If you are going to make a new year’s resolution about your law firm marketing in the next few weeks, I would suggest you seriously consider improving your law firm blog.
I have spoken about blogs in the Law Firm Marketing 101 series before, but I need to stress how important these opinion soap boxes are, as they do way more than offer information and advice to possible clients.
What makes blogs so powerful?
Content is King
Google (let’s face it – I can talk about search engine systems, but we all know that what Google does or thinks is most important and if you follow their trends in marketing online, you fall in line with what the other search engines are doing – so it makes it easier just to mention Google when referring to search engines in general) from the beginning of time has always tried to push website administrators or authors to produce great content, and even in the years of black hat SEO and false content promotion techniques, great content always found its way through for improved search ranking. Lawyers communicate well; a blog should not be foreign territory.
My only tip for writing great content in your blog, is to first write down your keyword terms and choose the ones you want for the new article, so that you ensure that the keywords are used throughout the article.
People want free advice
Before people pick up the phone and call their favourite lawyer, they generally do a Google search to see what information they can gather before engaging. This is your opportunity to give them enough content to help, but entice them to contact you for further help.
It tells the reader that you care enough to help the community, that you are an expert in that field and that you are available should they need further advice – obviously, the goal is to get them to call for a billed consultation.
SEO food
If your blog is external to your website and has links back to you law firm website, you will generate great SEO food in the links back and forth.
Social Media food
You blog content allows you to speak about and link to your blog articles in your social media, pulling people into the blog for good content.
Newsletter food
Use your blog content in your newsletter, use the introduction paragraph to entice people to click through to the blog.
Regular content
You should decide up front how often you are going to add a new topic to the blog and stick to that – I would suggest at least once a fortnight. It is easier if you have a number of partners/associates to call on for content and get them writing – but make sure you have a schedule of when they need to deliver the content to the blog admin person.
Try to find blogs, articles or social media that are related to your keyword topics and comment there referring to your articles in your blog, if relevant.
To get ideas, tips and inspiration on starting or improving your law firm blog, visit Kevin O’Keefe’s “Real Lawyers Have Blogs” blog, he is the master of law firm blogs…hands down.
