The Elements of Effective Headlines for Law Firm Blog Posts

Search engine optimization (SEO) is confusing, especially since Google changes its mind all the time about how it ranks pages, and it only reveals small teasers about how its algorithms work, without telling the whole story, leaving content marketing experts relying on guesswork for their advice about how businesses can improve their SEO rankings.  We can at least be certain that search engine results pages (SERPs) do not list entire websites, but rather individual pages; therefore, at any given moment, you are working on optimizing an individual blog post or practice area page on your law firm’s

website, not the whole site.  Meanwhile, when your page displays on the SERP, users do not see the whole page; they only see the headline, and that is what they click on or scroll past.  Likewise, when you send a newsletter to people who have filled out content forms on your website, the goal is to get them to click on the headlines of this month’s blog post, therefore visiting your site.  Therefore, even though blog post headlines account for a small percentage of the word count of your legal marketing content, it is worthwhile to put a lot of thought into them.

Put Your Brand Identity in Every Blog Post Title, Even If It Means Increasing the Word Count

According to Ann Gynn of Content Marketing Institute, every blog post headline should be consistent with your brand identity.  On the surface, this is easy; if you are a personal injury law firm, you only write blog posts about the causes and effects of preventable injuries and the legal rights of injured people.  The challenge is to keep your audience in mind.  If you are writing about new regulations for automatic braking systems in cars, your audience is drivers in your state who want their own cars and the other cars on the road to be as safe as possible.  These are some possible headlines:

• New Regulations Require Automatic Braking Systems to Work at Up to 65 Miles Per Hour

• Your Automatic Braking System Works Best in Good Weather and in City Traffic

• How Reliably Can Today’s Automatic Braking Systems Prevent Collisions?

With these headlines, the focus is on consumer safety.  You would frame your blog post and its headline differently if your audience were lawyers, insurance actuaries, or car enthusiasts who like to spend time thinking about many other cars besides the ones they have concrete plans to buy.

Negativity Sells, but Mean-Spiritedness Does Not Attract the Kind of Attention You Want

Everyone knows that we don’t need more name-calling and sensationalism on the Internet than we already have, but Gynn discovered that consumers click on negative headlines even more than positive ones.  In other words, they were more likely to click on a blog post called “How to Avoid Co-Parenting Drama,” as opposed to “How to Keep the Peace With Your Ex-Spouse.”

What If You Get Writer’s Block After Writing the Headline?

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can produce blog posts to flesh out the headlines you have created, or even write blog posts from scratch, headlines and all.