Do Paid Ads and Landing Pages Have a Role in Law Firm Marketing?

A big part of content marketing involves optimizing your website to rank as highly as possible among organic search results, but even if your website is the first organic result that Google displays, there will still be paid ads above the link to your website. Most people will scroll past these ads until they reach the organic search results, but not everyone will, or else Google would have stopped displaying paid results above the organic results long ago. Paid ads that display above organic search results may be a useful way to diversify your law firm’s digital marketing strategy, but only if you plan them carefully, and only if you also invest in organic search results, such as by regularly updating your law firm’s website with informative legal blog content.

What Is a Landing Page?

When a user clicks on a search engine ad, it leads them to a landing page, which is part of the advertiser’s website. At the bottom of the landing page is a call to action. When the user clicks on the call to action, it takes the user to the page where they can complete the action. For ecommerce sites, this may be a payment page. For law firms, it is usually an online contact form.

How to Build a Successful Paid Ad and Landing Page Combination

Search engine ads and landing pages have exactly one goal, namely to persuade users to fill out an online contact form on your website. Search engine ads should advertise a service closely related to the search query. For example, if the user types “Divorce Monday 2022,” the search engine ad might say “File Your Divorce Papers by Divorce Monday.” If the user types “annual gift tax exclusion 2021,” the search engine ad might say “Gift $15K by December 31.” Users that click on the search engine ads will be directed to a landing page. Whereas long form content is king on most web pages, less is more on landing pages. Bullet lists and short paragraphs are best; 300 words is long enough. You don’t want the user to have time to get cold feet about contacting you.

Landing Pages Are No Substitute for High Quality Blog Content

People rarely hire lawyers on a whim; most of the time, it is a carefully thought-out decision. For every person who clicks on a search engine ad and contacts you during the same web browsing session, there are at least several others who want to read blog posts and detailed reports about legal issues similar to the ones they are facing. Search engine ads can certainly be part of your robust content marketing strategy, but they are no substitute for regularly updating your blog with informative content.

Building a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Law Firm

The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can help you develop a multi-faceted legal marketing content strategy, including blog posts, search engine ads, and more.

Long Form Content Is Essential to Your Law Firm’s SEO Strategy

Everywhere you look online, there is clickbait, so someone out there must think that it is helping their SEO rankings, and maybe it is generating clicks, but it is not building trustworthiness or generating backlinks. SEO is not penny wars; it is about more than just the sheer number of clicks. Including long form legal blog content in your content marketing strategy will boost the credibility, and therefore the SEO rankings, of your website.

Long Form Content Enables You to EAT

In content marketing terms, EAT stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. In other words, it means showing your audience how much you know about your practice area. Even the best 500-word blog post only contains 500 words of your knowledge. A report that is 2,000 words or longer contains enough information which means that other websites will want to use it as a source, making it fertile ground for backlinks.

Long Form Content Is on Google’s Wavelength

The movie Finch shows just how capable of human-like behavior and understanding robots have become. Jeff the robot is a great friend to Tom Hanks’ character and his dog, and viewers cannot help but contemplate that, in a similar situation, SIRI would probably be a pretty good friend, too. Meanwhile, humans and SEO bots respond to online content in different ways. Marketing professionals often push businesses to invest in infographics and interactive content because they are easier for humans to understand. These types of content are much harder for search engines to understand, though. It only takes Google’s bots a few seconds to read a report that a human would take more than an hour to read, and to gain a thorough understanding of all the ways that the report relates to a user’s search term. For image-rich interactive content and infographics, however, Google is relying on the relevance of tags and doesn’t really understand the big picture. The result is that your law firm’s website should appeal both to humans and to bots, and you should include long form content as well as the more eye-catching stuff.

Long Form Content Helps You Build Keyword Richness

It is 2021, and everyone knows by now that there is a lot more to SEO than keywords. In fact, keyword density is such a flawed metric that Google’s most recent algorithms hardly give it any weight. Saying “Greenville car accident lawyer” once in a 500-word blog post is better than saying it ten times; in fact, it is probably miles better. Keyword richness still matters, however.

Keyword richness means that a page contains numerous keywords for which you want to rank. For example, if you include ten keywords in a 500-word blog post, it will likely still sound somewhat forced. Meanwhile, it is perfectly normal for a 2,000-word content page to include the terms “car accident lawyer,” “car accident attorney,” “personal injury lawyer,” “car accident lawsuit,” and “motor vehicle accident lawyer.”

Law Blog Writers Goes to Great Lengths to Produce Awesome Content

The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers provide custom-written blog posts and page content of any length you choose, to boost your website’s authority.

For SEO Domination, Think About Individual Web Pages and Not Just Your Whole Website

People enter search terms into Google for a variety of reasons; Google’s ranking algorithms even factor user intent into their calculations. Informational, recreational, and purchase-oriented searches require different responses from Google’s bots. It goes without saying that playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and trying to find a lawyer who will help you after the insurance company offered you a paltry settlement for your car accident injuries or after your former employer threatened to sue you for breach of contract are not the same thing. Google should enable you to find the information you need in a single click. One way to show Google that it should place your site at the top of the list is by filling it with content relevant to the desired search term, but content is not the only thing that matters for search engine optimization (SEO). Links are also important, and you should focus on getting inbound links to all the pages of your site, not just the home page. Therefore, updating your law firm’s website regularly with professionally written, link-worthy legal blog content is an investment in your website’s organic search rankings.

Shallow Links and Where to Get Them

Shallow links are links that require three clicks or fewer (ideally one) to reach the desired content. If you wrote a blog post about noneconomic damages in car accident lawsuits, a shallow link would lead directly to that page. A deep link would lead to your law firm’s homepage; to reach the blog post, the user would have to click on “blog” and then the “car accidents” category, and then the desired post.

More importantly, shallow links boost the SEO rankings of the individual page, in this case the blog post. Links to the homepage direct all their SEO boost to the homepage, which presumably already ranks highly.

You can build shallow links through white hat means by exchanging guest posts with colleagues and organizations whose audience would be interested in your content. Your guest posts should include links directly back to the blog post (or practice area page) for which you are trying to build backlinks.

Sitelinks: The Ultimate Goal

Your goal in building backlinks to multiple pages on your site, including the homepage, is for Google to create a sitelink for your website. A sitelink is an SERP listing of a website with a link to the homepage at the top, and below it, a “table of contents” of links to various subheading pages on the site. You cannot bribe Google to make a sitelink of your law firm’s website; the only way to achieve it is by creating a website where multiple pages contain authoritative content and shallow backlinks.

Creating Quality Content Is an Ongoing Process

The only way to get a sitelink is by consistently updating your website with awesome content. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will create blog content that will attract backlinks from colleagues and strangers alike.