3 Building Blocks of Effective SEO Content

To the untrained ear, “search engine optimization” sounds like a computer coding skill, when in fact it is a writing skill. SEO has more to do with knowing your audience than it does with knowing html. These are three important elements of a law firm web page that will help its SEO performance. All lawyers are good at writing, but writing for an audience of people who may or may not need your legal advice or representation is a highly specialized skill. It makes sense to entrust your law firm’s blog to professional writers of legal blog content, so you can focus on doing what you do best.

Concise, Informative Meta Titles

The meta title is the clickable headline that appears in your web page’ listing on a search engine result’s page. If your meta title is longer than 155 characters, Google’s bots will edit it to something shorter. (If you have ever seen the New Yorker article about the edits that Google’s bots made to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, you will understand why you don’t want the bots editing your work.) The ideal meta title tells readers what they will be able to accomplish by visiting your page, such as “Don’t let insurance companies fool you into giving up your right to compensation after a car accident” or “How to get divorced in California for less than $1,000.”

Person-Focused Content

Don’t tie yourself in knots trying to fit as many different keywords as you can into 500 words of content, and Heaven forfend, don’t repeat the same keyword five times in the same blog post just to show off to Google. It isn’t 1995, and Google’s bots will not appreciate your retro style. Instead, focus on readability, and your keywords will follow. To provide additional value to readers, answer the question in the search query that leads to your web page. Ideally, you should make your content tell a story, perhaps with a summary of the answer to the user’s question in the first paragraph. This way, you will appeal to the readers who need an answer immediately in the middle of a drive or a work meeting, as well as the ones who are reading entire blog posts for entertainment.

Eye-Catching Headlines

The headline is the first thing readers see when they navigate to your page, so choose a headline that makes people want to keep reading. Cynics might call it clickbait, but you do not need to resort to gimmicks. Just make the headline sound more like the title of something someone will want to read and less like a long tail keyword generated by analytics software. “7 Steps to a Cheap Divorce” is a better headline than “Summary Dissolution of Marriage Modesto, California.” People who were searching for a cheap divorce did not know that there were seven steps, but they do after reading your headline, and they want to keep reading to find out what those steps are.

The Best Law Firm Blog Is the One That Gets Regular Updates

You can get an additional SEO boost by regularly updating your blog. You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create blog posts that start with effective titles and tell stories that keep readers scrolling all the way to the end.

Holiday Annoyances Are a Goldmine for Law Firm Blog Post Ideas

Being a lawyer during the pandemic is tough, and the holiday season during the pandemic is tough, so if you think your list of grievances about last year’s holiday gathering was long, wait until you see this one. People you have been related to for years have a way of asking the most ignorant questions about your work and expecting you to fix problems that have nothing to do with your practice area. This year, you have enough stress, so instead of letting the annoying questions and comments raise your blood pressure, turn each one into a blog post idea. If you do this, you will have enough legal blog content to update the blog on your law firm’s website every week in 2022; just remember, there is no rule saying you have to write all the posts by yourself.

When Life Gives You Perishable Eggs, Make Eggnog

According to Jill Kocher Brown of Jump Fly, the best business blog post topics are actual questions that people ask about the products and services you offer. Sure, you can spend money on Analytics software to search for the questions that people type into search engines, but there is something special about questions that come from real people, including in-laws with whom you have a love-hate relationship.

If your law firm deals with cases in a variety of practice areas, you might hear all of these questions during Christmas dinner, and all of them could make good blog post topics:

· Can the family court make decisions about your children’s religious upbringing?

· Why do people plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit?

· Why does hiring a lawyer cost so much, and when is it better to represent yourself in court?

· Can the family court force stay-at-home mothers to reenter the workforce after a divorce?

· Will I be responsible for my spouse’s student debt if we get a divorce?

· Is Divorce Monday a thing?

· Why do you choose to defend criminals?

· What happens if your judge is biased?

When people look up these questions on Google, they are often met with rich snippets lovingly selected by Google’s search engine bots who, though they may be smart enough to write a mean Kafka’s Metamorphosis fanfic, are no match for you when you have had a few glasses of adult eggnog and are desperately trying to maintain the flow of conversation so that your brother-in-law doesn’t get started again on how UFOs created COVID. Answer your relatives’ questions with all your avuncular eloquence and, if you dare, record yourself on your phone while doing it. You will end up with blog posts that are ten times more readable than anything a bot could write. Bots may have a way with words, but they have no concept of how it feels to be stuck at a family gathering with nothing to help you avert a major crisis except your erudition and a few nutmeg-scented libations.

Or Leave It to the Folks Who Enjoy Writing

If, when the holidays are over, you still don’t feel inspired to write, just remember the questions and send them over to the pros. You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create blog posts that attract and hold the attention of snippet bots and human readers alike

How to Impress Google With the Introductory Paragraph to Your Blog Post

Many of the documents that you write in the context of your work as a lawyer; for example, in a personal injury complaint or divorce petition, you start by listing the names of the parties. Google does not have any hard and fast rules about how you should begin the blog posts on your law firm’s website; in fact, Google’s search engine bots can read all of the text on a web page in an instant, so as long as the relevant content is on the page, it doesn’t matter where it is. Meanwhile, readers respond well to certain features in the opening paragraphs of blog posts, and reader actions such as time on page and number of clicks also play a role in the page’s SEO rankings. These are some important components of the introductory paragraphs of legal blog content that will make a good impression on prospective clients and on Google’s search engine bots.

Include Your Focus Key phrase

Representatives of Google have indicated that its SEO bots do not have an opinion about where to place your keywords, and the consensus is that, in the third decade of the 21st century, one incidence of a keyword in a blog post is enough; the days of keyword stuffing are long gone. SEO rankings are not the only reason to include your main keyword (such as “Flagstaff car accident lawyer”) in the first paragraph, though. First, some readers will click away after the first paragraph if they do not see a phrase that resembles their search query. Second, a sentence in the first paragraph that includes your focus key phrase is a prime candidate for a snippet.

Reasonable Length for an Introductory Blog Post

Long blocks of texts alienate readers; they are especially hard to read on mobile devices, which is where the majority of readers enter Google searches for law firms. Twelve sentences is the maximum length for a blog post introduction paragraph, but yours can be even shorter than that.

Indicate What Readers Will Find If They Keep Reading

Visitors to your blog post page will keep reading if the first paragraph is interesting enough and, more importantly, if it is free of annoyances like formatting errors and unidiomatic language. One of the most effective ways to get them to keep reading is to spell out what they will find in the subsequent paragraphs; a law firm blog post is not a mystery novel. Your first paragraph should include sentences like, “In this post you will find out five strategies that insurance companies use to give you less money after a car accident” or, “Keep reading to find out which business entity type is best for your small business.”

Awesome Blog Posts From Beginning to End

You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create blog posts that make Google want to extract snippets from the first paragraph and make readers want to keep reading all the way to the end.