One of the more benign forms of entertainment one can find on the Internet these days is to peruse old web pages that the Wayback Machine has archived. If you follow the bibliographic references of Wikipedia articles, you can find online news reports and film reviews that predate the 21st century, and careful readers (including everyone who has graduated from law school) will notice how the journalistic style of 2022 differs from the way that people used to write in the early days of the Internet. Law firms that had websites in the 1990s congratulated themselves on how forward thinking they were, but if you read their web page content now, it would probably sound antiquated. One can argue that the whole practice of businesses posting blogs on their websites has been meretricious from the beginning, but the quality of business blog posts has improved over time. One of the reasons for the improvement in writing quality on business blogs, including legal blog content, is that professional content writers have learned to stop worrying so much about keywords and enjoy communicating with human audiences.
Keyword Density Is an Outdated Metric
Search engine optimization (SEO) algorithms change all the time to reflect users’ responses, but regularly updating the blog on your law firm’s website remains one of the best things you can do to keep your law firm’s website on the first page of Google search results. It’s fine to do keyword research to help you get ideas for blog post topics, but focus on quality instead of quantity. Just choose one keyword, and start writing; focus on what prospective clients want to read, because that is what Google’s constantly changing algorithms are trying to do, too.
The days when keyword density, which is the number of times a keyword appears in a piece of content, relative to the total word count of the content, are in the distant past. Revising a blog post to increase its keyword density almost always makes it worse. At best, adding your target keyword to one sentence in every paragraph has the same effect as tacking the phrase “with a Grand Rapids personal injury lawyer” onto the end of a fortune cookie fortune. At worst, Google will interpret it as keyword stuffing and penalize your site.
Avoid Keywords That Have No Audience Except Search Engines
Once you choose a keyword, use it once in the title, once in a subheading, and once in the body text; other than that, just write what you think prospective clients want to know about the topic. A good keyword is one that could plausibly occur in a natural sentence. A human being might say, “Branwell Bloggins is the best personal injury lawyer in Grand Rapids,” but no one would utter the sentence, “Branwell Bloggins is the best personal injury lawyer Grand Rapids MI.” When someone types “personal injury lawyer Grand Rapids MI” into a Google search box, Google is smart enough to know which websites will be the most useful to them. Write for the human reader, not the search term.
You Choose the Keywords and Leave the Writing to Law Blog Writers
The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will compose readable, custom-written content that addresses your target audience’s questions.