The Twilight of SEO?

Ever since millennials allegedly slew the dinner napkin, it seems like more and more of the things we have become accustomed to are going extinct. Yahoo Answers kicked the bucket not too long ago, and if you follow the news, you could get the impression that fiat currencies, or even planet Earth itself, could be next. For as long as your law firm has had a website, you have been hearing that content is king, but long-reigning monarchs are the exception to the rule. As Google’s algorithms get smarter, web content gets dumber, and natural language processing bots become more proficient in sophistry, search engine optimization (SEO) professionals have been saying that SEO is going the way of the dodo, but does this mean that you should no longer invest resources in making your law firm’s website rank first on Google search results, or is it just the usual gloom and doom that everyone has been saying these days? The safest bet for now is to continue updating the legal blog content on your website frequently.

Beyond Search Engines

Get a grip, doomsayers. It isn’t so much that SEO is going extinct, it is just that search engines no longer have a monopoly on how customers engage with businesses online. 15 years ago, everyone who needed to make a business transaction of any sort searched Google, but now Google is just one of many vehicles for finding needed products or services. Besides search engines, there are ecommerce apps like GrubHub for food delivery Amazon for virtually everything, plus an array of social media platforms from Facebook to Tik Tok.

When it comes to searching for law firms, people rely on Google more than they do when they want to buy cardigan sweaters or chicken wings. It can’t hurt to diversify your content marketing strategy, though. You should continue to monitor your site’s SEO performance and regularly update it with new content, but it is also a good idea to maintain a social media account or two.

Your Competitors Still Care About Ranking on Google, Even If You Don’t

Even if you have decided that Google searches are so last decade, the other law firms in your city have not. Remember that the goal of content marketing is to attract the business of the greatest possible share of your target audience, not the whole Internet. There are only so many couples in Naperville who get divorced each year, and only so many lawyers who can represent them. You want to make sure that those clients contact you and not your competitors. At least some of those prospective clients, especially the older ones, will be searching for lawyers on Google. If you need motivation to optimize your website, think of all the clients your competitors will not be getting if you do.

Keeping Up Your Strong SEO Position in Uncertain Times

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can help you keep your law firm’s blog updated with custom-written posts while also branching out into other aspects of content marketing strategy.

Call-to-Action Text and Your Law Firm’s Content Marketing Strategy

Imagine that you write an informative blog post and post it on your law firm’s website. Your post, which is several thousand words long, describes the six types of alimony recognized by Florida law and the situations in which the courts award each type. After reading your post, the reader knows which kind of alimony the courts will likely award in their divorce case, feels confident that getting divorced will not cause them financial ruin, and goes back to Google to search for a divorce lawyer. What’s wrong with this picture? Since you have invested all the time in writing this informative blog post, shouldn’t the reader contact you? If your blog post does not have a call-to-action (CTA), you risk situations like the one just described. If your blog posts do not currently have CTAs, you should add them as soon as possible, but your work on the blog thus far has not been in vain. Updating your blog is good for SEO rankings; time on page is also an SEO criterion, so you are promoting your law firm if you post long form content and visitors read it all the way to the end. The most effective legal blog content, however, almost always contains a CTA.

Every Call-to-Action Begins With a Verb

A call-to-action (CTA) is a brief phrase of text contained in a clickable link or a clickable button. It should instruct the reader what they can do by clicking the link or the button. For example, a CTA might enable readers to subscribe to a newsletter, fill out an online contact form, or add an item to an online shopping cart. Therefore, the call-to-action phrase should begin with a verb, and it should be as specific as possible about what the reader will do by clicking it. These are some examples of CTA phrases that law firms might use:

· Contact Bloggins & Associates

· Download our guide to car accident insurance claims

· Subscribe to our newsletter

· Schedule a free consultation

Where Should You Place the Call-to-Action for Best Results?

Where you should place the CTA depends on the type of content. In a blog post, it should be at the end, and a paragraph that describes how the reader can benefit from clicking a CTA. In a marketing email, it can be almost anywhere, since readers are used to clicking links in emails. On a landing page, it could be at the top or on the bottom. In social media content, the ideal CTA location depends on the layout that the social media app uses. It could even be in the form of a pop-up or slide-in button.

Increase Your Site’s Conversion Rate With Effective CTAs

Updating the blog on your law firm’s website is great, but adding a CTA at the end of each post to increase your conversion rate is even better. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will deliver custom-written blog posts that hold readers’ attention from title to CTA.

How Technical Should the Blog Posts on Your Law Firm’s Website Be?

Many lawyers will tell you that their experiences in law school required them to learn a whole new way of reading. Not only must law students learn a large vocabulary of legal terms, but they must learn to read between the lines to find the important inferences in texts where potential bombshells of information are hidden in the midst of paragraphs that are 95 percent boilerplate text. Some lawyers even get into the habit of reading with their “lawyer glasses” on, even when they are reading news reports, novels, or personal correspondence, in the rare event that lawyers have time to read anything for fun. Think about the documents you must read for your current cases; if you posted 500-word excerpts from those court decisions, insurance policies, medical reports, and affidavits on your blog (assuming it was legal to do so), prospective clients would probably not understand them well, much less figure out what you thought was notable about them. Meanwhile, your law firm’s blog will add more value to your website and attract more new clients if it teaches readers something they didn’t already know and does not simply state the obvious or offer meaningless advertising slogans. Writing legal blog content that provides important legal information to your audience in terms they can understand is a tall order, so you should hire professional legal content writers who are up to the task.

No Two Blogs Have an Identical Audience

Writing teachers always tell you to “know your audience,” and this is as important when you are writing blog posts for your law firm’s website as if you were writing novels or advertising copy. The target audience of your blog depends on your practice area of law. Are your prospective clients divorced parents? Are they people who have suffered work injuries? Small business owners? Professionals approaching retirement age? People facing criminal charges for drug possession? Whoever they are, write for them.

Consider how differently you would describe a recent verdict in a medical malpractice case if you were describing it to patients (prospective plaintiffs), compared to if you described it to doctors (prospective defendants). With the patients, you might focus on the plaintiff’s financial losses and physical and emotional suffering. With the doctors, you might focus on the avoidable and unavoidable risks associated with treatment. You could use medical terminology without explaining it when the target audience is physicians.

Take Your Cues From Your Current Clients

If you want to know what your prospective clients already know and what is news to them, listen to your current clients. Before they met you, did they know how civil and criminal cases are different? Did they know how courts calculate economic and noneconomic damages? Did they know the difference between marital and nonmarital assets? Anything that a real client was surprised to find out is a great topic for a blog post.

Law Blog Writers Can Write for Any Audience

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will compose custom-written blog posts that explain relevant legal concepts and cases in the appropriate amount of detail and complexity for your target audience.