Does Your Law Firm’s Blog Have Too Many Keywords?

One of the more benign forms of entertainment one can find on the Internet these days is to peruse old web pages that the Wayback Machine has archived. If you follow the bibliographic references of Wikipedia articles, you can find online news reports and film reviews that predate the 21st century, and careful readers (including everyone who has graduated from law school) will notice how the journalistic style of 2022 differs from the way that people used to write in the early days of the Internet. Law firms that had websites in the 1990s congratulated themselves on how forward thinking they were, but if you read their web page content now, it would probably sound antiquated. One can argue that the whole practice of businesses posting blogs on their websites has been meretricious from the beginning, but the quality of business blog posts has improved over time. One of the reasons for the improvement in writing quality on business blogs, including legal blog content, is that professional content writers have learned to stop worrying so much about keywords and enjoy communicating with human audiences.

Keyword Density Is an Outdated Metric

Search engine optimization (SEO) algorithms change all the time to reflect users’ responses, but regularly updating the blog on your law firm’s website remains one of the best things you can do to keep your law firm’s website on the first page of Google search results. It’s fine to do keyword research to help you get ideas for blog post topics, but focus on quality instead of quantity. Just choose one keyword, and start writing; focus on what prospective clients want to read, because that is what Google’s constantly changing algorithms are trying to do, too.

The days when keyword density, which is the number of times a keyword appears in a piece of content, relative to the total word count of the content, are in the distant past. Revising a blog post to increase its keyword density almost always makes it worse. At best, adding your target keyword to one sentence in every paragraph has the same effect as tacking the phrase “with a Grand Rapids personal injury lawyer” onto the end of a fortune cookie fortune. At worst, Google will interpret it as keyword stuffing and penalize your site.

Avoid Keywords That Have No Audience Except Search Engines

Once you choose a keyword, use it once in the title, once in a subheading, and once in the body text; other than that, just write what you think prospective clients want to know about the topic. A good keyword is one that could plausibly occur in a natural sentence. A human being might say, “Branwell Bloggins is the best personal injury lawyer in Grand Rapids,” but no one would utter the sentence, “Branwell Bloggins is the best personal injury lawyer Grand Rapids MI.” When someone types “personal injury lawyer Grand Rapids MI” into a Google search box, Google is smart enough to know which websites will be the most useful to them. Write for the human reader, not the search term.

You Choose the Keywords and Leave the Writing to Law Blog Writers

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will compose readable, custom-written content that addresses your target audience’s questions.

In Defense of Stating the Obvious on Your Law Firm’s Website

Perhaps you had a professor in law school who reacted with outrage when first-year law students did not know what a tort was or had never heard the expression “black letter law.” Maybe you have a good laugh when a prospective client tells you that she doesn’t think her ex-husband deserves unsupervised parenting time simply because he lets the children watch more TV than she considers reasonable or another that expects you to bribe the police to make his DUI charges go away. “Some people just don’t understand” is a refrain that we hear too often; it usually serves no purpose other than to make the speaker feel smart. Being amused at other people’s ignorance is not a good look for lawyers. What is the job of attorneys in public-facing practice areas such as family law, criminal defense, and estate law, if not to help people understand the law? What better way to inform the public about the laws and legal procedures related to your practice area than by regularly updating your website with informative, understandable legal blog content?

Nothing Is Obvious

According to Robert Rose of Content Marketing Institute, 90 percent of success in content marketing is attributable to successful communication. The root of the problem is that speakers assume that something is so obvious to the audience that the speaker does not need to say it. He is referring to communication between clients and professional content creators, but the rule applies equally well to communication between the author of the content and the audience.

By this logic, you should not shy away from stating the obvious in your content, because it probably is not obvious to prospective clients. For example, how many clients contact personal injury lawyers after they have accepted an insurance settlement that is not enough to cover all their accident-related medical expenses? You would be able help a lot more clients get a lot more money if the general public knew more about the events in the days and weeks after an accident where insurance companies make it harder for injured people to recover settlement money that will cover all their accident-related bills. It is a good idea to write blog posts about how you should have a lawyer contact the insurance company when they ask you to give a recorded statement or before signing the insurance settlement offer. Most people don’t know that they should do this, because most billboards and TV ads do not make it clear. In other words, it is obvious to personal injury lawyers, but not to the people who need their services. Remember that, in a law firm blog, your audience has almost no background knowledge about the law; it is not like when you are giving a presentation at a conference for lawyers.

The Obvious Can Still Be Interesting

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will compose legal blog content that explains basic legal concepts to your target audience in an engaging way.

The 4 Elements of an SEO-Friendly Blog Post

Google’s algorithms are changing all the time, and there is robust debate among search engine optimization (SEO) professionals about which metrics deserve the most of your attention. Should you write longer content to increase users’ time on page? Should you devote your time to building backlinks, which would require you to make a good impression on your competitors? Should you Google the name of your own law firm and ensure that its name, address, and phone number (NAP) is accurate on every website where it appears? If you devote most of your law firm’s marketing budget to following the latest SEO trends, it will only leave you feeling overwhelmed. A better use of your time is to follow the SEO practices that have been helping businesses attract web traffic for as long as business websites have existed. In other words, keep updating your website with factually accurate, readable legal blog content that has all the elements of an SEO-friendly blog post.

Content

Prospective clients will visit your website if it contains information about topics relevant to them. Think of your law firm’s blog as a constantly evolving frequently asked questions page about your practice area. It can also include commentary on current news stories that relate to your practice area. Choose your blog topics based on questions that current clients have asked you, rather than on what you think would make the best SEO keywords.

Keywords

You don’t want your blog post to sound like a parade of keywords, but it is worthwhile to do some keyword research. It is sufficient to use a keyword once in a title, once in a subheading, and once in the body text of the blog post.

Links

Don’t think of linking your blog post to other websites as an SEO gimmick; if you approach it that way, Google will see right through it and penalize your site. Instead, approach the incorporation of links into your blog post as citing your sources. In other words, link to sites that you would be proud to share with your law school professors.

Formatting

Content is king, but no one will stay on your web page long enough to appreciate your awesome content if the formatting of the page is too difficult to read. Whatever you do, do not format your blog post as a single, continuous block of text. SEO experts differ as to the ideal length for a paragraph; some say that you can safely include up to 12 sentences in a paragraph, while others go as far as to recommend single-sentence paragraphs. Regardless of the paragraph length you choose, your blog posts should format easily on mobile devices and tablets as well as on desktop and laptop computers.

When You Need More Than Just the Basics

Anyone can write one blog post, but most lawyers do not have the time to write a steady stream of them, which is what Google prefers. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will deliver informative, well-researched blog posts week after week.