How to Write Blog Post Titles That Humans and Search Engine Bots Will Love

Lawyers tend to have a way with words. Perhaps, when you took AP English in high school, you used to impress your classmates during the class activities where you had to think of titles for passages you read, and you always came up with titles loaded with alliteration, subtext, and intertextual references. Those kinds of titles make for elegant turns of phrase in legal memorandums, not to mention eye-catching email subject lines. Of course, the titles that make you a superstar in the legal profession are not necessarily the ones that pack the biggest punch for search engine optimization (SEO). Writing effective legal blog content means appealing to readers in ways that search engine bots will notice, starting at the title and going all the way to the call-to-action paragraph.

The Seven Categories of Eminently Clickable Blog Post Titles

The best blog post titles give the reader enough information to know that they want to keep reading, but not enough that they can find the answer to their question just by looking at the title and without reading the body text of the post. Bill Widmer of Ahrefs identifies seven formulas for successful blog post titles, as follows:

· Listicle titles start with a number and purport to list instances of something, such as “5 Things to Do at the Scene of a Car Accident” or “6 Types of Alimony in Florida.” Most listicles format the number as a numeral.

· “How to” articles claim to teach the reader how to do something they are trying to accomplish, such as “How to Maximize Your Chances of a Fair Insurance Payout After a Car Accident” or “How to Modify Your Parenting Plan.”

· Question titles are identical or nearly identical to common search queries related to your practice area, such as “How Much Money Can You Get for Pain and Suffering” or “What Is Community Property in Divorce?”

· Comparison titles compare and contrast two terms related to your practice area, such as “Personal Injury Lawsuits vs. Workers’ Compensation Claims” or “Divorce vs. Annulment.”

· “Ultimate guide” titles claim to tell you everything you need to know about the topic, such as “The Ultimate Guide to Estate Planning” or “Everything You Need to Know About Personal Injury Lawsuits.”

· “Devil’s advocate” titles appear to state a surprising, controversial, or counterintuitive thesis, such as “You Are Probably Saving Too Much for Retirement” or “It’s OK to Be Enemies With Your Ex-Spouse.”

· “Click to find out” titles tell you to expect surprises about a topic you thought you knew about, such as “Here Is What Happened After McDonald’s Paid a Multimillion-Dollar Settlement to a Customer Who Spilled Hot Coffee on Her Lap,” or “You Knew That Most People File for Divorce in January, but Did You Know Why?”

More Than Just Click-Worthy Titles

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can provide individual blog posts, a complete content marketing strategy, or anything in between.

Cracking the Nut Graph for Successful Content Marketing

The most effective law firm blog posts are the ones that summarize their main points in the introductory sentence, are consistent with the law firm’s brand identity but substantially different from others on the site, and are formatted so that the reader can understand them at a glance but will want to read them in detail. Ann Gynn of Content Marketing Institute, some of which she learned from Michael Bugeja, a professor of journalism at Iowa State University, makes these points in a recent article. She frames the article as a set of questions readers should ask themselves before choosing a blog post topic and writing a lead sentence for the article. Gynn and many other content marketing experts agree that an informative lead sentence and an intuitive layout are important components of effective legal blog content.

The Art of the Nut Graph

According to Gynn, the ideal opening sentence for a blog post directly tells you what you will find out by reading the blog post; in this regard, it is like an abstract of an academic article. Of course, the fact that this post is on your website instead of anywhere else on the Internet also communicates something to the audience about your brand; it does not need to say the name of your law firm to do this effectively.

A stand-alone topic sentence at the beginning of a blog post is sometimes called a nut graph, because it summarizes the entire post in a nutshell. A nut graph is certainly not the only way to get the audience’s attention; other popular ways of starting blog posts include rhetorical questions, controversial or counterintuitive statements (such as “congratulations on your divorce”), or interesting anecdotes. Nut graphs have an advantage over all of these for SEO, though, because they naturally include keywords relevant to the topic of the post. In this regard, they are uniquely suited to blog posts; no one would start a novel or a standup comedy routine with a nut graph, but they are appropriate for business blog posts.

What Do Readers See First, If Not the First Sentence?

If the nut graph of your blog post achieves its goal, the reader will be convinced that your post contains information that they want to know. People often access law firm blog posts from their mobile phones when quickly trying to find answers to law-related questions. In one eyeful, the reader should see not only the nut graph, but also an outline of your post that will let them know where to look next if their buddy is demanding an immediate answer about how much child support he will have to pay and the reader needs to find this out by the time the traffic light turns green. (Of course, you are not encouraging distracted driving, just being realistic about the way people use mobile phones.) You can accomplish this through informative subheadings.

Trust the Professionals for Nut Graphs, Longform Content, and Everything in Between

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can provide custom-written blog content that gets to the point immediately but makes the reader want to stick around to read more.

Sources

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/questions-writer-effective-lead

Bots Are Plenty Competent at Writing Blog Posts, but Your Audience Wants a Human Connection

This month, the New York Times published the most recent in a series of articles on the impressive writing proficiency of artificial intelligence. Readers may remember that, about a year ago, another magazine from the Big Apple published an article that used a computer-generated pastiche of Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an example of the extent and limitations of the mastery of language by artificial intelligence. The new article focuses on a supercomputer in Iowa, known as GPT-3, that produces text, based on a much larger corpus of human-composed texts than any previous AI writing project that has preceded it. The author’s article, Steven Johnson, describes asking the computer to write a recipe for Bolognese sauce, compose a poem in the style of John Ashbery, and provide an explanation of the Big Bang theory with elementary school students as its target audience. The bottom line is that, if you asked the current generation of bots to compose legal blog content about your practice area, they would probably write something that is recognizable as a blog post, but it probably wouldn’t be something that you would want to use to make a good first impression on prospective clients.

Artificial Intelligence Is Great for Routine Writing Tasks, but Communicating With Potential Clients Is Not a Routine Task

Johnson implies that GPT-3 could make itself useful in a law firm, since artificial intelligence is good at generating boilerplate text. It could easily compose drafts of routine emails, invoices, and even simple contracts. It would simply look at numerous examples of similar texts and then remix them according to your instructions. According to Emily Bender, Temnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Meg Mitchell, this is exactly the problem. In a paper published before Johnson’s New York Times piece, the aforementioned authors describe AI writing programs as “stochastic parrots.” Computers can follow patterns, and they can do it in increasingly sophisticated ways, but they cannot think in any way that resembles how humans think.

All of this is to say that, if you prompted a computer to write a blog post for your law firm, the post would probably be more grammatically correct than what you would get from 95 percent of the freelancers on Fiverr. At best, though, it would be a bland, generic blog post, lacking in narrative arc and specific details. In other words, it would be bottom of the barrel blog content, the kind that readers click away from after a few sentences, once they realize that no genuine thought has gone into it. This would lead to a reduced time on page, which would be bad for your site’s SEO rankings.

Only Humans Can Write Blog Content Thoughtfully

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can do more than just remix old blog content according to your specifications. They can help you communicate meaningfully with the target audience of your law firm’s website, as only human beings can.

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/magazine/ai-language.html

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/on-nyt-magazine-on-ai-resist-the-urge-to-be-impressed-3d92fd9a0edd