Is It Tacky for Law Firms to Publish Holiday-Themed Blog Content?

For some types of businesses, the holidays are peak season, so it would be foolish not to publish promotional content on your website for the holidays. Local bakeries would be losing out on a lot of revenue if they did not talk up their Christmas tree-shaped cakes, their cupcakes decorated to look like pumpkins and spiders, and, in certain parts of the country, their Mardi Gras king cakes. Photography studios have to pull out all the stops to compete with each other in November as families get professional photos taken for their Christmas cards. Law firms do tend to see an increase in certain types of cases around the holidays, but anyone who contacts a law firm is not looking for clever advertisements that will convince them to make a purchase. Clients only contact law firms because they have suffered heavy financial losses or are in danger of suffering such losses, or because they are injured, have recently lost a family member, are facing criminal charges, or are going through a family crisis such as divorce or a troubled co-parenting arrangement. Seasonal legal blog content can be effective at engaging prospective clients’ attention and for SEO purposes, but it is important to keep things professional.

Holiday Legal Blog Content Dos and Don’ts

If you are a personal injury lawyer and you publish posts with titles like “Trade in Your Santa Suit for a Lawsuit,” the ghost of Jacob Marley will show up at your door faster than you can say, “Good afternoon.” It is a better idea to take it easy with the holiday-themed gimmicks and, instead, think about the kinds of inquiries you tend to get most of during the holidays, and to publish posts related to those legal issues. Here are some examples:

· Family law – Post content about the holiday-specific provisions of parenting plans and about co-parenting during the holidays. Also post content about Divorce Monday and the legal advantages to initiating your divorce at the beginning of the calendar year.

· Criminal defense – Post content about criminal charges that are most common during the holidays, such as DUI and domestic violence, and possible defenses to them.

· Personal injury – Post content about alcohol-related car accidents and premises liability (such as slip and fall accidents in retail stores). Focus on the legal remedies available to people injured in these kinds of accidents.

· Estate planning – Talk about estate planning as a New Year’s resolution. In December, remind readers of the annual gift tax exclusion, as many retirees give cash gifts to their adult children instead of stocking stuffers.

In other words, the purpose of your blog remains the same throughout the year, namely to inform prospective clients and the public about the laws and about their legal rights.

You Can Go Caroling While Professional Content Writers Write Your Holiday-Themed Blog Content

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will compose custom-written posts, as seasonal or as evergreen as you choose, for your law firm’s blog.

In Praise of Listicles: Thousands of Years of Helping Readers Organize Their Thoughts

Content marketing experts have been saying for years that listicles are a thing of the past. This sentiment often appears in the context of an incitement to embrace the latest trend, whether it is the podcast, the tweet, the e-book, or the short form video. From reading these pieces of advice, you might think that the listicle was a short-lived fad that emerged in the 2000s as blogs replaced email forwards and ended as people’s attention spans grew too short to read an entire list, no matter how short its items might be. According to James Vincent, the author of Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, listicles have been around for much longer than the Internet has, and they help fulfill humanity’s need to organize complex information. Adopting the listicle format for your legal blog content could help you communicate clearly with your audience and convince them to contact your law firm.

Is Writing Listicles the World’s Oldest Learned Profession?

According to Vincent, the world’s oldest texts are lists; he argues that writing originated as record keeping, as professional scribes in some of the world’s oldest agricultural societies (in China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica) made lists of agricultural produce. It was a way of making sure there was enough food for everyone in a city-state with a population in the tens of thousands. Over time, the pictographs used to represent quantities and types of produce developed into syllabaries and alphabetic scripts, but lists did not lose their importance. A scribal manual from ancient Egypt is little more than a list of 610 items about which scribes needed to know, ranging from foodstuffs to members of the royal family to districts of the empire to cosmological and metaphysical concepts. In other words, the list reminded the society’s most educated people of everything they needed to know.

Lists Can Help Your Prospective Clients Bring Order Out of Chaos

Fast forward 4,000 years, and listicles and bullet lists on law firm blogs can still help remind your prospective clients of everything they need to know. If you are going through a divorce, suffering financial hardship due to an accidental injury, facing criminal charges, or managing the administration of a recently deceased family member’s estate, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by all the details. Sometimes a checklist is just what you need. Listicles on law firm blogs can reassure prospective clients that their situation is manageable. They can also help them organize their thoughts to know what questions to ask during their first consultation with you.

Writing an Effective Listicle Requires Expertise

The best person to write a listicle that will be meaningful to your prospective clients is a professional content writer who knows about the legal profession and your practice area of law. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can create listicles and other types of online content for your law firm.

Does Your Law Firm’s Website Need to Be 200,000 Words to Get Google’s Attention?

Focusing on quality instead of quantity is as important in content writing as it is in other aspects of business and the legal profession. You have probably already reached this conclusion in your career already. Your law firm can more easily stay financially solvent if you focus on working with the lawyers, office staff, and financial resources you have, rather than trying to expand too much in a short period of time. Likewise, it is a much better business strategy to stick with the kinds of cases with which you are the most comfortable, rather than to practice “door law” where you say yes to all prospective clients, so that, before you know it, you are working on personal injury, probate, business dispute, child support, and criminal defense cases all at the same time. For purposes of search engine optimization (SEO), Google also values quality over quantity, but you would not know this by the way that conventional wisdom on content marketing emphasizes word count. Instead of stressing about the volume of your legal blog content, you should focus on consistently writing blog posts that address your prospective clients’ questions and concerns.

An Enormous Word Count Makes You a Motor Mouth, Not an Authority

In a recent post on SEO Roundtable, Barry Schwartz addresses a persistent rumor about the minimum amount of content your site must contain before Google considers it authoritative. Some versions of this rumor say that a website (including all of its various pages) needs at least 200,000 words before Google will consider it authoritative; other versions say that an authoritative website needs at least 30 articles.

According to Schwartz, all of this is unfounded speculation; word count is not even a criterion for SEO, at least not in recent versions of the algorithm. What matters more is that you keep updating your site. The information on a law firm’s website does not normally go out of date, so you do not need to remove it. This means that you should continue adding content, such as blog posts and practice area pages, to your site, and as you do, the word count on your site will increase. Assuming that you add one 500-word blog post to your site per week and one 500-word content page per month, it will take about five months to get to 30 articles (assuming that the definition of “article” includes both blog posts and content pages) and just over six years to get to 200,000 words. If you have consistently been providing new content about your practice area of law for six years, this qualifies you as an authority, regardless of word count.

Law Blog Writers Provides Quality

There is no rule saying that you must compose every word of content on your site to make your site authoritative. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will provide content for your website to build your reputation as an authoritative source of information.