Digital Marketing Trends to Boost Your Law Firm Website’s Performance in 2020

The new year is almost here, and even if you are averse to New Year’s resolutions, it’s time to think about ways to get a better return on the money you spend marketing your law firm. Unsurprisingly, most law firm marketing takes place online, so most of your marketing strategies will involve digital marketing.

The digital marketing website 99 Designs has published a list of digital marketing trends to follow for 2020, and like most content related to marketing, only some of it is applicable to law firms. For example, shoppable posts are of no use to law firms; your profession is too complex to be practiced merely through clicks and the exchange of digital currency. The following are suggestions from the 99 Designs listicle that law firms would be wise to incorporate into their marketing strategy for the new year.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is not a new concept in brand marketing, but the sheer volume of data available about users’ behavior means that marketers can do it more effectively. In short, sentiment analysis means figuring out what your target audience thinks and cares about and validating those sentiments with your brand image. The ideal client profile, such as Becky the Christian radio listener, is an example of sentiment analysis. With an ideal client profile, you think about your prospective audience and create a fictional character who embodies their identifying qualities. You develop that character in detail and craft your blog content as though it is addressed to them.

Smaller Social Media Sites

When you try to reach a smaller audience, you can communicate with them in more detail. You can get a clearer idea of what they want and how they respond to your current marketing efforts. Don’t delete your Facebook or Twitter account if your law firm has one, but try out some smaller social networks, too, and see how much better you can communicate with your followers.

Snippets

Google automatically extracts snippets from websites when it displays search results. Therefore, your SEO goal should not be just to get your site listed on the first page of search results; it should also be to have Google extract a snippet that will make readers want to click on the result and visit your site. As in the pre-snippet area, writing high quality content is the key to earning recognition from Google.

Vlogging

If you are good enough at public speaking to be a lawyer, you are good enough to make a vlog. You can use your vlog to inform viewers about the laws related to your practice area and also to give them a preview of the knowledgeable, approachable person they will meet if they have a consultation with you.

Hire Legal Content Writers

You can count on Law Blog Writers to sort through the hype and identify the digital marketing strategy that fits best with your law firm and its intended audience.

How to Start Strong with a New Blog for Your Law Firm

Adding a blog to your law firm’s website is a great marketing strategy. Regularly updating your site, such as by adding new posts to a blog, helps convince search engines that the information on your site is up-to-date, which helps your site’s SEO rankings. Meanwhile, posting informative content makes a good impression on readers of your site, making them more likely to choose you when they decide to hire a lawyer in your practice area.

Therefore, if you have decided to start out 2020 by making a blog for your law firm’s website, you have chosen an achievable and worthwhile New Year’s resolution. The simple fact of having a blog is enough to give you an SEO boost, but attracting human readers and convincing them to contact your law firm takes a little more work. Here are some ways to help your blog make a splash in its debut year.

Add Content Before You Go Live

It’s disappointing when you enter a search query into Google and then click on a result, only to find a page that says “coming soon” or “website under construction.” Just programming the right URLs and page headings might convince Google that your site is the real thing, but a content-free site is useless to readers. Upload at least one post to your blog before you make it visible to visitors.

Treat Your First Blog Entries as an FAQ Page

Readers will keep coming back to your blog if you answer questions relevant to them, so devote your first few blog posts to common questions about your practice area. For example, if you are a divorce lawyer in Florida, you might start with blog posts such “Florida laws about prenuptial agreements,” “how child support in Florida is calculated,” and “Florida uncontested divorce,” for example.

Post Links to Your Blog on Social Media

Having a social media presence is an effective content marketing strategy. Make brief posts on social media that link back to your blog, where readers can find more in-depth answers to their questions.

Embrace Controversy, Within Reason

Don’t be a troll, but the Internet is no place for the faint of heart. Design a portion of your blog posts to appeal to people who are looking for some good clickbait. For example, if you are a family law attorney, refer to news stories about gold-digging trophy wives and uncaring deadbeat dads; then follow up with useful advice. A reader might just be Googling to find confirmation that her ex-husband’s new girlfriend is, in fact, a b-word, but she might find your blog post about how parenting plans can limit children’s interactions with a parent’s partner. (After all, why say “b-word” when you can say “paramour”?)

Contact Legal Blog Writers

Starting a blog is a great New Year’s resolution, but hiring professional writers to write it is even better. You can count on Law Blog Writers to produce engaging blog content that helps your blog make a splash starting from its first entry.

How to Write an Effective First Paragraph for a Law Firm Blog Post

As a lawyer, you are skilled at producing presentable pieces of writing quickly, from legal memorandums to correspondence with clients, witnesses, and your colleagues in the legal profession. Consciously or not, you probably start by imagining a template of the document you are writing and then filling in the details. A blog post has a discernible template, designed with readers as well as SEO in mind. Brian Clark of Copyblogger has presented several pieces of advice for writing effective opening paragraphs for blog posts; as usual with general advice about legal blog content, some of these suggestions are more applicable to law firm blog posts than others.

Brian Clark’s Advice for Engaging Your Readers’ Attention with Your First Paragraph

In summary, Clark suggests starting your blog post with something interesting. He gives the following five examples:

· A question for your readers to ponder

· An anecdote

· A hypothetical scenario for your readers to ponder

· A statistic

· An analogy

· A quote

All of these are effective ways to capture readers’ attention with the first few sentences of your blog post. In fact, you have probably used all of these strategies when presenting arguments in court during your career or during mock trials in law school or event speech and debate events in high school. An anecdote presented by way of analogy, with a punchline showing how it relates, in an unexpected way, to your thesis, might even have been your trademark in your student days.

Of course, you should use the “hook” of your blog post honestly, not merely for shock value. It should be relevant to the subject of the post and should not contain exaggeration. As anyone who has ever had to argue for or against a piece of scientific research being admissible as evidence in court, statistics can be misleading when presented out of context. Statistics about what percentage of people believe a given assertion or prefer a certain thing can also come across salesy or sounding like mean-spirited clickbait.

SEO Considerations for the First Paragraph of Your Post

Clark begins his post about Eugene Schwartz, a famous writer of advertising copy; Schwartz claimed to devote a lot of time to the first 50 words of a piece of advertising copy. Does your first paragraph need to be that short?

Short paragraphs can capture readers’ interest, and there is a line of thinking that they are good for SEO, but it is not always practical to start with such a short paragraph in a law firm’s blog post. You should aim to use your main keyword (such as “Miami criminal defense lawyer”) in the last sentence of your paragraph, even if you use it nowhere else in the post. Once you include your hook, your keyword, and enough other text to link them together meaningfully, you might be past the 50-word mark, and that is fine.

Legal Content Writers

The professional writers at Law Blog Writers are experts at thinking of engaging first paragraphs for blog posts You can count on Law Blog Writers to produce informative blog content that hold readers’ interest from headline to call to action.