Your SEO Superpower Is Being a Real Lawyer

The worst and most malicious content on the Internet, the character assassination, conspiracy theories and sales of illegal drugs, tends to appear under pseudonymous bylines. It is easy to lie, slander, or put others at risk when you are confident that, in a few minutes, you can log off and go back to being the person that your family, neighbors, and coworkers trust, in other words, when the person causing trouble online is not the real you. It takes considerably more audacity to do those things and sign your real name to them. This problem is not new, and neither is Google’s awareness of it. Google has been using EAT, which stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, as a search result ranking criterion since 2014, and since then it has undertaken several efforts to improve its ability to evaluate EAT accurately. This is just one of the ways that publishing legal blog content on your law firm’s website is great for your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) rankings.

To Enhance Your EAT, Tell Google in Unambiguous Terms Who You Are

Many SEO criteria are based on characteristics of the content itself, such as keyword richness and density, length of content, idiomatic language, and lack of repetition. Additionally, some criteria relate to users’ engagement with the content, such as the number of clicks the page has received, the time on page of the average visit, and the number of backlinks. Meanwhile, EAT is about who wrote the content, not what it says or who read it.

The authors with the best EAT are individuals and companies that Google’s human evaluators and natural language processing (NLP) bots can prove are who they say they are. For example, a human evaluating websites for Google probably knows that there is a company called Nike and that it makes athletic shoes. If she does not know off the top of her head that there is a law firm called Bloggins & Associates that is located in Atlanta and takes personal injury cases, she can do a Google search and find its address and phone number; if she is really doing her due diligence, she will call.

NLP bots will not call your law firm and talk to a receptionist, but they do respond to statements like “Branwell Bloggins is a personal injury lawyer based in Atlanta and licensed to practice law in the state of Georgia.” If you include information about the law school you graduated from and previous jobs you have held. You can include this information on the “Attorneys” page on your site or at the end of the guest posts you write on other sites.

Add Your EAT to Professionally Written Content

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will produce custom-written blog content for your law firm’s website and for guest posts. By adding your byline to the professionally written content, you can use your EAT to boost your SEO rankings.

Four Enemies You Meet While Content Marketing

Imagine that content marketing for your law firm is a game of Super Mario Bros. You just want to make an informative, user-friendly website that will persuade people who can benefit from your services to choose your law firm, so that you can go back to your basement apartment and eat pizza with your brother, but all kinds of virtually indestructible monsters keep crossing your path and attempting to thwart you on your quest. Face them if you dare, but if you would rather focus on being a lawyer and leave the content marketing to the professionals, you can hire professional legal blog content writers.

Cheapskate Clients

Many content writers find that clients try to talk their way into paying less after content writers have already delivered the content they promised. Fortunately, if you write your own blog content, then you cannot argue with yourself about money.

Fickle Link-Building Friends

A survey by Search Engine Land found that the content marketers who participated in the survey ranked link-building as their least favorite part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Building backlinks requires convincing someone else to link to your site; no matter how big your budget is or how awesome your content is, your link-building partner has the final decision about clicking to enable the link. Building link-building relationships is as demoralizing as online dating, from the mind games to the people who ghost you after you go out of your way to impress them.

SEO Charlatans

Sometimes it seems like everyone claims to be an SEO expert and that the only difference between them and established content marketing firms is the price. People who offer to do your SEO free of charge often have outdated knowledge, and they can end up making your site even worse. Even worse than those are the ones who are insistently offering to overhaul your website after the graduated from an SEO training course that operates on a multilevel marketing business model and then try to get you to sign up for the course, promising that you will make more money as an SEO genius than you ever did as a lawyer.

Google Is the Worst Thing About Content Marketing

Of course, all of the other content marketing enemies are mere underlings compared to the big boss, namely Google. Not only is Google constantly changing its ranking criteria, but if you directly ask SEO questions to its representatives, you get evasive answers. Likewise, it frequently places obviously spammy paid ads above relevant content. Its inability to tell the difference between a review written by an angry customer and one written by a bot that has been programmed to remix the language of an angry customer is a perfect example of how artificial intelligence lacks human decision-making ability. Despite this, Google has the final say about how easy or difficult it is for users to find your site.

Law Blog Writers Contends With Google So You Don’t Have To

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can help you avoid all the pitfalls of SEO and other aspects of content marketing.

How to Write Blog Post Titles That Humans and Search Engine Bots Will Love

Lawyers tend to have a way with words. Perhaps, when you took AP English in high school, you used to impress your classmates during the class activities where you had to think of titles for passages you read, and you always came up with titles loaded with alliteration, subtext, and intertextual references. Those kinds of titles make for elegant turns of phrase in legal memorandums, not to mention eye-catching email subject lines. Of course, the titles that make you a superstar in the legal profession are not necessarily the ones that pack the biggest punch for search engine optimization (SEO). Writing effective legal blog content means appealing to readers in ways that search engine bots will notice, starting at the title and going all the way to the call-to-action paragraph.

The Seven Categories of Eminently Clickable Blog Post Titles

The best blog post titles give the reader enough information to know that they want to keep reading, but not enough that they can find the answer to their question just by looking at the title and without reading the body text of the post. Bill Widmer of Ahrefs identifies seven formulas for successful blog post titles, as follows:

· Listicle titles start with a number and purport to list instances of something, such as “5 Things to Do at the Scene of a Car Accident” or “6 Types of Alimony in Florida.” Most listicles format the number as a numeral.

· “How to” articles claim to teach the reader how to do something they are trying to accomplish, such as “How to Maximize Your Chances of a Fair Insurance Payout After a Car Accident” or “How to Modify Your Parenting Plan.”

· Question titles are identical or nearly identical to common search queries related to your practice area, such as “How Much Money Can You Get for Pain and Suffering” or “What Is Community Property in Divorce?”

· Comparison titles compare and contrast two terms related to your practice area, such as “Personal Injury Lawsuits vs. Workers’ Compensation Claims” or “Divorce vs. Annulment.”

· “Ultimate guide” titles claim to tell you everything you need to know about the topic, such as “The Ultimate Guide to Estate Planning” or “Everything You Need to Know About Personal Injury Lawsuits.”

· “Devil’s advocate” titles appear to state a surprising, controversial, or counterintuitive thesis, such as “You Are Probably Saving Too Much for Retirement” or “It’s OK to Be Enemies With Your Ex-Spouse.”

· “Click to find out” titles tell you to expect surprises about a topic you thought you knew about, such as “Here Is What Happened After McDonald’s Paid a Multimillion-Dollar Settlement to a Customer Who Spilled Hot Coffee on Her Lap,” or “You Knew That Most People File for Divorce in January, but Did You Know Why?”

More Than Just Click-Worthy Titles

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can provide individual blog posts, a complete content marketing strategy, or anything in between.