How Much Should Your Competitors Influence Your Law Firm Marketing Strategy?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing effort to make your website display above other websites on search engine results pages.  This means that, as in other aspects of business, you are in direct competition with other businesses in your area for the attention and patronage of customers in your city that provide similar services to yours.  Meanwhile, content marketing, of which SEO is one aspect, requires your company to build and express a unique brand identity.  Therefore, how much effort should you devote to researching the marketing strategies of other law firms in your area?  You should certainly consider what your competitors are doing, but rather than obsessing over everything they do and trying to anticipate their next move and beat them to it, just focus on producing valuable legal marketing content for your target audience.

When to Borrow a Page From a Competitor’s Playbook

Analytics can only take you so far when you are developing a marketing strategy.  It doesn’t hurt to find out the most popular keywords in your practice area and try to rank for the keywords on which your competitors outrank you.  You should only try to rank for keywords that are relevant to your practice area.  If you only take family law cases, then there is no point in trying to rank for “Greenville premises liability lawyer” just because another law firm in your area ranks highly for it.

Instead, when evaluating your competitor’s marketing efforts, think like a human being instead of like a search engine.  Look at how easy it is to navigate your competitor’s website, how quickly the site loads, and how readable the layout is.  In other words, your competitor’s website might be the motivation you need to invest in a user experience makeover for your own site.

Doppelganger Blues

How many children’s movies seek to convey the message that, instead of spending all your efforts on trying to impress other people, you should just be yourself, and be the best you that you can be.  This advice is worthwhile when it comes to law firm marketing content.  Focus on the kinds of cases that you can best represent, and communicate this message to the public truthfully and understandably.

The most important thing that should dictate your content strategy is the kinds of legal services you provide.  Are most of your clients seeking collaborative divorce?  Are they fathers who seek to increase their parenting time or lower their child support payments?  Are they debt-ridden Millennials in search of prenuptial agreements?  Write for them and not for another audience that you imagine will bring you more money.  Don’t lose your identity in pursuit of accolades from Google.

Be Strategic and Authentic in Your Content Marketing

Write content that provides value for your own client base, or better yet, have the legal blog content writers at Law Blog Writers, LLC write it, and Google will take notice and reward you for your efforts.

How to Build a Successful Content Marketing Strategy When Your Client Base Is Flat Broke

Some lawyers’ jobs are one economic downturn away from oblivion.  If your job is to draft real estate sales contracts, prenuptial agreements, and collaborative divorce agreements for folks in the Hamptons or in Beverly Hills, you are in a more vulnerable position than you think, even though your clients pay you so much that, if push comes to shove, you can just retire and move somewhere cheaper.  That is not the world where most lawyers live and work.  If your job is to contest unfairly denied Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) claims or to tell clients that it is inevitable that they will have to sell their late parents’ house during probate due to Medicaid estate recovery laws, you don’t have to wait for things to get worse before you and your clients begin feeling the financial strain.  Bankruptcy lawyers rank highly among practice areas where an initial consultation is most likely to include the words, “If I could afford that, I wouldn’t need to hire you.  For bankruptcy lawyers and others with a low-income client base, legal marketing content is less about persuading your clients to part with their nonexistent money and more about building a reputation for being knowledgeable and helping your target audience save money.

A Good Reputation Is Priceless, Even When No One Can Afford Your Hourly Fees

Conventional wisdom says that the goal of law firm marketing is to get Google users to visit your site, fill out an online contact form, schedule a consultation, and start paying you to represent them in their legal case.  If bankruptcy lawyers built their strategy that way, they would miss out on a large segment of their audience, the ones who already know that they can’t afford to hire a lawyer.

Bankruptcy lawyers should focus on building a website that enables visitors to complete the bankruptcy filing process on their own.  Include how-to guides in written and video form; bankruptcy can happen to anyone, from old fogeys who like written lists to digital natives who prefer to get information from videos.  As with any kind of video marketing content; someone out there just got a horrifying bill and wants to watch a 90-second video about filing for bankruptcy before getting back to work on gigs to earn money to pay down the bill, while someone else has fallen behind on a mortgage and is trying to choose between bankruptcy, surrendering the house to the bank, or both; this person wants a 20-minute video with greater detail.  As with any practice area, you need an FAQ page.  One of those questions should be about when it is advisable to hire a bankruptcy lawyer.  The complex cases that need you will hire you, while the simple cases will represent themselves in bankruptcy court, but don’t hesitate to end your video by asking them to write a positive review of you online if they found your video helpful.

Law Firm Marketing Content for Bankruptcy Lawyers and More

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can create valuable website content for lawyers in any practice area.

The Elements of Effective Headlines for Law Firm Blog Posts

Search engine optimization (SEO) is confusing, especially since Google changes its mind all the time about how it ranks pages, and it only reveals small teasers about how its algorithms work, without telling the whole story, leaving content marketing experts relying on guesswork for their advice about how businesses can improve their SEO rankings.  We can at least be certain that search engine results pages (SERPs) do not list entire websites, but rather individual pages; therefore, at any given moment, you are working on optimizing an individual blog post or practice area page on your law firm’s

website, not the whole site.  Meanwhile, when your page displays on the SERP, users do not see the whole page; they only see the headline, and that is what they click on or scroll past.  Likewise, when you send a newsletter to people who have filled out content forms on your website, the goal is to get them to click on the headlines of this month’s blog post, therefore visiting your site.  Therefore, even though blog post headlines account for a small percentage of the word count of your legal marketing content, it is worthwhile to put a lot of thought into them.

Put Your Brand Identity in Every Blog Post Title, Even If It Means Increasing the Word Count

According to Ann Gynn of Content Marketing Institute, every blog post headline should be consistent with your brand identity.  On the surface, this is easy; if you are a personal injury law firm, you only write blog posts about the causes and effects of preventable injuries and the legal rights of injured people.  The challenge is to keep your audience in mind.  If you are writing about new regulations for automatic braking systems in cars, your audience is drivers in your state who want their own cars and the other cars on the road to be as safe as possible.  These are some possible headlines:

• New Regulations Require Automatic Braking Systems to Work at Up to 65 Miles Per Hour

• Your Automatic Braking System Works Best in Good Weather and in City Traffic

• How Reliably Can Today’s Automatic Braking Systems Prevent Collisions?

With these headlines, the focus is on consumer safety.  You would frame your blog post and its headline differently if your audience were lawyers, insurance actuaries, or car enthusiasts who like to spend time thinking about many other cars besides the ones they have concrete plans to buy.

Negativity Sells, but Mean-Spiritedness Does Not Attract the Kind of Attention You Want

Everyone knows that we don’t need more name-calling and sensationalism on the Internet than we already have, but Gynn discovered that consumers click on negative headlines even more than positive ones.  In other words, they were more likely to click on a blog post called “How to Avoid Co-Parenting Drama,” as opposed to “How to Keep the Peace With Your Ex-Spouse.”

What If You Get Writer’s Block After Writing the Headline?

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can produce blog posts to flesh out the headlines you have created, or even write blog posts from scratch, headlines and all.