Do Backlinks Still Matter?

Outdated search engine optimization (SEO) advice has a long afterlife on the Internet.  It is easy to find costly SEO training courses, some of them sold through a multilevel marketing (MLM) business model, that promise to teach you to make your website bring in big bucks.  Most of the information you learn in these courses is from the era of Friendster and Geocities.  The good news is that lawyers are not usually the victims of these SEO scams.  If your reasoning skills are sufficient for you to have graduated from law school, then you know that a law firm does not sink or swim purely on the strength of its website.  Yes, SEO is important because most clients find out about the lawyers they hire through Google searches.  Instead of stressing out over various aspects of Google’s SEO algorithm, though, you should focus on updating your site frequently with valuable legal blog content.

Google Is Too Smart to Fall for Backlink Spamming

A backlink, also known as an inbound link, is when another web page links to your web page, for example, when a link in a news article or business directory website links to your law firm.  Google used to give web pages a big rankings boost for backlinks, because it considered them evidence that the owners of other websites found the target web page so useful or informative that they wanted to share it with their own audience.  As with keywords, though, it did not take long for the owners of websites to seek out shortcuts that would give them a large number of backlinks without them genuinely attracting the admiration of other webmasters.  The sale of backlinks became an emerging industry, and website owners would trade backlinks as a favor to each other, even if the subject matter of the linked sites was unrelated.  Some enterprising folks even invented link-building bots.

It didn’t take long for Google to wise up to these shenanigans.  Google’s Penguin update aimed to penalize sites for irrelevant or obviously spammy backlinks.  Penguin is not a recent update; it is no spring chicken in penguin years, ancient in Internet time.

What’s a Law Firm to Do?

How much mental energy should you, as a lawyer who wants to market your small to medium-sized law firm, devote to backlinks?  Not much.  Don’t go chasing backlinks, but do concentrate on creating content that is so valuable that those who read it will want to encourage others to read it.  Google is always updating its algorithms to be better at evaluating the usefulness of web content to human readers; it even employs human evaluators for this purpose.  You should write what you want your prospective clients to know.  Let Google chase you, not the other way around.

What If You Don’t Have Time to Write All This Fabulous Content?

This is where the professional law firm bloggers at Law Blog Writers, LLC come in.  The team of content marketing writers will produce custom-written content for your law firm website.

Law Firm Marketing for Perfectionists

Perfectionism can be a blessing and a curse.  Your attention to detail enabled you to succeed in your studies before and during law school, and your clients praise your meticulousness.  On the other hand, you feel like your work is never done; even though you start working on an assignment as soon as you receive it and you don’t procrastinate, you always seem to finish your work right before the deadline, leaving you with virtually no free time.  Even though you have found a method that works for you as a lawyer, trying to add law firm marketing to your list of tasks is a recipe for stress and panic.  Things move so quickly on the Internet that there simply isn’t time to fuss over every detail.  If you hire professional writers to write law firm blog content, you can save up time and energy, freeing up your resources to do your job as a lawyer diligently.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

Readers do not like sloppily written blog posts, and neither does Google.  Search engine optimization (SEO) ranks web pages based on a complex variety of factors, including factual accuracy and grammatically correct, idiomatic language.  The fact that you would never dream of clicking “publish” on a draft that you have not fact-checked and proofread is a plus in the content marketing world.

On the other hand, SEO is a moving target.  Google is always changing its algorithms, but that is mostly a matter of refining its ability to tell the difference between genuinely useful and well-written content and spam that tries to score points with Google without providing value to readers.  Perfectionism is an obstacle in content marketing because your site will lose its place on the search engine results page, and its rank will slip, if you update it less frequently than your competitors do. In other words, you must add new blog posts to your site at least once per month.  If you write one perfect blog post per year and your competitor writes one pretty good blog post every two weeks, your competitor wins.

An Antidote to Perfectionism?

The high responsibility, low control model of management lends itself well to lawyers and content marketing.  The best thing you can do is to delegate the composition of blog content to your law firm staff or, even better, to a professional content marketing company.  Then sit back and watch your site’s SEO rankings soar.  Don’t read the posts before you publish them if doing this would lead you to spend hours rephrasing every sentence.  Instead, focus on the analytics and on the boost that the blog posts are bringing to your site’s SEO rankings and how many prospective clients have contacted your law firm since you started publishing a blog.

Law Blog Writers, LLC, Is the Next Best Thing to Perfection

Contact the professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC to get blog content of consistent quality that will make prospective clients and Google notice your site.

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What Is Evergreen Content, and Why Is It Important to Your Law Firm’s Content Marketing Strategy?

Internet content has a surprisingly short shelf-life, and it seems to be getting shorter, as if to keep pace with the attention span of those who consume it.  If you doubt this, just look at a news article from a few months ago or a social media post from yesterday.  If you happen to follow the references cited in a Wikipedia article and find a website archived by the Wayback Machine, it is truly a blast from the past.  When you consider this, it may seem pointless to write a blog for your law firm’s website if anything you write is going to be out of date almost as soon as you click “publish.”  If you investigate the matter further, however, you will realize that there is a large range of how long web content stays relevant.  It is possible to write legal blog content and other types of marketing content that will remain of interest to readers for years to come; this type of content is often called evergreen content.

The Way to Find Evergreen Content Is to Find Out What It’s Not

When you brainstorm topics for your law firm’s blog, the first ones that come to mind probably will not be the evergreen ones.  You will probably think of blog posts related to the current moment.  If you are a personal injury lawyer, if it is close to Thanksgiving or Christmas, you will probably think about how drunk driving accidents are most frequent during the holidays, and in the summer, you will think about motorcycle accidents or about the summer festival in your city that attracts out-of-state visitors distracted by alcohol and by unfamiliar surroundings.  If you are a family law attorney, you will think of the co-parenting challenges associated with tax time, summer vacation, and the Christmas holidays, to name just a few of the many annual events that are a minefield for co-parenting conflict.

Once you have eliminated those topics, think about the things that clients always want to know, regardless of the season; this is your evergreen content.  Frequently asked questions posts are a popular form of evergreen content, as are explanations of the laws that affect the kinds of cases you handle. For example, if you are an employment lawyer, you might want to write about the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, among others.

Evergreen Content Is Not Just for Blogs

Blogs are not the only place to write evergreen content.  Frequently asked questions pages about the various services you offer are a great asset to a law firm website.  The content on your practice area pages is also, by nature, evergreen.

Make Your Law Firm’s Website Verdant With Evergreen Content

Frequently updating your site with evergreen content will make a great impression on your prospective clients and on Google.  Content the law firm marketing writers at Law Blog Writers to build up your site with evergreen content.