Searched-Focused Outlines: An Effective Method for Writing Informative Web Page Content Quickly

Your teachers in middle school and high school probably tried to teach you to create outlines of writing assignments before drafting the text, but most students don’t put much thought into their outlines or reread them very carefully when writing out the full text of the assignment. By the time you are a practicing lawyer, though, you understand the value of outlining and organizing your thoughts before composing a text that other people will read. Many lawyers write outlines before drafting any document more formal than an email to a client. Like many lawyers, even though you are accustomed to composing a variety of legal documents, you might feel stuck when it comes to writing content for your law firm’s website. You might feel especially intimidated when you find out that writing content for your law firm’s site is not a one-time project; for best results, you should update it frequently, such as by adding new posts to your site’s blog. The good news is that a simple outlining technique can help you quickly compose legal blog content that succinctly addresses readers’ questions.

Creating an Outline Based on Keyword Research

In the old days, people used to write blogs to enthuse about their favorite bands or rant about the multilevel marketing companies that scammed them out of their life’s savings, but today, the main purpose of blogs is to drive web traffic to business websites, including law firm websites. Whether you are writing a blog post or a content page about one of your law firm’s practice areas, your goal should be content that addresses issues that users have in mind when they type common search queries.

Keyword research tools can show you the websites that rank highest in your geographic area for the search queries for which you want to rank. Choose several keywords and write a subheading for each one; if possible, phrase your subheading as a question. Assume that you will write one or two paragraphs under each subheading. Don’t obsess over word count too much, but for a 500-word blog post, you should write approximately three subheadings, and for a 2,000-word content page, you will need about 12. For example, for a blog post called “What to Do After a Car Accident,” your subheadings might be, “Should I Take Pictures After a Car Accident?” “What Do I Tell the Insurance Company?” and “Do I Need a Car Accident Lawyer?”

When you start with a keyword-focused outline, you do not have to worry about working keywords into the body text, because they are already in the subheadings. You will probably include them naturally in the text, but even if you don’t, that is fine. A keyword-focused outline can help you avoid writing text that is awkward, wordy, or repetitive just so you can include keywords.

Keyword-Focused Outlines Are Just One Approach to Law Firm Blogging

Whether your law firm’s brand identity includes blog posts based on common questions, current news stories, or the intricacies of case law, you can always trust the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver informative, readable content quickly.

How Bad Is Fluff Content for SEO Rankings?

Every lawyer can think of a colleague whose writing style is hard to follow and whose email could still make all their relevant points if they were half their current length. High school and college English teachers wave The Elements of Style in students’ faces and exhort them to write like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Some of them would even disapprove of the word “exhort” and urge you to find an Anglo-Saxon synonym for it. Lawyers know the value of the economy of speech, both in oral communication and in written documents. When it comes to web content, though, the verbosity tends to come out, even in the most skilled writers. Perhaps it is because pages are just pixels on a screen, so being wordy doesn’t kill more trees than getting to the point. Maybe it is because seeing the word count add up on the corner of the window on your word processing application gives you a sense of accomplishment, much as racking up fractions of miles on a treadmill does. No matter the reason, fluff content is ubiquitous online, even in legal blog content, and while Google doesn’t seem to mind it, it deters prospective clients.

More Keywords, Less Time on Page

Barry Schwartz of SE Roundtable defines fluff content as content that is repetitive without repeating previous content verbatim, so that Google does not recognize it as duplicate content. According to Schwartz, not only does Google not penalize pages that contain fluff, it often ranks them highly. He hypothesizes that this is because Google’s bots do not know that the paraphrases of previously stated points do not add new information to the page; this is just one of the ways that bots, for all their ability to emulate the tone of Kafka’s Metamorphosis lack a human-like understanding of language.

Paradoxically, Google’s bots recognize concise, informative text; they make rich snippets out of it. The trouble is that they cannot tell whether the rest of the content on the page adds important details and context or simply restates the snippet in slightly different words. Google may think that the content is well written, in the sense of free of grammatical errors, and it may reward you for using a wide variety of keywords.

Human readers, however, recognize fluff when they see it. When they read two whole paragraphs without learning anything that the rich snippet did not already tell them, they will become impatient and navigate away from the page. Time on page is one of many metrics that determine the SEO ranking of a web page; Google rewards pages that readers find informative enough to read all the way to the end. In this regard, fluff content will count against you for SEO rankings.

All Informative Content, No Fluff

You can always trust the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver fluff-free blog posts, landing pages, guest posts, and page content for your law firm’s website.

New Year’s Resolution: Lazy, Cheapskate Content Marketing

We are not even a week into 2022, and everyone’s energy is already stretched thin, even thinner than it was this time last year, if that is even possible. The last thing most small law firms have is time and money to invest in content marketing. Meanwhile, content marketing is as important as ever as a means for small law firms to connect with current and prospective clients and to establish their professional reputations. This year, you should adopt a “less is more” approach to content marketing, but you should continue to update your law firm website with relevant legal blog content at least a few times per month.

An Ounce of Strategy Is Worth a Pound of Content

Frequently adding new content to your website and your social media accounts is great for SEO and for increasing awareness about your law firm, but creating new content costs time, and if you do not create the content yourself, it costs money to pay someone else to create it. Don’t waste your efforts trying to keep up with the Joneses and have the fanciest website in town and the most diversified content marketing strategy. Instead, focus on small but measurable goals. Jodi Harris of Content Marketing Institute poses a series of “who? why? how?” questions to help you do this. These are some examples of manageably sized content marketing goals and strategies for achieving them:

· If your goal is to rank about a certain competitor on organic search engine results pages, then you should focus your efforts on SEO. Add new pages to your website and update your blog as often as possible.

· If your goal is to raise awareness that you have recently branched into a new practice area or want to attract a certain type of cases, then focus your page content and blog posts on this area. For example, if you have figured out that DUI and traffic offenses are your criminal defense law firm’s bread and butter, then most of the new content you add to your site should be related to those practice areas, from content pages to FAQ pages to blog posts. You could even invest in a few search engine ads and landing pages related to DUI and traffic crimes.

· If you have set your sights on social media marketing for 2022, choose just one social media platform and choose it carefully.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

You can do a lot of content marketing without creating any new content at all. For example, you can republish some old blog posts that made a splash several years ago, if they are still relevant. On social media or your blog, you can link to existing, valuable content. You can even publish a long report you have previously written by repackaging it as a series of blog posts.

Legal Marketing Content Never Goes Out of Style

You don’t need a big, ambitious content marketing strategy this year, but you do need to publish content. You can always trust the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to provide content that gets good results.