5 Important Tips for Your Legal Content Strategy
By Nancy Rapp on April 11, 2023 in Content Marketing & Promotion Content Writing
Creating content for your law firm’s website is no small task. The most effective lawyer content marketing strategies encompass a variety of content styles and require a fair amount of research. Accordingly, we have included a quick guide to help you begin a new content strategy or modify your law firm’s existing approach:
1) Conduct keyword research.
Many attorneys incorrectly assume that keyword research only applies to SEO campaigns. In reality, keyword research is a critical first step for all content marketing campaigns.
You need to do this kind of research to determine the trending searches in your area and how much content you’ll need to create. For example, don’t waste too much time crafting train accident content if it only yields ten searches a month. Yes, you may want these cases for your practice, but there may not be enough internet searches to justify a vast amount of content dedicated to these claims.
Similarly, proper keyword research also demonstrates your keyword difficulty. If the number is high, you’ll need to invest more time in that practice area’s quality and quantity of content to outperform the competition.
2) Review the content on your competitors websites.
It’s important to review several competitor’s websites when developing your law firm’s content strategy. Select competitors by way of direct search (i.e., typing in the law firm’s name) and conduct a Google search to see which firms are performing well in your desired practice areas.
When conducting your research, make a note of several factors:
- Amount of content on the homepage and practice area pages. Do the attorneys in your area have a lot of information about their claims, or is it more or less just a stylized page without text. The more the other firms have, the more content you probably need, as well.
- What practice areas or claims do they mention? Though you may already know what claims you’d like to target, another website may inspire you to craft content for additional legal matters. Along those lines, you may also be inspired to write about content that your competitors lack. For example, if you’re a family lawyer and none of your competitors write about parental alienation, this may be a low-hanging fruit that you can grab with some content.
- Look for multimedia content presentations. If your top competitors have details like videos, infographics, and other more creative content formats, that may be something to keep on the back burner for when you’re done with your written material.
3) Outline content silos.
As mentioned in #1, some practice areas are going to be more competitive than others. That means certain practice areas simply need more content. It’s a good rule of thumb to include 1,000 words per page, but some legal areas require far more than that on the page and on additional subpages.
The trick to incorporating hubs into your attorney content marketing campaign is to break down practice areas into individual claims. Examples include:
- Break car accident cases into types of accidents: DUI, distracted driving, rideshare accidents, etc.
- Divide medical malpractice into categories: hospital negligence, misdiagnosis, birth injuries, etc.
- Create pages for individuals crimes: white-collar defense, sex crimes, etc.
There is no harm with adding more content to your site unless it’s repetitive. Many content marketing campaigns see success with a significant amount of content—so if something makes legal sense to add it, go ahead and write it.
4) Remember your audience.
All too often, law firms draft web content that reads more like a legal brief than assistance for a potential client. Though some of your content may be to show legal authority, in general, you are writing to the general public. In order to prevent a site visitor from getting frustrated with your site, you need to keep the following content writing tips in mind:
- As a rule, strive for an eighth-grade reading level
- Divide up your content with bullets and headings
- Don’t talk about too many topics on one page
- Include FAQs
Further, put yourself in the shoes of a site visitor. For many of your practice areas, a potential client will be feeling overwhelmed, unhappy and confused if they need to hire a lawyer. Your goals are to make the site visitor feel comfortable with your law firm and show that you can help them with their specific legal question. Thus, your content should walk clients through legal matters to understand why they need a lawyer and what you will do to help them.
Additionally, writing for your target audiences includes more than simply drafting practice area pages. For example, your potential clients want to know what makes your law firm better than the other firm with an impressive website. Therefore, make sure your legal content marketing strategy includes pages like case results, testimonials, etc., to showcase your successes.
5) Your content marketing strategy must continue to evolve.
All too often, attorneys create a content strategy, write the material and then never touch their core content again. (Note: core content is often referred to as “evergreen content,” as well.) This is a fatal mistake as competitor websites improve, Google algorithms change, and keyword trends shift.
Monitoring your content marketing campaign is critical to your success. See which pages are performing as desired by tracking which pages yield conversions versus which pages have a high bounce rate.
Even if the data proves positive, you still need to keep up with the evolving trends in legal marketing. Add subpages to your existing hubs. Invest in the multimedia options mentions in #2. It may even be worth it to update your website design if your site pales in comparison to your competitors.
The strongest attorney content marketing campaign with a high yield of client conversions still has the potential to drop over time. Thus, continuously evolving your content strategy based on data and implementing the other tips above are critical to your success.
