A Well-Written Blog Post Has a Lot in Common With a Well-Written Academic Essay

Some corners of the Internet will tell you that, in order to write successfully for an Internet audience, you must first forget everything you learned in school. (The more you have to pay to access such advice, the more overt the disdain for formal education you will encounter, to the point that if you attend an in-person workshop, someone will probably tell you to your face that you are a chump for going to law school.) It is true that blog posts belong to a genre or format with its own conventions, but you can learn to write within them just as you learned to write legal documents as a law student. Don’t let the marketing bro advice lurking in the more meretricious corners of the Internet scare you out of writing legal blog content; the more sophisticated Google’s bots become, the more that their idea of what constitutes good writing aligns with the views of your freshman English composition professor.

Semantic Richness, Also Known as Cohesiveness

In the old days, Google ranked web pages higher if they used the keyword in the user’s search query more times, calculated either by raw number of instances or by percentage of total content. When you choose a topic for a blog post, think about which phrases you would expect to see in a blog post about that topic. For example, if you are writing a post about car accident lawsuits, you might expect to see phrases like car accident, rear-end collision, personal injury lawyer, insurance settlement offer, comparative negligence, medical expenses, statute of limitations, and noneconomic damages. If Google’s bots detect all of those phrases in your post, it will know that the post is informative and stays on topic, as opposed to only mentioning car accident lawsuits in passing or saying the same thing about them again and again without giving the reader any in-depth knowledge. In SEO terms, this is called semantic richness, but your English composition professor used to call it cohesiveness or just plain staying on topic.

Information Architecture, Also Known as Organization

Including keywords in the title and subheadings of your post is not just an SEO gimmick. It also shows Google’s bots that your blog post is well organized. For example, in a post about car accident lawsuits, it would make sense if the subheadings were “the car accident lawsuit process,” “determining fault in a car accident,” “economic and non-economic damages,” and “contact a car accident lawyer.” In other words, Google’s bots scan the subheadings and linked phrases in your post to see if it has internal logic and links to genuinely related content. In SEO terms, this is called information architecture, but your freshman English professor would recognize it as a well-organized blog post.

Law Blog Writers to the Rescue

Meanwhile, there is an important difference between academic writing and commercial blog posts. Unlike in college, it isn’t cheating if you pay someone to write your blog posts. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers and get blog content that would make your freshman composition professor smile.