Sadaf Tanzeem
Content marketing and SEO are interconnected and need to produce successful results separately. You can only expect to acquire quality backlinks for your target readers or potential clients to stay on your site if you publish rock-solid legal content regularly.
Hence, if you want more and more people to find your law firm's website, creating quality legal content and structuring it for SEO should be the top priority of your law firm's marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll discuss all the aspects of SEO content you should consider to rank higher.
What is SEO Content For Law Firms
SEO content is designed to rank well in search engines like Google. It can be blog posts, landing pages, guides, articles, or videos.
Why Should Law Firms Focus on SEO Content?
The main reason you should focus on creating law firm content is that, as per Google, content is still one of the top three ranking factors. Yet, only some content ranks unless optimized for SEO. Hence, you need SEO content.
However, unlike pay-per-click marketing tactics (where you can spend hundreds of dollars to rank at the top), SEO for lawyers requires effective utilization of resources to rank higher.
If your goal is to grow your law practice beyond referrals and word-of-mouth marketing, then this is what you need.
Related: SEO Writing: How To Create Articles That Search Engines Rank
Types of SEO Content
Blog Posts
Blog posts should be your top priority if you want to win the content game. It’s a regular stream of law firm content that you can produce in less time that can attract more traffic over time.
Secondly, it allows you to target long-tail keywords as your primary keyword. In an analysis of 306 million keywords, Backlinko found that 91.8% of search queries are long tail keywords.
Plus, fresh and updated content gives more reasons for Google's algorithm to index your website.
Long-form content
Long-form content keeps readers on your blog for longer, adds value to your website, and generates more links.
Since the keywords naturally fit in such content, it allows you to target a wide range of related terms and generate organic traffic. That way, it also becomes easier for Google bots to crawl and understand what your website content is about.
Videos
Most people on the internet today prefer watching videos. Plus, they’re more engaging than other types of content.
Additionally, an average user may spend more time on a website with a video. Incorporating videos on your web pages can boost your engagement and give the users the information they need.
Lists
List posts are amazing because they allow legal professionals to beef up the article with more keywords and phrases. You can incorporate multiple related key terms in each of the subheaders.
Plus, Google always prefers websites that provide a good user experience. And list articles are one way to do that, as it allows people to scan through the blog post quickly and determine if they want to read it. The title also lets them know what it exactly is about and whether they should click on it.
Trending Content
One of the major aspects of SEO is backlinks. And trending content like newsworthy articles, stories, interviews, or current events can help you get a lot of them.
Even though this type of content is usually short-lived, it can provide a quick traffic hike, increase your brand awareness, and get several domains referring to you. Since finding such content in the legal industry is easier, you can produce such content consistently.
How to Begin Legal Content Writing Targeting Keywords
Before optimizing your SEO content, you need to conduct keyword research. The following methods can help:
- List all the topics on which you want to create content, the seed keywords, and the terms or titles your competitors are ranking for.
- You can also find the search volume and keyword difficulty for those keywords using SEO tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest.
Keywords with low difficulty and higher search volume are the best to target when you’re just beginning with legal writing.
- Search the scout legal forums for relevant keywords and questions you can cover on your blog.
- You can use Google Search Console to find keywords. All you have to do is go to the search results option under "Performance."
Head over to "Pages." From there, inspect the topics that you think you can do better.
- Make sure you target a good mix of keywords with commercial search intent along with navigational and informational keywords. It allows you to target your potential clients in the final stage of their buying journey—for instance, when they’re considering hiring a lawyer.
When you’re done conducting your keyword research, create highly detailed unique content on these topics. Finally, structure your content for SEO and your readers. If you have limited time to spend on legal content writing, you can also consider hiring legal content writers or taking legal content writing services from specialized marketing agencies.
How to Structure Your Blog Post for SEO and Humans: 5 Simple Steps
Study Competitors' Content (that Ranks Right Now!)
Before you go on to creating the best-in-class content that your audience love, you need to figure out what’s already done and what unique value you can provide your audience.
A quick competitor analysis can be a good way to start with it.
Search for the keyword you’re going to create content on and get a general idea of what has already been covered on this topic. Also, try to analyze how you can improve it. For instance, if they just cover what to do if someone's stuck in a certain legal situation, you can elaborate on it and show how to do it.
