How to Impress Google With the Introductory Paragraph to Your Blog Post

Many of the documents that you write in the context of your work as a lawyer; for example, in a personal injury complaint or divorce petition, you start by listing the names of the parties. Google does not have any hard and fast rules about how you should begin the blog posts on your law firm’s website; in fact, Google’s search engine bots can read all of the text on a web page in an instant, so as long as the relevant content is on the page, it doesn’t matter where it is. Meanwhile, readers respond well to certain features in the opening paragraphs of blog posts, and reader actions such as time on page and number of clicks also play a role in the page’s SEO rankings. These are some important components of the introductory paragraphs of legal blog content that will make a good impression on prospective clients and on Google’s search engine bots.

Include Your Focus Key phrase

Representatives of Google have indicated that its SEO bots do not have an opinion about where to place your keywords, and the consensus is that, in the third decade of the 21st century, one incidence of a keyword in a blog post is enough; the days of keyword stuffing are long gone. SEO rankings are not the only reason to include your main keyword (such as “Flagstaff car accident lawyer”) in the first paragraph, though. First, some readers will click away after the first paragraph if they do not see a phrase that resembles their search query. Second, a sentence in the first paragraph that includes your focus key phrase is a prime candidate for a snippet.

Reasonable Length for an Introductory Blog Post

Long blocks of texts alienate readers; they are especially hard to read on mobile devices, which is where the majority of readers enter Google searches for law firms. Twelve sentences is the maximum length for a blog post introduction paragraph, but yours can be even shorter than that.

Indicate What Readers Will Find If They Keep Reading

Visitors to your blog post page will keep reading if the first paragraph is interesting enough and, more importantly, if it is free of annoyances like formatting errors and unidiomatic language. One of the most effective ways to get them to keep reading is to spell out what they will find in the subsequent paragraphs; a law firm blog post is not a mystery novel. Your first paragraph should include sentences like, “In this post you will find out five strategies that insurance companies use to give you less money after a car accident” or, “Keep reading to find out which business entity type is best for your small business.”

Awesome Blog Posts From Beginning to End

You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create blog posts that make Google want to extract snippets from the first paragraph and make readers want to keep reading all the way to the end.

How Important Is the Location of Links in a Blog Post?

You know a blog post is good when you would still want to read it from beginning to end even if it were printed out in hard copy, such that you could not follow the links. (You know you are a geriatric millennial if, when you were in college, your dad used to print out interesting articles his friends forwarded to him by email and send them to you by postal mail, when he could have just as easily forwarded them to your university email address.) Blog posts are more than just a way to link your website to other sites, and the body text is more than just a prelude to the call-to-action paragraph at the end, where the reader can follow a link to contact you.

Despite this, everyone who has written a blog post for a business website knows that links are important; even a perfunctory search for how to write blog posts will indicate that you should link to other pages on your site as well as to credible sources for the information you are presenting. How important is it where the links are in relation to the rest of the text in the post? There are lots of rumors about this, but no authoritative answers, and the best way to cope with this ambiguity is to entrust the composition of your legal blog content to professional content writers who will deliver posts that perform well no matter where they place the links.

Google: If There Is an Ideal Location for Links, We’re Not Telling Where It Is

Some content marketing guides will tell you that Google’s bots will pay more attention to the links from your site if they are in the first paragraph, while others say that including a link in the last paragraph is more beneficial to your SEO rankings. This debate has as much to do with curiosity about the psychology of search engine bots as it does with the practicalities of optimizing a web page. Asking whether bots read a web page from top to bottom or from bottom to top is somewhat like asking whether dogs dream in black and white or in color.

When asked about this matter during a Twitter discussion, John Mueller of Google was perfectly evasive. He said that the anchor text connected to the link matters more than the location, but he did not disclose which link locations, if any, Google’s bots prefer. Then Gianluca Fiorelli mentioned that Google owned a patent called Reasonable Surfer that pays attention to link locations. Mueller’s noncommittal response was full of the kinds of punctuation-based emojis that geriatric millennials used to use on AOL Instant Messenger while procrastinating studying for their college finals.

You’ve Come to the Right Place for Law Firm Blog Posts

You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to produce custom-written blog content that boosts the SEO rankings of your law firm’s website, so you can have more free time to spend pondering life’s unanswerable questions.

How Useful Are Automated Paraphrasing Tools for Your Law Firm’s Blog?

Every law firm that wishes to stay competitive with its search engine optimization (SEO) rankings needs a blog on its website, and it needs to add new content to the blog at least once per month. Lawyers, paralegals, and other law firm employees are already too busy to take on any additional tasks, such as researching and writing blog posts, especially at small law firms where everyone is already managing a superhuman workload. Relying on artificial intelligence to compose or rewrite blog posts is a popular strategy for adding a blog to your site at minimal cost and minimal expenditure of time. While artificial intelligence is better at writing than it used to be, it is a much better investment of your resources to hire real humans to write legal blog content for your site.

How Paraphrasing Tools Work

Paraphrasing tools are computer programs that take input of existing web context and turn it into output by changing the wording but not changing the meaning. At least, that is what they do in theory. They originated years ago, when Google started penalizing websites that posted plagiarized content, so websites started rewriting existing content instead of simply re-posting what they found on other sites.

Of course, changing something just enough that it is not technically plagiarized does not make for a pleasurable reading experience. You have probably heard of the horrors of “spun content.” If you have ever navigated to a web page that contained it (probably after scrolling through several pages of search results preceding the spun page), you probably clicked away quickly because it was so unreadable that it made your brain hurt. At their worst, plagiarism tools simply swap out synonyms out of context, so that “catch up” becomes “capture up.”

You can guess that this kind of D-minus effort to make your web content not count as plagiarized will not endear you to Google. Looking for synonyms is a profitable enterprise when it comes to keyword research, but you can do that with analytics software. Besides, after a while, it will become intuitive that your blog post should include the phrase “auto accident attorney” in addition to “car accident lawyer.”

Paraphrasing Tools Are No Substitute for a Human Writer

If you don’t have time to write your own blog posts, and having artificial intelligence produce rewrites by making superficial changes is not the solution, then what should you do? Even if you do not have a huge budget to devote to your website or to your marketing efforts, it is worthwhile to hire content writers to deliver professionally written blog posts.

Legal Content Writers Can Do More Than Just Paraphrase

Professional writers with a background in law can strike just the right tone with your audience. You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to compose idiomatic, readable blog posts for your law firm’s website, posts that address the questions and concerns of your target audience.