Never Underestimate the Power of the NAP for Local SEO Rankings

Lawyers have always been famous for burning the candle at both ends, but since the COVID-19 pandemic started you have been working harder than ever. You have been putting in extra effort to bring in new clients, but maybe the thing standing between you and the uptick in initial consultations you are hoping for is a NAP.

In fact, all the keyword searches and efforts to adapt your site to voice searches are no substitute for a good NAP. The NAP, which stands for name, address, and phone number, is one of the most boring parts of SEO, but it is also among the most important. Straightening out your NAP might be the key to improving your SEO rankings, but it works even better if you also regularly update your website with high quality legal content writing.

How Your NAP Affects Your Law Firm’s SEO Rankings

When you search online for a business, the most important things that you want to find out are its name, address, and phone number. In other words, you want to identify it and know that it exists and that it is possible to make contact with it. After you explore its website and decide that it is worth pursuing, you want to know how to contact it. This is important for every type of business, but is especially important for law firms.

Including your contact information, specifically your NAP, on your law firm’s website sounds like a no-brainer, but it is just the first of many steps in leveraging your NAP for SEO purposes.

If your law firm has ever changed names, locations, or phone numbers, then records of the old contact information might still be available online and some of your prospective clients who intended to contact you might not be able to find you because they found the outdated contact information. Furthermore, if there are several versions of your NAP available online, it will make you seem less credible to Google’s ranking algorithms, pushing your SEO rankings lower. One way to remedy this is to fill out a Google My Business profile with as many contact details about your law firm as possible.

What’s Next After Your NAP?

Having a unique business name is important, but the name is far from the only thing about your business that is unique, and it is not how you win clients over once they get to your site. One of the best investments you can make is to update your law firm’s blog frequently. The frequent updates make a good impression on Google and the blog content is what gives you credibility in the eyes of human readers.

Law Blog Writers Will Create Blog Content That Makes Readers Want to Contact You

A consistent NAP and a regularly updated blog full of engaging legal blog content make for a winning law firm marketing strategy. Contact Law Blog Writers to get custom written content for your law firm’s blog.

How to Make Your Law Firm’s Holiday Cards an Effective Marketing Tool in This Most Unusual Year

As you sit at home, drafting work emails in your pancake batter-stained bathrobe, tears well in your daughter’s eyes as she attempts to solve long division problems without ever hanging seen her teacher solve one in person, and your son watches Peppa Pig and her friends play on a playground even though playgrounds haven’t been open since before he was old enough to slide down the slide by himself. You want to cheer your children up by daydreaming about the holidays, but all your kids want for Christmas is to do math in a classroom, fight with the other kids at daycare over the toy fire engine, or eat Chicken McNuggets inside a McDonald’s.

You feel the same way about 2020 as everyone else feels; you can’t wait for it to be over. Some people are even calling to cancel 2020. Of course, it is not possible to cancel 2020, but you can say goodbye to it in the most community-building way possible, such as by sending holiday cards. Sending holiday cards is not just for lonely old ladies; it can be an effective form of law firm marketing, as well.

Why Send Holiday Cards?

Sending a greeting card to the people on your contact list during the holiday season serves to remind the recipients of your existence and your brand identity. No one suddenly decides to hire a personal injury lawyer simply because a greeting card showed up in the mail earlier that day, but in the coming months, if someone they know tells them about a problem that a lawyer in your practice area could help them solve. Besides, if you make especially eye-catching law firm holiday cards, people might display them at home or at work, giving you free advertising whenever anyone visits the recipient of the card.

Print or Email?

You might think that physical holiday cards sent through postal mail are the default option, but things are not so simple during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is true that some people who use email for most correspondence delight in receiving a greeting card in the mailbox. The pandemic has sparked many people’s interest in old-school pleasures like gardening and homemade baked goods, and old-fashioned paper greeting cards certainly fit in with that ethos. On the other hand, if your contacts have listed their office addresses in your contact list, they might not receive the cards, so email might be a better option. Besides, sending holiday cards by email is much less expensive.

What About Greetings?

Some grinches grimace every time someone says “Merry Christmas.” Some grouches grumble whenever someone says “Happy Holidays.” You can sidestep this problem by not saying either. Just send your contacts your best wishes for 2021, and add personalized messages when possible.

Build Your Law Firm’s Brand Identity All Year Long

Holiday card season only happens once a year, but you should update your blog all year long. You can get high quality custom written legal blog content from Law Blog Writers.

Focus on Your Core Audience: Advice for Lawyer Bloggers

Websites that are accessible through Google searches and appear in the results of those searches have the whole world as their audience, at least in theory. For this reason, anyone who posts a video of themselves dancing to a catchy song can have an audience of billions; that person can become a superstar or else never live down their unfortunate decision to make a fool of themselves on the Internet. In practice, though, most websites will not be viewed by the entire audience of the World Wide Web; law firm websites certainly will not. Instead, you should focus your law blog content on the people who are most likely to benefit from it and most likely to contact you if they do.

Don’t Try to Be All Things to All People

Think about all the clients you have ever represented in your career as a lawyer, or even all the people who have ever contacted you for a consultation. What did the people who expressed interest in your services as a lawyer have in common? How did they see the world? What were their values, hopes, and fears? These are the features of your target audience, the people you should keep in mind when you write your blog. For all the people who have already contacted you about legal representation, there are more out there. You are a better judge of how they think than any analytics tools are.

Think about memorable clients you have met in the past. You should write blog posts aimed at the next Bob or the next Amy (or whatever your previous clients’ names were). This tactic liberates you from having to follow data-driven fads. You don’t have to write about what “everyone” is thinking about, whoever they are. Yes, everyone is worried about COVID-19 and its economic effects right now, but they can find information about it on millions of other websites. Your blog should give them information and perspectives that they cannot so easily find in other places.

Providing Valuable Blog Content for Your Core Audience

Don’t try to become a thought leader; be the leader that you already are. Remember that you have already helped numerous clients; they already value your opinion, and there are many more future clients out there who will value your opinion, too. Here are some ways to make your blog appeal to your core audience:

· Give your views on current events as they relate to your practice area

· Advise your clients on what they should do in situations that relate to your practice area even before they contact you (such as communicating with their former in-laws, if you are a divorce lawyer, or what to do in the first moments after a car accident, if you are a personal injury lawyer)

· Share content by writers that you admire and who have influenced your views, including your colleagues in other cities and your professors from law school, among others

Leave the Writing to the Blogging Experts

Perhaps an even better strategy is to identify the concerns of your target audience and then leave it to the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create engaging, shareable blog posts for them.