How Technical Should the Blog Posts on Your Law Firm’s Website Be?

Many lawyers will tell you that their experiences in law school required them to learn a whole new way of reading. Not only must law students learn a large vocabulary of legal terms, but they must learn to read between the lines to find the important inferences in texts where potential bombshells of information are hidden in the midst of paragraphs that are 95 percent boilerplate text. Some lawyers even get into the habit of reading with their “lawyer glasses” on, even when they are reading news reports, novels, or personal correspondence, in the rare event that lawyers have time to read anything for fun. Think about the documents you must read for your current cases; if you posted 500-word excerpts from those court decisions, insurance policies, medical reports, and affidavits on your blog (assuming it was legal to do so), prospective clients would probably not understand them well, much less figure out what you thought was notable about them. Meanwhile, your law firm’s blog will add more value to your website and attract more new clients if it teaches readers something they didn’t already know and does not simply state the obvious or offer meaningless advertising slogans. Writing legal blog content that provides important legal information to your audience in terms they can understand is a tall order, so you should hire professional legal content writers who are up to the task.

No Two Blogs Have an Identical Audience

Writing teachers always tell you to “know your audience,” and this is as important when you are writing blog posts for your law firm’s website as if you were writing novels or advertising copy. The target audience of your blog depends on your practice area of law. Are your prospective clients divorced parents? Are they people who have suffered work injuries? Small business owners? Professionals approaching retirement age? People facing criminal charges for drug possession? Whoever they are, write for them.

Consider how differently you would describe a recent verdict in a medical malpractice case if you were describing it to patients (prospective plaintiffs), compared to if you described it to doctors (prospective defendants). With the patients, you might focus on the plaintiff’s financial losses and physical and emotional suffering. With the doctors, you might focus on the avoidable and unavoidable risks associated with treatment. You could use medical terminology without explaining it when the target audience is physicians.

Take Your Cues From Your Current Clients

If you want to know what your prospective clients already know and what is news to them, listen to your current clients. Before they met you, did they know how civil and criminal cases are different? Did they know how courts calculate economic and noneconomic damages? Did they know the difference between marital and nonmarital assets? Anything that a real client was surprised to find out is a great topic for a blog post.

Law Blog Writers Can Write for Any Audience

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will compose custom-written blog posts that explain relevant legal concepts and cases in the appropriate amount of detail and complexity for your target audience.

Using Content Outlines to Create Effective Blog Content Quickly

Time is money, and money is a scarce resource these days. Some law firms have scaled down their content marketing budgets to the point that employees of the law firm, or even the lawyers themselves, are writing blog posts for the law firm’s website. Those who are hiring content marketing firms cannot afford to fail to provide clear instructions to the writers and risk getting content that is not what they want. In these tough economic times, law firms cannot afford not to update their blogs regularly, since an active blog is a reliable way to boost and maintain your law firm website’s search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. Whether you are writing the blog posts yourself, an employee of your law firm is writing them, or you are outsourcing them, the legal blog content will turn out better if you organize your thoughts in a content outline before the writer drafts them.

The Elements of a Content Outline

Whether the piece of content you want is a 500-word blog post or a 2,500-word white paper, you need an outline to help the writer stay focused, even if that writer is you. The outline should say what the content is about and what impression you want the content to make on the reader and on Google’s search result ranking bots. At minimum, your content outline should include the following:

• The title of the post

• The target keyword

• The target user intent (usually informational for law firm blog posts, but sometimes promotional for guest posts or transactional for landing pages)

• Subheadings to be included in the post

• What to include in the call-to-action paragraph (for example, your phone number or email address or an offer for a free consultation)

• Target word count

A seasoned content writer can look at your content outline and immediately think of things to write that will be interesting to the target audience. For example, if the writer sees that the post is about content outlines, one writer might think to start with the proverb “time is money.” Another might start with an anecdote about the Pomodoro method of time management, and a third would start with an anecdote about writing outlines in high school or law school. This is the beauty of writing a content outline and then handing it to a writer. You do not have to think of an engaging introduction or a catchy call to action slogan. Likewise, the writer does not have to try to guess whether you want a blog post about content outlines, user intent, or the ideal length for law firm blog posts. All of this makes it easier for the writer to deliver acceptable content on time. Therefore, law firm plus content outline plus writer is a winning formula, even when everyone is pressed for time and strapped for cash.

Law Blog Writers Creates Outlines, Content, and More

Whether or not you have already drafted content outlines for the content you want, the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can deliver engaging, readable content for your law firm website with a fast turnaround.

FAT Is the Missing Ingredient in On-Page SEO

Sam the Cooking Guy, whose cookbooks and YouTube videos improved so many people’s kitchen skills during the pandemic, is fond of saying that “fat is flavor.” He is talking, of course, about the lipids that occur naturally in avocados, olive oil, steak, and Sam’s personal favorite, butter, making the proteins and carbohydrates they accompany in the dish taste so much better, but the friendly Canadian amateur chef’s favorite maxim could apply just as well to search engine optimization (SEO). As every lawyer looking to put every extra penny toward paying off law school loans knows, web content has no nutritional value, but there is a different kind of FAT that you can add judiciously to your legal blog content to make it suit your readers’ tastes; in this case, FAT stands for form, angle, and type.

EAT to Live, but FAT to Prosper

Conventional wisdom in the content marketing world emphasizes the importance of EAT, which stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. For law firm websites, EAT is one of the easier hallmarks of SEO desirability to achieve; it is easy for Google’s bots to verify that you are a real lawyer employed by a real law firm. This, by itself, is not enough to attract visitors to your law firm’s website; you also need blog content that answers your audience’s questions and addresses their concerns. Keyword research is just the beginning when it comes to find out what your target audience would like to see on your site, you should also think about FAT:

· Format encompasses the general outline of a blog post or content video. Examples include listicles, myths versus facts, frequently asked questions, and how to guides.

· Angle includes the appeal you want to make to your readers’ values or pain points. This can include a focus on cost effectiveness or reaching a solution peacefully, to name just two possible angles you can use in law firm blog posts.

· Type is an even broader category than format. Examples of content types include blog posts, videos, email newsletters, and podcasts.

Just as you would not eat a plain stick of butter for dinner (or, at least, you would not do it more than once), FAT is not all you need to make your content succeed. Your content should also be idiomatic, succinct, and engaging. Likewise, off-page factors help, too, such as how frequently you update your website and the number of backlinks. Every law firm needs a varied and well-balanced content marketing strategy, including keyword research, backlinks, and perhaps even paid search engine ads, but it is the FAT of your law firm’s blog that will keep visitors coming back to your site and turn some of them into clients.

Lean on Law Blog Writers for Content With Just the Right FAT

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will create custom written blog posts and legal marketing content of other formats to keep your website on the first page of Google search results.