The Age-Old Question of How Often to Update Your Law Firm’s Blog

A brief overview of search engine optimization (SEO) principles for business websites will tell you that one of Google’s criteria for assigning a ranking to your site is the frequency of updates to your site. The target for frequency of updates varies widely from one industry to another; for example, ecommerce sites add new product listings and promotional offers several times per day, but that strategy is not practical for law firms. It simply doesn’t make sense to post an announcement on your site that says, “Sue by midnight and get a 20 percent discount on your attorney’s fees,” only to replace it the next day with a message of congratulations to all the people who filed lawsuits the previous day. For law firm websites, updating the site is synonymous with adding new posts to your site’s blog, especially after you have already written separate content pages for the various types of cases your law firm takes. Frequently updating your site with informative legal blog content can give your website the SEO boost it needs.

Blog Posting Frequency Is Relative

According to Neil Patel, Huffington Post, which is one of the most widely read blogs in the world, adds new posts at a rate that exceeds one blog post per minute. It is both unrealistic and pointless for a local law firm to post thousands of blog posts per day, even if you were to enlist dozens of chatbots to write them. With law firm blog posts, quality should take precedence over quantity. Adding new posts every day will not help your SEO rankings if the posts are simply spun versions of each other, or if they are mostly filler and fluff that you composed for no purpose other than to include keywords and meet a word count target.

If you want to find out how many blogs you should post, look at your competitors’ sites, and then one-up them. If the site that ranks above yours posts one blog per month, post two, and if it posts two, you should post three. If it posts three posts per week, you should post four.

Lazy but Brilliant Ways to Increase Your Posting Frequency

Write a new post every week, or even more than one post, sounds completely overwhelming if you are already swamped with work, which most employees at small law firms are. The good news is that you can get SEO points for updating your site without writing completely new posts. Simply making a few edits to one of your existing posts and then clicking “publish” also counts. Even adding a new paragraph to a content page, such as one that addresses a law or court decision that was enacted or issued more recently than when you first wrote the content page, will give you an SEO boost.

Pick a Number, and Law Blog Writers Will Write That Many Blog Posts

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will write as many or as few blog posts as your law firm’s website needs.

SEO Is Not a Quick Fix

No one goes into the legal profession to get rich quickly. If you open your own law firm, you have to spend a lot of money on it before you have enough cases to break even. Even if you take the risk averse route and get a salaried position with a well-established law firm, chances are that, between student loan payments and astronomical cost of living expenses, you will be left with just pennies in your bank account at the end of each pay period. Meanwhile, you never question whether it was worth it to get a law degree and become a lawyer. You should take a similar attitude toward search engine optimization (SEO) of your law firm’s website. SEO is about building your site’s reputation over time, as you have done with your reputation as a lawyer. Rather than obsessing over analytics and trying to anticipate the next fads, you should simply keep adding informative legal blog content to your site and establishing your online reputation as an authority on your practice area of law.

How Long Does It Take for Your SEO Efforts to Become Profitable?

Olga Zarzeczna of SEOsly says that the biggest disadvantage of SEO is that it is time consuming. Even the spiciest blog post about a legal case or court decision is not going to drive millions of new viewers to your site overnight. According to Zarzeczna, it takes about six months of implementing a successful SEO strategy before you see your site rise above the competition on organic search results. She recommends investing in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for those first six months, so your site can start to have visibility from the beginning. Once your site is in the top spot among the organic search results, you no longer need PPC advertising, and you can safely stop paying for it.

In other words, slow but steady wins the race. Start with keyword research and by studying your competitors’ websites. Then add content to your site; remember that you get points with Google’s search engine bots by updating your site frequently, so there is no need to spend weeks composing content in a Google Doc and then to upload it onto your site in one sitting. It is better to upload it piecemeal. In addition to blog posts, you should also have many different content pages for the various laws that prospective clients might need to know about and the types of cases you represent. You also don’t need to reinvent your strategy every time a digital marketing expert uploads a new video with a title that promises to upend your strategy or disrupt the SEO industry as a whole. In this regard, less is more. It is enough to reevaluate your SEO strategy once or twice per year to see what is working and what can still improve.

SEO Does Not Have to Be a Lonely Slog

You can always entrust the long-term planning to the pros. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will provide a steady stream of custom-written content pages and blog posts for your site.

EAT: Google’s Most Elusive SEO Metric

Google uses a variety of criteria to determine which web pages will be most useful to a user, based on that user’s search query. Some of these are easier for the creators of web content to appeal to than others. For example, including a keyword in a blog post is a very simple manner. The user’s time on page is not entirely within your control, but there are actions you can take to increase the chances that users will spend a substantial amount of time visiting your site instead of clicking away quickly. For example, you can make your content longer and ensure that it is interesting enough that users will want to read it all the way to the end; you should also invest in web design that gives you a user interface free of annoying glitches that might cause visitors to give up on your site quickly. By contrast, EAT, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, is not something you can easily optimize. The good news is that your legal blog content, seeing as it appears on a law firm website, probably has more EAT than you realize it does.

Google Scholar Is the Key to a Law Firm’s EAT

Google is tight-lipped about the details of how it measures EAT, but it appears that Google can tell that you are a genuine expert on the subject of your content based on several factors:

· Your identity is independently verifiable. For example, if your law firm’s website says that you graduated from a certain university, it can verify this by going to your university’s website and viewing the program of your graduation ceremony.

· You only write about a small group of related subjects (for example, personal injury law and criminal defense law, or whichever practice areas your law firm works with), instead of being a generic Internet loudmouth.

· Other people link to your content.

In this regard, Google Scholar works in favor of lawyers in pursuit of EAT. Every appeals court decision in which you or your law firm is mentioned enhances your EAT, as does every article you have written for a law journal accessible through Google Scholar.

Leveraging Other People’s EAT to Enhance Your Site’s Content

Simply because your website belongs to a law firm, its EAT is already considerable. To enhance it even more, stand on the shoulders of giants. Link straight to the source of the topics you mention in your law firm blog posts; in other words, cite statutes and published court decisions directly, instead of citing secondhand accounts of them, such as the blogs of other law firms. This way, Google knows that you are not simply repeating Internet gossip.

Law Blog Writers Can Optimize Your EAT

Your EAT is already there; now, you need readable content that will help Internet users and Google’s search engine bots appreciate it. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will write interesting, readable content that showcases your expertise.