Besides the top ten search engine results, if you want to analyze some specific or direct competitors, you can do a site search by typing “site: competitor.com + topic.”
Follow Recommendations in Content Optimization Tools
Once done with your research, you need to optimize your content. The easiest way to do it is by following the recommendations of an SEO tool like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Surfer SEO.
It helps you know the best word count you should opt for your topic, how to structure your subheads, how many times you should use different keywords and their unique impact on your content, the questions you should answer in your topics, and much more.
Many law firm content writing agencies provide such services in their overall content marketing package.
Related: How to Create a SEO Content Brief for Freelance Writers
Use Heading Tags to Breakdown Content
Headers are used to separate the headline and subheadings and rank them in order of importance from H1 to H6.
H1 describes what your entire page is about, and H2s highlight the topics you’ll cover in each section, followed by subheadings from H3 to H6. They provide structure to your article, making it scannable and readable instead of a big block of text.
Plus, along with making your readers happy, it pleases Google too, as the search engine uses header tags to gather context for your page. Since Google pays attention to it, you must include your target keywords in your heading tags. Although, be reasonable about it and avoid keyword stuffing.
You can also write them as a long-tail voice search keyword and respond to that question in paragraph tags (within <p>) just below it. It helps you earn the featured snippet. For instance, check the example below.
They have structured their H2 and the paragraph next to it like this.
Since John Mueller has confirmed that Google has an automated system to understand synonyms, all you have to do is structure your content the right way. If all conditions are met, you might win the featured snippet.
Create Well-Optimized Meta Description and URL
Meta Description
Meta description is the summary of what your web page contains that appears in the Google search results.
In 2009, Google announced that meta descriptions or meta keywords are not a ranking factor.
So why are we still discussing it?
Well, if you write a good meta description, it improves your CTR greatly, which, in return, positively impacts your search engine rankings. Plus, if the keywords you use in your meta description match the search query, Google highlights them. It pulls the searcher’s attention to it and improves their chances of clicking on your headline.
So, when you write your next meta description, ensure its length is between 100-155 characters and mention the keywords that closely correspond to the main topic.
URL Structure
An optimized URL can help Google know what your page is about based on its structure if your content isn’t SEO-friendly. Since Google indexes content, URLs are considered a minor ranking factor.
However, adding your primary keyword in the URL clarifies what your page is about and makes it short, which is easy to share.
Give Your Posts a Visual Flavor
Adding images, videos, screenshots, and infographics can increase your web visitors' stay time, make your content more engaging, and give more information for Google to crawl your website and improve its ranking.
But Google can't see as you and I can. Hence, include file names and alt text in your images.
Here are some best practices to optimize your images for SEO:
- Make sure they are of high quality. Consider using JPEG format for images with lots of colors and PNG for simple images.
- Scale down as big image files may slow your page’s loading speed.
- Name your file with descriptive keywords. Consider including the keywords in the beginning and separate them with hyphens. The best practice is to ensure that your file name is clear to both humans and search engines. For example, if an image of a car crashes into another, change your image name from image.jpg to red-and-yellow-cars-crashed-into-each-other.jpg.
- Convey something about the picture in your alt text since Google needs more information to understand your images to index them accurately. For instance, the alt text for the above example image can be “car crash.”
- Make sure that your images are mobile-friendly.
Parting Tip: Update Your Content Regularly
Finally, to maintain the credibility of your website and always provide updated information to your readers, update your law firm's legal content regularly.
Plus, it also has some SEO benefits, as Google loves fresh content. It can bring new traffic to your website, helps you stay relevant, uses up-to-date keywords, and keep up with Google’s algorithm. And you can promote it like any new piece of content.
For instance, if you wrote a blog post explaining certain policies and now the government has made some changes, you can update that article. Similarly, if your blog post includes years — for example, how to hire a lawyer in 2022 — you can change this blog for the current year. However, it can be tricky to answer when you should update your content.
You can also update content to fix grammatical, factual, or other errors.
Sadaf Tanzeem is a B2B SaaS and marketing writer for brands like On The Map Marketing. She collaborates with overwhelmed content marketers and business owners to take the burden of content development off your shoulders.