How to Ensure Success When Hiring Freelancers to Write Law Firm Marketing Content

When writing marketing content for their own law firm websites, many lawyers are far enough outside their comfort zone that they would prefer to hire someone else to do it. Likewise, the law school curriculum teaches you how to be a lawyer, but it does not teach you how to be a manager. When you hire content writers, you must do both. Hiring individual writers on a freelance basis is an option if you know that writing your own legal blog content is not for you, but an even better choice is to work with a content marketing firm that specializes in custom-written content for law firm websites.

Set a Reasonable Budget for the Project

One of the fastest ways to tank your outsourced law firm website content is to ask freelance writers to work for peanuts. If you set the budget so that, when you divide the amount you are paying by the time the writer spent on it, it barely adds up to minimum wage, you are giving writers an incentive to do a sloppy job and rush through as many projects as possible in order to make ends meet. Keep in mind that freelancers (hired with 1099 forms) get to keep less of the money they get from writing than employees (hired with a W2) do, because they are responsible for paying all of their own taxes on the income.

Beware of Jack-of-All-Trades Freelance Writers

Whenever possible, choose freelance writers who have experience with the legal profession. Just as clients should steer clear of “door lawyers,” who will represent every client who walks through the door, whether or not the lawyer has any experience with the type of case with which the client needs help, you should steer clear of “door freelance writers.” You have read web content that was obviously written by someone who knows nothing about the subject of the content; if you post this kind of content on your site, prospective clients will notice, and they will navigate away and visit the website of another law firm. Instead, you should hire writers who have previously worked for law firms, either as content writers or in another capacity, such as paralegals.

Give Detailed Instructions

Even the best writer will only do as good a job on a project as the instructions they receive for the project. The more clearly you communicate your expectations for the project, the more easily the writer can meet those expectations. Be as clear with content writers about what you need from them as you are with clients when you ask them to provide information relevant to their cases. Let content writers know that you are wiling to answer their questions at any point during the writing process.

Law Blog Writers Is Your Best Choice

Even better, hire a content marketing firm dedicated entirely to producing content for law firm websites. You can count on the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver quality blog posts and web page content every time.

Sources

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/find-work-quality-freelancers

Beware of Google’s Manual Actions

When you hear the phrase “manual actions” in the context of search engine optimization (SEO), you might think that it is something good. After all, user engagement helps your site’s SEO rankings. If a user manually clicks on your site, that means more to Google than if a user simply is aware that your website exists; it should also count at least as much as time on page, where the user could simply be staring into space while your site is visible on their screen. Outside of the Internet, manual actions by customers, such as signing a check or taking cash or a credit card out of their wallet, are among the best things you can hope for. When an employee at Google clicks to make a decision about your site that overrides the judgment of its algorithms, though, it means trouble for your site. Therefore, if the content on our site has been there a long time, you should review it to make sure that it is manual action-proof, and you should add new legal blog content that complies with Google’s current standards.

Google’s Manual Actions Are Penalties, Not Ranking Factors

Google ranks websites in the order of their relevance to users’ search queries, in other words, how useful it thinks they will be to the user. It judges their relevance by a variety of factors, including keyword matches, high quality writing (grammatically correct and idiomatic language that stays on topic), the number of clicks the site has received in the past, the length of time previous users have spent on the page, links to other web pages, and how recently the website has been updated, among other factors. Google changes its algorithm (the mathematical formula it uses to give weight to each ranking factor) periodically. Therefore, a comprehensive SEO strategy requires you to monitor the rankings of your law firm website and update your site as necessary.

Website designers and content creators often find ways to game the system and make their sites rank higher without enhancing the quality of the site. A classic “black hat” SEO tactic is to write keywords dozens of times in a font color that matches the background, so that users will not see the phrase “Hattiesburg personal injury lawyer” repeated ad nauseam in the margins, but Google’s bots will, and they will think that the site is more relevant than the sites of other law firms in Hattiesburg. Google’s algorithm updates are a way of staying ahead of the black hat SEOs. If Google catches your site trying to bend the rules while its next algorithm is still in the works, it will take a manual action. This means that a Google employee in a cubicle somewhere will physically click on the search result of your site and move it off of the first page results or remove it from the results list entirely. If Google takes a manual action against your site, it will notify you. The good news is that manual actions are not forever, and you can always repair the violations on your site so that Google will reinstate it.

Excellent Content With No Risk of Violations

You can count on the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers that play by the rules and provide value for readers.

How to Optimize Your Law Firm Website for Local Searches

Most people who hire lawyers find these lawyers through Google searches. Likewise, most people who search on Google for law firms are looking for a law firm in their own geographic area. There may be a few people searching for your law firm from out of state, but these are the exception rather than the rule. For example, someone in North Carolina might search for “Is Florida an equitable distribution state” when she sees on Facebook that her frenemy from high school, who has since moved to Florida, is getting a divorce. Likewise, someone who got injured in a car accident while visiting Florida from out of state might look for a personal injury lawyer in Florida, since the courts of the state where the accident occurred have jurisdiction in personal injury cases. Most searches will be from people in your area looking to hire you. Therefore, your legal blog content and everything else on your website should have your local community as a target audience.

Get Your NAP in Order

In the context of search engine optimization, NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. NAP is one of the things that search engine bots pay the most attention to when finding results related to businesses. Your NAP should display on every page of your website, to make it clear to Google that all of the pages belong to the same business. The best way to get your NAP on every page and to ensure that it is identical on each page is to display it in a footer. Consistency is important; you should either format your business name as “Bloggins and Associates” or “Bloggins & Associates.” Likewise, you should format your street address as “Pines Boulevard” or “Pines Blvd.,” but not both. If you change the name of your business, you should reach out to all the sites that list your business and ask them to update the name, so that your business is not competing with its former self for SEO rankings.

Write What You Know

Outsourcing blog content is fine; perhaps it is even ideal. When it comes to practice area pages on your website, though, the best person to write the content is someone at your law firm, or at least someone in your city. Someone who lives in South Florida knows which of the roads that lead to Pembroke Pines are the most annoying to drive on; they can write content that reflects this more quickly and effectively than the most skilled Internet researcher. They remember which multi-vehicle pileups and society page divorces remain in the local public consciousness, even though these never made national news.

NAP on Your Own Turf, but Leave the Blogging to the Professionals

No matter how accurate your NAP and how local your practice area pages, you will still need to update the blog on your law firm website regularly with new content. You can count on the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver custom-written blog posts that add value to your site and enhance your SEO rankings.