How Bad Is Fluff Content for SEO Rankings?

Every lawyer can think of a colleague whose writing style is hard to follow and whose email could still make all their relevant points if they were half their current length. High school and college English teachers wave The Elements of Style in students’ faces and exhort them to write like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Some of them would even disapprove of the word “exhort” and urge you to find an Anglo-Saxon synonym for it. Lawyers know the value of the economy of speech, both in oral communication and in written documents. When it comes to web content, though, the verbosity tends to come out, even in the most skilled writers. Perhaps it is because pages are just pixels on a screen, so being wordy doesn’t kill more trees than getting to the point. Maybe it is because seeing the word count add up on the corner of the window on your word processing application gives you a sense of accomplishment, much as racking up fractions of miles on a treadmill does. No matter the reason, fluff content is ubiquitous online, even in legal blog content, and while Google doesn’t seem to mind it, it deters prospective clients.

More Keywords, Less Time on Page

Barry Schwartz of SE Roundtable defines fluff content as content that is repetitive without repeating previous content verbatim, so that Google does not recognize it as duplicate content. According to Schwartz, not only does Google not penalize pages that contain fluff, it often ranks them highly. He hypothesizes that this is because Google’s bots do not know that the paraphrases of previously stated points do not add new information to the page; this is just one of the ways that bots, for all their ability to emulate the tone of Kafka’s Metamorphosis lack a human-like understanding of language.

Paradoxically, Google’s bots recognize concise, informative text; they make rich snippets out of it. The trouble is that they cannot tell whether the rest of the content on the page adds important details and context or simply restates the snippet in slightly different words. Google may think that the content is well written, in the sense of free of grammatical errors, and it may reward you for using a wide variety of keywords.

Human readers, however, recognize fluff when they see it. When they read two whole paragraphs without learning anything that the rich snippet did not already tell them, they will become impatient and navigate away from the page. Time on page is one of many metrics that determine the SEO ranking of a web page; Google rewards pages that readers find informative enough to read all the way to the end. In this regard, fluff content will count against you for SEO rankings.

All Informative Content, No Fluff

You can always trust the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver fluff-free blog posts, landing pages, guest posts, and page content for your law firm’s website.

New Year’s Resolution: Lazy, Cheapskate Content Marketing

We are not even a week into 2022, and everyone’s energy is already stretched thin, even thinner than it was this time last year, if that is even possible. The last thing most small law firms have is time and money to invest in content marketing. Meanwhile, content marketing is as important as ever as a means for small law firms to connect with current and prospective clients and to establish their professional reputations. This year, you should adopt a “less is more” approach to content marketing, but you should continue to update your law firm website with relevant legal blog content at least a few times per month.

An Ounce of Strategy Is Worth a Pound of Content

Frequently adding new content to your website and your social media accounts is great for SEO and for increasing awareness about your law firm, but creating new content costs time, and if you do not create the content yourself, it costs money to pay someone else to create it. Don’t waste your efforts trying to keep up with the Joneses and have the fanciest website in town and the most diversified content marketing strategy. Instead, focus on small but measurable goals. Jodi Harris of Content Marketing Institute poses a series of “who? why? how?” questions to help you do this. These are some examples of manageably sized content marketing goals and strategies for achieving them:

· If your goal is to rank about a certain competitor on organic search engine results pages, then you should focus your efforts on SEO. Add new pages to your website and update your blog as often as possible.

· If your goal is to raise awareness that you have recently branched into a new practice area or want to attract a certain type of cases, then focus your page content and blog posts on this area. For example, if you have figured out that DUI and traffic offenses are your criminal defense law firm’s bread and butter, then most of the new content you add to your site should be related to those practice areas, from content pages to FAQ pages to blog posts. You could even invest in a few search engine ads and landing pages related to DUI and traffic crimes.

· If you have set your sights on social media marketing for 2022, choose just one social media platform and choose it carefully.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

You can do a lot of content marketing without creating any new content at all. For example, you can republish some old blog posts that made a splash several years ago, if they are still relevant. On social media or your blog, you can link to existing, valuable content. You can even publish a long report you have previously written by repackaging it as a series of blog posts.

Legal Marketing Content Never Goes Out of Style

You don’t need a big, ambitious content marketing strategy this year, but you do need to publish content. You can always trust the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to provide content that gets good results.

What the Beatles Can Teach Us About Law Firm Blogs

In a more innocent era in Internet history, when you were feeling uninspired and there was nothing good on TV, it was easy to amuse oneself with Beatles-themed web content, mostly in the form of blogs. Online music magazine articles where paid journalists ranked the Beatles albums from worst to best were a dime a dozen, as were the typo-ridden personal blogs where amateur bloggers weighed in on which Beatles albums were superior to which other ones. A true gem of the pre-YouTube Internet, though, was the blog What Goes On, which lovingly cataloged every mistake, Easter egg and “anomaly” (to use the site’s own terminology) to be found on any of the Fab Four’s studio albums. Even six decades after they performed covers of American R&B songs to drunken audiences in Hamburg, the Beatles continue to inspire with their creativity, as Joseph Kalinowski’s recent reflection on the new Beatles documentary Get Back shows. Kalinowski observed how the documentary shows the creative processes of John, Paul, George, and Ringo when they were arguably at their creative peak as musicians, and he related this to his own creative process as a writer of web content. If you do not have any creative energy left over to write legal blog content for your law firm website, you can always enlist professional content writers to produce it.

An Irrelevant Idea Can Become Relevant at Any Time

According to Kalinowski, Get Back shows the Fab Four trying out lyrical and musical ideas in the studio in the 1960s that their bandmates originally rejected. These words and tunes eventually ended up on later Beatles albums, or even on the band members’ solo albums after the Beatles disbanded. In the context of your law firm’s website, any idea that pops into your mind during a conversation with a colleague, client, or party guest could become the topic for a blog post or longer piece of website content in the near future, or even years down the road.

There Is No One Size Fits All Template for Collaboration

Get Back, like so much entertaining content about the Beatles, showcases the band members’ interpersonal conflicts, especially about songwriting. When watching the documentary, Kalinowski observed that the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership was only the ideal choice some of the time. One memorable scene in Get Back shows how the song “Don’t Let Me Down” took shape during an impromptu visit from Billy Preston, a versatile keyboard player who just happened to be visiting Apple Studios that day. As for law firm blog posts, even if you think you have found a winning formula, don’t be afraid to change it up sometimes through collaborations with colleagues.

Get Back to Practicing Law and Leave the Blogging to the Pros

An efficient way to bring your blog posts to fruition is to send your notes and ideas to the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers. You can get custom written blog posts and web page content for your law firm website for an affordable price.