A Well-Written Blog Post Has a Lot in Common With a Well-Written Academic Essay

Some corners of the Internet will tell you that, in order to write successfully for an Internet audience, you must first forget everything you learned in school. (The more you have to pay to access such advice, the more overt the disdain for formal education you will encounter, to the point that if you attend an in-person workshop, someone will probably tell you to your face that you are a chump for going to law school.) It is true that blog posts belong to a genre or format with its own conventions, but you can learn to write within them just as you learned to write legal documents as a law student. Don’t let the marketing bro advice lurking in the more meretricious corners of the Internet scare you out of writing legal blog content; the more sophisticated Google’s bots become, the more that their idea of what constitutes good writing aligns with the views of your freshman English composition professor.

Semantic Richness, Also Known as Cohesiveness

In the old days, Google ranked web pages higher if they used the keyword in the user’s search query more times, calculated either by raw number of instances or by percentage of total content. When you choose a topic for a blog post, think about which phrases you would expect to see in a blog post about that topic. For example, if you are writing a post about car accident lawsuits, you might expect to see phrases like car accident, rear-end collision, personal injury lawyer, insurance settlement offer, comparative negligence, medical expenses, statute of limitations, and noneconomic damages. If Google’s bots detect all of those phrases in your post, it will know that the post is informative and stays on topic, as opposed to only mentioning car accident lawsuits in passing or saying the same thing about them again and again without giving the reader any in-depth knowledge. In SEO terms, this is called semantic richness, but your English composition professor used to call it cohesiveness or just plain staying on topic.

Information Architecture, Also Known as Organization

Including keywords in the title and subheadings of your post is not just an SEO gimmick. It also shows Google’s bots that your blog post is well organized. For example, in a post about car accident lawsuits, it would make sense if the subheadings were “the car accident lawsuit process,” “determining fault in a car accident,” “economic and non-economic damages,” and “contact a car accident lawyer.” In other words, Google’s bots scan the subheadings and linked phrases in your post to see if it has internal logic and links to genuinely related content. In SEO terms, this is called information architecture, but your freshman English professor would recognize it as a well-organized blog post.

Law Blog Writers to the Rescue

Meanwhile, there is an important difference between academic writing and commercial blog posts. Unlike in college, it isn’t cheating if you pay someone to write your blog posts. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers and get blog content that would make your freshman composition professor smile.

Bots Can Improve Your Law Firm’s Website in Ways You Would Never Expect

In your work as a lawyer, your time is better spent doing the best possible job with clients’ cases than writing content for your law firm’s website. Regularly updating the blog on your site is a must for staying at the top of the organic SEO results and for attracting prospective clients on your site, but there are only so many hours in a day and better you should respond promptly to your clients’ emails and research relevant case law than crank out new blog posts every week. Outsourcing your legal blog content can be a daunting prospect, though; is it worth the cost of hiring flesh and blood human beings to write your law firm’s blog?

Who’s Afraid of Intelligent Machines?

The odds are great that, in the past 24 hours, you have read something that was written by a computer. Half of the sentences in that email you received from a colleague today may have been auto-completed by Gmail. When your niece sent you a text message, she may have just been clicking on the words that your phone suggested. And then there’s the chatbot on your law firm’s website that directs visitors to your content page. For pennies a day, you can subscribe to software that enables bots to churn out thousands of words with a single click. That’s not the whole story, though. You need only read the bot-composed doppelganger of Kafka’s Metamorphosis to know why so many lawyers hesitate to turn content bots loose on their blogs.

Behold the Marketing Gibberish Generator

If all you care about is word count and keywords, then by all means, let the Marketing Gibberish Generator compose the blog posts for your law firm’s website. With just a

click, the Marketing Gibberish Generator will spit out a miasma of buzzwords related to the subject matter and platform you enter into its search fields. If you type something like “men’s divorce lawyer Boulder, Colorado blog” it might say something like “Alimony equitable distribution biased against men modify child support order 420 friendly Boulder, Colorado men’s divorce attorney” and keep this up for as many words as you tell it to.

How Not to Write Like a Web Content Bot

The Marketing Gibberish Generator is useless at producing publishable blog content, but when humans and machines work together, beautiful things can happen. For example, if getting words onto paper is the hardest part for you, you can edit the gibberish, keeping only the buzzwords you want until you have a readable blog post. You can also use its gibberish as an example of what not to do. You can say, “I will write about equitable distribution, but I will speak of devoted dads instead of about a system biased against men.” Sometimes the best way to find what you want to say is to hear what you don’t want to say. The Marketing Gibberish Generator can function as a voice in your head saying, “Eeew! Do I sound like that?”

Behold the Intelligent Humans of Law Blog Writers

Meanwhile, there is an affordable way for humans other than you to write blog posts for your law firm. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers and get blog posts that your readers can relate to.

Knowing Your Audience Means Avoiding Stereotypes

Remember Becky, the user persona created by marketing executives to represent the target audience of contemporary Christian radio? No one wants to be Becky, and no one will admit to being her, not even women named Rebecca who listen to contemporary Christian radio while driving their children to soccer practice. This is because Becky is a stereotype, not a real person. Creating user personas can be a fruitful thought exercise when developing a marketing strategy, but it is important not to stop there, because then you are marketing to stereotypes, and no one likes to be stereotyped.

Drawing attention to a characteristic you think your target audience possesses is bound to backfire. (That Subaru commercial from the 90s was the exception that proves the rule.) You can probably think of countless examples of ads targeting women where it is obvious that the idea for the ad originated in a boardroom full of men in suits or a bro basement with a ping-pong table in the middle. To create truly effective legal blog content, you need a deeper understanding of your audience.

Letting Your Audience Speaking for Itself

Law firm blogs are not TikTok videos about toys, but there is a lesson to be learned here. Nerf recently decided to add TikTok to their online marketing repertoire and deciding to hire a Chief TikTok Officer for this purpose. Instead of perusing the resumes of business school graduates, they simply looked to the audience of their products and of TikTok. They asked Nerf enthusiasts to submit TikTok videos of themselves showing off their Nerf blaster skills, and they received more than 1,000 entries. The job ended up going to Sophie Jamison, whose videos of Nerf blaster stunts already have a following on TikTok, where she goes by the name Sophie Lightning.

How does this apply to law firm marketing? Your audience probably does not spend its time making videos on TikTok; for reasons that extend far beyond user-generated content, it is in your interest to find out what their social media platforms of choice are. It starts with conversation with real clients about social media; the next step is viewing the social media content and finding out how people could use it, or already actually use it, to discuss subjects related to your practice area. For example, a personal injury lawyer could ask social media users to make videos about living with a permanent injury. A divorce lawyer could ask them to make videos about co-parenting during the holidays or post-divorce financial glow-ups. (Social media users who paid off all their credit card debt in a year once their ex-spouse was out of the picture would probably love to brag about it.) The experiences of real clients, or real prospective clients, will resonate with your audience more than anything you can say.

Videos Are Nice, but Don’t Forget to Blog

No matter which social media platforms your audience uses, they still search on Google, and Google loves business blogs. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create blog content to help you connect with your target audience.