As lawyers, you can leverage your deep knowledge of your practice to help you obtain the clients and cases you want.
Think about it: you often know the judges and opposing counsel, understand procedure, have a general idea of how a case will unfold, and know what makes a case worth your effort.
You also know what questions your clients usually have.
When you combine this knowledge with blogging, which is a great tool for organically boosting your search engine rankings (also known as SEO), writing about your practice by providing a resource to potential clients is a great way to get the kinds the of cases you actually want.
The problem is a lot of lawyers get it wrong. They write these clunky, lengthy blogs with footnotes at the end that are written more for a legal community than for a client. It’s painful.
So here’s a guide for lawyers who want to write better blogs, boost their SEO, and get better clients.
Blogging Basics
Your blog should include the following:
- 600-800 words. Google likes length. It’s perfectly fine to write a blog that’s 1200 words, but just remember that you need to keep it skimmable. We have short attention spans, especially if we are trying gather information from the web.
- Linking to two sources. You will need at least two links to reputable sources. Reputable sources are not other law firms (they’re your competitors) or random articles. Look at news sources, particular for local news in your area. You can also site reputable legal sites like bar associations or government websites.
Hint: Notice this blog. Have you found our two link outs? See how we hyperlinked the text rather than inserting the whole website or footnoting? Do that. Search engines won’t read the link, but they’ll read the text as a full sentence.
- Linkback. A linkback is a hyperlink that directs people to a different page on your website. If a person clicks it, they stay on your page longer. As far as web traffic goes, this tells Google that people are finding the information on your website useful and relevant. Be careful not to linkback to something random. Keep it relevant.
- Keywords. Yes, you can get scientific here and do SEO research on what keywords work well (we do that), but for your sake let’s keep it simple. If you’re a family law attorney handling estates and wills in Seattle, you’ll want to have the following words peppered throughout the blog: estate lawyer, wills, Seattle, Washington, family, inheritance.
Formatting
Use this blog as an example. Look at its structure and formatting and mimic with these tips:
- Bullets and numbering. Lists are your friends. It helps keep things concise and makes it readable.
- Keep it casual. Avoid jargon unless you explain it. First person is ok! Use bold and italics when it makes sense. Let that old English teacher roll over in her grave.
- AP style-ish. What makes reading a newspaper (either online or print) so easy and quick for people is that reporters write in one or two sentence paragraphs.
If a point can stand on its own, let it stand on its own.
Writing in this style will also help make your keywords pop on the page.
It is also a much quicker way to write.
Point made?
If you follow the style and tips given in this blog, you are on your way to leading organic traffic to your law firm’s website.
One last thing to note: bar associations have ethics rules that govern online advertising for attorneys. Make sure you’ve read your bar’s rules before putting information out there.
Still not sure where to start? Need a website before you can start blogging? Can’t think of good blog topics for your legal practice? Let’s have a conversation…