Is a High Bounce Rate Always a Problem?

Bounce rate is how often visitors to your site click on only one page, the one that turns up on a search results page, and then navigate away from the site. For example, a “bounce” is when a visitor clicks on a blog post on your site but does not navigate to your homepage, your attorney profiles, your practice area pages, or your contact form. The opposite is if the user clicks on multiple pages on your site and, ideally, fills out a contact form. Search engine optimization (SEO) experts have given varying opinions about how much bounce rate affects your site. If it affects it at all, it is only one of many ranking factors. In fact, sometimes it can even be good if a user only visits one page on your site. Reducing your bounce rate should not be your highest priority, but regularly updating your site with high quality legal blog content should.

When Visiting a Single Page on Your Site and Then Bouncing Can Be a Good Thing

Not everyone who visits a law firm website is looking to hire a lawyer in the near future; many visitors just have general questions about the law. For example, if a user types “what is the minimum wage in Illinois” or “is Florida a community property state or equitable distribution,” your site is providing a valuable service by providing a straightforward answer to those questions. Your website has met the user’s needs if the user can find the answer on the first page they visit. Time on page is not even an accurate measure of the site’s usefulness. The search has been a success if the user just sees the sentence, “Florida is an equitable distribution state” and then goes back to eating a tuna melt, writing a novel where a character is talking about her previous marriage, or whatever the user was doing before it occurred to them to Google a question about your practice area.

How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Of course, if you can get casual visitors to your site to stay awhile, even better. Increasing time on page and conversion rate are admirable goals, even if they are not the ultimate purpose of content marketing. You can entice visitors to stay longer by writing blog posts that people will want to read all the way through, even if their original purpose in navigating to the site was to find a simple answer to a legal question. Likewise, you can encourage people to click on other pages within your site by adding internal links to your blog post, linking to your practice area pages, your contact page, and even other blog posts.

The moral of the story is that you should not redo your entire site or trash years’ worth of content just to chase a ranking factor that a self-proclaimed content marketing expert is the next big thing. Google’s algorithms are always changing, and trying to keep up with the whims of search engine bots will benefit your website and your law firm by focusing on valuable content and a comfortable user experience.

Give Readers an Answer Quickly and Then Make Them Want to Stay

Creating binge worthy content on a law firm website is a tall order, but the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers are up to the task.

Three Ways Content Marketing Can Help Your Law Firm

In the old days, law firms used to advertise through noisy commercials on local television networks or by plastering larger-than-life pictures of themselves on posters on the sides of public buses, but it is easy to see why those strategies are outdated. No one has the patience to sit through television commercials anymore; old folks mute their TVs and respond to text messages on their cell phones during commercial breaks, and young folks get their video content from a variety of platforms, none of which are old-fashioned television and almost all of which enable you to watch what you want when you want. Therefore, content marketing, which means promoting your business through Internet content, is the wave of the future, even for law firms; according to Margarita Loktionova of Content Marketing Institute, 97 percent of businesses engage in content marketing, although most of these would like to improve the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. These are three ways that regularly adding legal blog content to your site can help your law firm increase revenues.

Increasing Brand Awareness

When people visit law firm websites, it is because they are looking for a law firm in their city that deals with the legal problem they need to solve, such as getting a better insurance settlement for a personal injury claim, modifying a parenting plan after a divorce, or dissolving a business partnership. A Google search can show prospective clients that your law firm exists, but the content on your site shows them how it is different from the other law firms they could choose; in other words, the content on your website communicates your brand identity. Therefore, your blog posts should not be full of generic content written at dirt cheap content mills. If your blog posts follow a formula (for example, one paragraph about a particular law, one about a case from your state involving that law, and one about how your law firm can help), it makes your blog posts recognizable as well as readable.

Driving Internet Traffic to Your Website

The human audience is only part of the equation. Prospective clients will only see your website if Google’s search engine bots know that your website is relevant to users’ questions. Therefore, search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of any content marketing strategy. Regularly updating the content to your site, such as by posting one or more new blog posts per month, is a great way to get Google to notice your site and rank it at the top of the search engine results pages.

Encouraging Prospective Clients to Contact You Through Your Site

Once visitors reach your site your goal is to get them to fill out a contact form so you can contact them by email (or any other contact information they provide). This is sometimes called lead generation. Many law firm clients initiate their first contact with a law firm through the law firm’s website.

Can a Blog Help You Do All of This?

Yes, it can, and there is no rule that you have to write the blog all by yourself. Instead, the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will produce custom-written, authoritative blog posts and web page content for your law firm’s website.

Sources

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/shifting-gears-content-marketing-industry-2022/

How to Ensure Success When Hiring Freelancers to Write Law Firm Marketing Content

When writing marketing content for their own law firm websites, many lawyers are far enough outside their comfort zone that they would prefer to hire someone else to do it. Likewise, the law school curriculum teaches you how to be a lawyer, but it does not teach you how to be a manager. When you hire content writers, you must do both. Hiring individual writers on a freelance basis is an option if you know that writing your own legal blog content is not for you, but an even better choice is to work with a content marketing firm that specializes in custom-written content for law firm websites.

Set a Reasonable Budget for the Project

One of the fastest ways to tank your outsourced law firm website content is to ask freelance writers to work for peanuts. If you set the budget so that, when you divide the amount you are paying by the time the writer spent on it, it barely adds up to minimum wage, you are giving writers an incentive to do a sloppy job and rush through as many projects as possible in order to make ends meet. Keep in mind that freelancers (hired with 1099 forms) get to keep less of the money they get from writing than employees (hired with a W2) do, because they are responsible for paying all of their own taxes on the income.

Beware of Jack-of-All-Trades Freelance Writers

Whenever possible, choose freelance writers who have experience with the legal profession. Just as clients should steer clear of “door lawyers,” who will represent every client who walks through the door, whether or not the lawyer has any experience with the type of case with which the client needs help, you should steer clear of “door freelance writers.” You have read web content that was obviously written by someone who knows nothing about the subject of the content; if you post this kind of content on your site, prospective clients will notice, and they will navigate away and visit the website of another law firm. Instead, you should hire writers who have previously worked for law firms, either as content writers or in another capacity, such as paralegals.

Give Detailed Instructions

Even the best writer will only do as good a job on a project as the instructions they receive for the project. The more clearly you communicate your expectations for the project, the more easily the writer can meet those expectations. Be as clear with content writers about what you need from them as you are with clients when you ask them to provide information relevant to their cases. Let content writers know that you are wiling to answer their questions at any point during the writing process.

Law Blog Writers Is Your Best Choice

Even better, hire a content marketing firm dedicated entirely to producing content for law firm websites. You can count on the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver quality blog posts and web page content every time.

Sources

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/find-work-quality-freelancers