, whenever the clients will need assistance with legal matters, they’ll come to you.
Another reason why content marketing is an effective SEO strategy is that it can easily become a lead generation magnet for your business. Studies have shown that law firms that utilize content marketing have 3x more leads than the ones that rely on paid ads.
So, now that you know the significance of content marketing for lawyers, let’s start with the actual guide you’ll require to build an effective content marketing strategy.
Start With Keyword Research
The first and foremost phase of developing a content marketing plan is to perform keyword research. Obviously, you need to target specific search queries that people use to find legal services.
Keyword Research is the process of utilizing different online SEO tools to find the most potential keywords (search queries) for your website. Once you have the list of keywords, all you have to do is optimize your content for them.
Follow these steps while performing keyword research for your law firm’s website.
Start with creating a list of relevant topics that people may use to find the services that you offer. For instance, if you are a personal injury lawyer, your clients are most likely to search for topics such as ‘What to do after a car accident’ or ‘legal process after car accident’. List down all the topics and move towards the next step.
Once you have the list of topics, the next step would be to brainstorm different keyword ideas people may search for. For instance, people looking for personal injury lawyers are most likely to use search phrases such as ‘car accident attorneys’, ‘lawyers after car accident’, or ‘attorneys for personal injury’. Similarly, look for the phrases that relate to the parent topic.
The next step is to use a dedicated keyword research tool to find related keyword ideas and compare them on the basis of different keyword metrics like search volume, competition, and CPC.
The last step is to narrow down your list to the most potential keywords. To achieve the best results, it is always a great strategy to target keywords that have a decent search volume and low competition.
Take a look at our detailed keyword research guide to understand the entire process from scratch.
Create Valuable, Informative, and Well-Optimized Content
Once you have all the potential keywords in your quiver, it’s time to craft the actual content. While creating content, however, there are a couple of things that you must remember. First of all, create content that people actually want to read.
Whether it’s a blog post, a landing page, or a new website page, it is important to write content that provides value to the reader. Rather than making it sound like a sales pitch, craft your content to resolve a customer query.
It is also an effective SEO strategy to experiment with different types of content formats to find the one that suits your audience.
Here are some of the different content formats you can experiment with.
Blogs
Web Pages
Videos
Podcasts
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can use to create valuable content.
Write Comprehensive Blogs
As a lawyer, it is your responsibility to familiarize your clients with different legal topics. That’s why it is always a good strategy to publish long blog posts that talk about a specific topic in detail.
Publishing longer content has several other benefits as well. Believe it or not, but longer blog posts have a better scope to rank in the top positions of Google search results. In fact, if you take a look at the first five pages in Google SERP, they are most likely to have 2000+ words.
Another potential benefit of publishing longer blog posts is that they help you connect with the audience by precisely resolving their queries. When you publish longer content, it becomes easier to talk about a particular topic in detail.
However, make sure that your content is informative (from start to end). In the process of writing lengthier blog posts, people often tend to go off-topic and make their content fluffy. This is the last thing you’d want to do as such content pieces damage the user engagement.
As long as you stick to the topic and write relevant content, you can even write 5000 words blog post.
Be Transparent
The best way to generate quality content is to stay 100% transparent throughout the blog. Provide accurate information and stick to ethical legal SEO practices. This will make it easier to build brand authority and nurture a healthy relationship with the readers at the same time.
Proofread Every Content Piece
Every writer is likely to make mistakes while writing the first draft of their blog. So, before publishing any content piece, make sure to proofread it. This will help you remove technical and grammatical errors.
In case you don’t have an in-house team of legal editors, read the entire post yourself or have someone else read it and make the essential changes. Also perform the required on-page optimization to make your content SEO-friendly.
Distribute and Promote Content Across Different Platforms
Now, that you have crafted the perfect content piece, it’s time to distribute and promote it across different platforms on the Internet.
Distributing the content means reaching out to different channels and sending your content to share it with others. Promoting the content, on the other hand, involves paid marketing as well.
Obviously, you can promote content without spending a single penny, but if you want effective results, it is a better strategy to take help from Facebook and Google ads to get more exposure for your blogs.
Finally, Convert Visitors into Potential Leads
By this point, you have already attracted visitors to your website and it’s time to convert them into potential leads. To do so, it is important to place CTAs (Call to Actions) throughout the web page so that one time visitors can be converted into leads that purchase your services.
While adding CTAs, however, make sure to be transparent. Your CTAs should stand out from the rest of the content. So, make sure to be direct and tell readers what they’ll get after clicking on a particular button.
For instance, ‘Download Our free Guide’ or ‘Click to Schedule a Call’.
Conclusion
That concludes our content marketing guide for law firms. If you are also struggling with low website traffic, utilizing content marketing can help. However, it is worth noting that content marketing is a gradual process.
You can’t expect your website to rank in the top positions of Google search results with one blog. It’ll require anywhere between 6-10 months and dozens of informative content pieces for expected results to appear through content marketing.
However, the results achieved through SEO and content marketing are always long-term. So, hire a team of professional SEO experts and let the professional content marketers handle the entire content marketing campaign for your website.
