The Role of Practice Area Content Pages in Your Law Firm’s Digital Marketing Strategy

If you have done rudimentary research on search engine optimization (SEO) and are trying to create the perfect website for your law firm, one that Google will immediately notice because it stands out from the crowd, you are making one of two mistakes.  Either you didn’t read the SEO advice carefully enough, you zoned out during the instructional video, or you took advice from one of the legions of uninformed content creators who noisily give advice on the Internet.  SEO is not about entire websites; that is not how Google’s algorithms work. 

Instead, search engines seek and find individual web pages; if any of the pages on your site ranks first among organic search results, you win.  In the context of individual searches, it doesn’t matter whether your law firm’s website has one page or hundreds, as long as the page that Google ranks in first place belongs to you.  In practice, though, it counts in your page’s favor if it links to other pages within your site and if this site gets new pages added to it frequently.  This means that you should continue to add legal marketing content to your law firm’s website, but practice area pages are at least as important as blog posts.

A Practice Area Page Is Not a Blog Post

Blogs are a practical way to keep adding new pages to your site and updating its content; they also diversify your keyword repertoire.  Any business can have a blog on its site, from a burger joint that reposts jokey social media content and delves into local lore to a law firm where each blog post provides informative content about its state laws or analysis of legal cases that have made the news.

Blog posts are not the only type of web page that can proliferate on your site.  You should also have practice area pages that provide an introduction.  For example, if yours is a personal injury law firm, you can have practice area pages about car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, and premises liability.  Each practice area page should provide a simple overview of the area.  Unlike blog posts, practice area pages should be evergreen.

A Practice Area Page Is Not a Landing Page

While the content on practice area pages tends to be simple and general a practice area page is not the same as a landing page.  Practice area pages should be informative and give clients what to expect.  By contrast landing pages, which are the pages that appear when a user clicks a clickable ad, have minimal content and are mainly window dressing for a button that enables the user to fill out an online contact form or submit payment.

Too Many Practice Area Pages Is Better Than Too Few

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC will create legally accurate, custom-written practice area pages for each of your law firm’s practice areas.

Is It Tacky for Law Firms to Publish Holiday-Themed Blog Content?

For some types of businesses, the holidays are peak season, so it would be foolish not to publish promotional content on your website for the holidays. Local bakeries would be losing out on a lot of revenue if they did not talk up their Christmas tree-shaped cakes, their cupcakes decorated to look like pumpkins and spiders, and, in certain parts of the country, their Mardi Gras king cakes. Photography studios have to pull out all the stops to compete with each other in November as families get professional photos taken for their Christmas cards. Law firms do tend to see an increase in certain types of cases around the holidays, but anyone who contacts a law firm is not looking for clever advertisements that will convince them to make a purchase. Clients only contact law firms because they have suffered heavy financial losses or are in danger of suffering such losses, or because they are injured, have recently lost a family member, are facing criminal charges, or are going through a family crisis such as divorce or a troubled co-parenting arrangement. Seasonal legal blog content can be effective at engaging prospective clients’ attention and for SEO purposes, but it is important to keep things professional.

Holiday Legal Blog Content Dos and Don’ts

If you are a personal injury lawyer and you publish posts with titles like “Trade in Your Santa Suit for a Lawsuit,” the ghost of Jacob Marley will show up at your door faster than you can say, “Good afternoon.” It is a better idea to take it easy with the holiday-themed gimmicks and, instead, think about the kinds of inquiries you tend to get most of during the holidays, and to publish posts related to those legal issues. Here are some examples:

· Family law – Post content about the holiday-specific provisions of parenting plans and about co-parenting during the holidays. Also post content about Divorce Monday and the legal advantages to initiating your divorce at the beginning of the calendar year.

· Criminal defense – Post content about criminal charges that are most common during the holidays, such as DUI and domestic violence, and possible defenses to them.

· Personal injury – Post content about alcohol-related car accidents and premises liability (such as slip and fall accidents in retail stores). Focus on the legal remedies available to people injured in these kinds of accidents.

· Estate planning – Talk about estate planning as a New Year’s resolution. In December, remind readers of the annual gift tax exclusion, as many retirees give cash gifts to their adult children instead of stocking stuffers.

In other words, the purpose of your blog remains the same throughout the year, namely to inform prospective clients and the public about the laws and about their legal rights.

You Can Go Caroling While Professional Content Writers Write Your Holiday-Themed Blog Content

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will compose custom-written posts, as seasonal or as evergreen as you choose, for your law firm’s blog.

In Praise of Listicles: Thousands of Years of Helping Readers Organize Their Thoughts

Content marketing experts have been saying for years that listicles are a thing of the past. This sentiment often appears in the context of an incitement to embrace the latest trend, whether it is the podcast, the tweet, the e-book, or the short form video. From reading these pieces of advice, you might think that the listicle was a short-lived fad that emerged in the 2000s as blogs replaced email forwards and ended as people’s attention spans grew too short to read an entire list, no matter how short its items might be. According to James Vincent, the author of Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, listicles have been around for much longer than the Internet has, and they help fulfill humanity’s need to organize complex information. Adopting the listicle format for your legal blog content could help you communicate clearly with your audience and convince them to contact your law firm.

Is Writing Listicles the World’s Oldest Learned Profession?

According to Vincent, the world’s oldest texts are lists; he argues that writing originated as record keeping, as professional scribes in some of the world’s oldest agricultural societies (in China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica) made lists of agricultural produce. It was a way of making sure there was enough food for everyone in a city-state with a population in the tens of thousands. Over time, the pictographs used to represent quantities and types of produce developed into syllabaries and alphabetic scripts, but lists did not lose their importance. A scribal manual from ancient Egypt is little more than a list of 610 items about which scribes needed to know, ranging from foodstuffs to members of the royal family to districts of the empire to cosmological and metaphysical concepts. In other words, the list reminded the society’s most educated people of everything they needed to know.

Lists Can Help Your Prospective Clients Bring Order Out of Chaos

Fast forward 4,000 years, and listicles and bullet lists on law firm blogs can still help remind your prospective clients of everything they need to know. If you are going through a divorce, suffering financial hardship due to an accidental injury, facing criminal charges, or managing the administration of a recently deceased family member’s estate, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by all the details. Sometimes a checklist is just what you need. Listicles on law firm blogs can reassure prospective clients that their situation is manageable. They can also help them organize their thoughts to know what questions to ask during their first consultation with you.

Writing an Effective Listicle Requires Expertise

The best person to write a listicle that will be meaningful to your prospective clients is a professional content writer who knows about the legal profession and your practice area of law. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can create listicles and other types of online content for your law firm.