4 Content Marketing Bad Habits to Ditch in 2021

So, you are putting effort into your law firm’s content marketing strategy, but it is only helping so much. The solution is not to give up, especially not on your blog. Google likes to see that your blog has been around for a long time, that you have consistently been updating it, and that it keeps improving. Some bad habits and outdated strategies might be hindering the performance of your content marketing efforts, though. These are some common content marketing bad habits that could be stopping your legal blog content from giving you the best possible return on investment.

Looking for a Quick Fix

Clickbait and content marketing overlap to a large enough degree that a great deal of business blog content, even on law firm blogs, focuses on hacks and quick fixes. Of course, as a lawyer, you know that focusing on the fastest solution without looking at the big picture will backfire. If you steered your clients in this direction, it would get you lots of negative online reviews and maybe even a malpractice lawsuit. Don’t be fooled by marketing charlatans who tell you that a few simple tricks will take the place of a detailed and thoughtfully considered content marketing strategy.

Spending Lots of Resources on Content With a Short Shelf Life

Outdated content on a blog still has SEO value, as long as you keep updating the blog; think of it as the blog having a large and diverse archive. Despite this, you should not spend too much money and effort on content that is so specific to a certain time of year or current event that it is only relevant for a short time. In other words, don’t blow your budget on a content marketing campaign centered on Talk Like a Pirate Day or whatever reboot of an old movie is getting a theatrical release this month. Seasonal content has its place, but evergreen content gives you a better return on your investment.

Resistance to Change

Too many law firms make the mistake of only making minor changes to their content marketing strategy and expecting a big improvement in their return on investment. Blogs are great, but even the best blog cannot reach all of your prospective clients. You will also need to branch out into other channels, such as podcasts, YouTube video content, or Twitter, even if getting started on a new content marketing platform costs time and money.

Talking More Than You Listen

The best marketing content is rooted in your responses to things that clients have actually said to you and questions that they have actually asked. Clients can give you a better idea of what the most frequently asked questions about your practice area are than marketing consultants who charge premium rates can.

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Old Blog Posts on Your Law Firm’s Website: Classics or Clutter?

Even if you don’t buy into the hype about decluttering being the key to happiness, and even if, during the pandemic, you were so much in your element working at your cluttered dining room table that you were disappointed to go back to your presentable law office after getting vaccinated, dealing with clutter is a part of your job. When you study documents to present as evidence, you have to find small pieces of relevant information in the midst of reams of clutter. If you are an estate planning lawyer, you might even advise your clients to declutter their houses now, because if they leave the decluttering to their descendants, it might delay the estate sale of the house or lead to feuds over personal property.

When it comes to the blog on your law firm’s website, those old, gently worn blog posts cluttering the archive might be a good thing. Don’t think of legal blog content that you posted several years ago as clutter; think of it as classic web content that never goes out of style.

Do Your Old Posts Provide Value to Your Prospective Clients?

If the newest posts on your blog are from more than a year ago, this will not make a good impression on visitors to your site. You should add content to your blog at least once per month, but there is no need to delete your old posts after you add new ones; sometimes a gigantic blog archive is just what someone needs when they are up all night, worrying about their legal and financial problems. Besides, information about court decisions does not go out of date; a post you wrote in 2017 about a then-recent court decision may relate to a reader’s legal problem more directly than any of your more recent posts.

Some simple analytics can show you how much value your posts, old and new, provide to readers. Do people still click on your old posts? How much time do they spend on each post? In other words, do they read the posts all the way to the end? If people spend more time reading your old posts than your new ones, maybe you should start emulating the old you.

Google’s SEO Bots Appreciate Your Classic Blog Posts

Another reason not to delete your old blog posts is SEO. Google’s bots will take notice if you updated your blog this week, but they will be truly impressed if you have updated it every week for several years. Besides, the more posts on your blog, the more instances of each keyword your site contains, and the greater variety of keywords. In other words, your site has more surface area with which to catch search queries.

Get Instant Classic Blog Content

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Content Marketing Is the New Public Relations

Online reputation management is an important part of the marketing strategy of any business, including but not limited to law firms. You have a lot of control over what you say online as a representative of your law firm, but you have much less control over what others say about you. Paying people to act as cheerleaders for your law firm on social media is a rookie mistake, as is posting mean-spirited, ad hominem responses to negative reviews of your law firm on review sites or, even worse, paying people to write fake positive reviews. Being mean will not win you any friends, but neither will attempting to buy people’s esteem in your law firm; it will just make you look desperate. The coolest people make being cool look effortless; they are simply being themselves, and the same goes for law firms. Instead of spending lots of money on public relations, a less expensive and more effective investment of your budget is to let your talents speak for themselves in the legal blog content on your law firm’s website.

Let the Journalists Come to You

According to Hillel Fuld of the Inc. blog, the difference between content marketing and public relations is not what is written but who writes it. When you write something about your law firm and post it on your site, it is content marketing. When a journalist writes something about you, it is public relations. You might be puzzling over how much of your marketing budget to devote to content marketing and how much to devote to public relations, but consider this: the more original content you include on your own law firm’s site, the easier it will be for journalists to write about you in ways that enhance your reputation.

If a journalist is writing about something related to your practice area in your city, she will probably start by doing online research about the topic. The more often you update your blog, the higher your SEO rankings will be. The more content on your site, the more the journalist will be convinced that you are a credible source, especially if you make it easy for readers to verify the information they read on your blog. The more detailed your “About Us” page, the more the journalist will know about you before she even emails you. All of these factors increase the likelihood that journalists will want to cite you.

Remember that a law firm is not a burger chain and you are not trying to sell a billion lawsuits. Having a good reputation is about being credible, not about making everyone buy your product.

Professionally Written Content Wins You Points With Google, Journalists, and Prospective Clients

The more content on your site, the better, but you do not necessarily have to write all of it yourself. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to write law firm blog content that shows the public your professionalism without resorting to shameless self-promotion.