How To Make Legal Blogs Interesting And SEO Friendly

Your law firm’s blog provides a key way to connect with current and prospective clients, not to mention driving more traffic to your website. Therefore, care must be taken when creating articles. They must satisfy both the reader and Google, which is not always an easy thing to do, especially for Solicitors who already have a full workload to deal with. Fortunately, there are some tricks you can use to ensure your website articles are engaging and convert readers into clients.

Understand the basics of SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO), done properly, is a complex craft; however, to succeed in legal writing, you only need to know the basics. A professionally qualified SEO expert can optimise your article before it is posted. All you need to do is the following:

• Know where to place keywords - the keywords of the article should appear in the title, first sentence, and be dotted naturally through the piece. Take this article for example. The key words are ‘legal blog’ which appear in the aforementioned places. The trick is to ensure the keywords flow naturally through the piece, ‘keyword stuffing’ could result in Google downranking your articles and penalising your entire website.

• Be consistent -it is better to post one article per month than six one month and nothing for the next six months. Ideally, try and publish once a week or once a fortnight, depending on the size of your firm and the practice areas you want to focus on. Immigration and personal injury are highly competitive; therefore, posting quality content two or three times per week will help boost your rankings. If your firm specialises in less generic practice areas such as corporate finance and luxury goods, two blogs a month is perfectly sufficient.

• Read and understand how to apply Google’s Helpful Content principles - in December 2022, Google rolled out its helpful content update to improve the quality of the search results it provides to readers. To rank highly, your articles must answer readers questions, demonstrate your firm’s knowledge and experience in the subject matter, and provide a genuine and valuable reader experience.

• Long copy sells – it may seem counter-intuitive but people would rather read a 2,000 word article that delves deeply into a topic than 400 words of fluff. Ideally, your legal blogs should be 800-1200 words long.

• Include links to authoritative sources – this will increase the value of an article as the reader can read further by clicking on hyper-links to other websites. However, ensure that the content you link to is respected. You will not do yourself any favours by including links from sites such as Buzzfeed and Vice. Instead, track down primary sources such as case law, ONS findings, and government papers. This demonstrates to the reader and Google that you have done your research. Your SEO professional can then focus on getting other authoritative websites to provide genuine backlinks to your law firm’s content.

Include a mix of evergreen and trending content in your legal blog publishing schedule

Legal blogs should form part of a larger content marketing strategy which includes videos, social media posts, landing pages, and editorials. When creating your legal blog publishing schedule, be sure to include both evergreen content and trending topics. Evergreen content is content that will give value to your readers for years to come. These blogs also provide a perfect platform in which to emphasise particular keywords. For example, your family law department’s blogs should have a series of evergreen articles such as:

• “What is a pre/post nuptial agreement?”

• “How are divorce financial settlements calculated”?

• “How do I get divorced in England and Wales (or Scotland or Northern Ireland)?”

• “What is a child arrangement order”?

• “What is a MIAM”?

Trending content, on the other hand, discusses things such as new case law, topics that are hot in the news, legislative changes, and government/law commission papers and consultations. Articles covering trending content demonstrate to readers and Google that your law firm is alive to new developments in your particular practice areas.

Write for your audience

You need to ascertain who your audience is and write in the style with which they are comfortable. For example, this article is written for those in the legal profession, so it is fairly conservative and professional in terms of language and style. If your firm specialises in personal injury, your blogs must be straightforward and easy to read in terms of simple language and sentence structures as you are writing for a wide-ranging audience with varying levels of age and education. Immigration law blogs need to be created with the knowledge that for many readers, English is their second language. At the other end of the spectrum, commercial property, corporate finance, and tax law pieces need to be drafted in a way that respects the intelligence and sophistication of those likely to be interested in such content.

Overlaying the above is the importance of developing your law firm’s tone of voice. This should match your brand and values. Think about how you want your business to come across. Do not try to be all things to all people. For example, some law firms brand themselves as tough, never give up, no-nonsense negotiators and litigators. Others want to promote values of compassion and non-confrontational approaches to solving client problems. Neither is right or wrong. What matters is discovering your tone of voice and applying it consistently throughout all the content you create.

Use AI carefully

Yes, AI language models such as ChatGPT can help time-pressed legal professionals create more content in a short amount of time. However, whatever ChatGPT or Bard etc presents to you must be thoroughly checked for accuracy and edited to ensure your law firm’s tone of voice and style is reflected. The fastest way to devalue your website and brand over time is to publish masses of unedited, unchecked AI-generated content.

Concluding comments

An engaging, SEO-optimised legal blog will, over time, help you attract more clients and increase website conversions, provided it is well-planned, well-written, and emphasises the positives of your brand. Yes, it takes time to write interesting, carefully researched articles but you are guaranteed to see results if you consistently publish valuable pieces readers can enjoy.

Albion Legal provides a range of added value products and services, from bespoke employment disputes insurance cover to white-labelled HR software. To discuss any points in the above article or to find out how we can help your business, please phone 0113 2471 717 or email our team.