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Content is king. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times, but when it comes to the legal industry, do you know how to make this type of digital marketing work for you?

Scripted’s writers often specialize in specific areas, including legal content, so we understand just how important it is to ensure you have the best content out there. Whether or not you hire us to help you create that content is up to you, but you should have a good understanding of digital marketing and SEO anyway.

What You Need to Know About Content Marketing

Legal-marketing

Why is content marketing so important? Providing content is still one of the top methods of affordable marketing techniques. With 77% of adults getting online daily, providing a way to reach them is essential.

According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing is one of the top methods of business promotion. It’s also one of the most effective. That being said, for roughly 60% of the population, content creation is too hard to on a consistent basis. That’s not a problem, since you can outsource the writing, but it shows just how essential this service is.

Of course, content isn’t a magic bullet that will instantly gain you more traffic to your website instantly, but it does work. When you are consistent and produce good quality content, then you can rest assured that it will pay off in the long run.

There are several types of content, including:

  • Infographics
  • List articles (listicles)
  • How To articles
  • White papers
  • E-books
  • Videos
  • Social media posts

You certainly have your choice when it comes to which type of content you want to post. What trips most people up is having to do it day in and day out. Working on a piece of content every single day can be challenging, but when you have that consistency, you’ll see more results.

Decide today that you’re going to start putting out at least one piece of content per day to grow your business. If that sounds overwhelming, don’t worry, we have a solution for that at the end of the article.

The Importance of Long-tail Keywords

Keyword-1

You already know that keywords are essential when it comes to ranking well in Google. Unfortunately, you’ll be hard pressed to increase organic traffic if you just try to rank for the biggest keywords out there.

If you look at the search volume for “lawyer,” you’ll find that over 61,000 people search this keyword each month. It’s also a keyword that insanely hard to rank for. A quick search on Google instantly shows that the top-ranking search results are pretty impossible to budget. It’s also a prime space for local lawyers to show up on Google Maps.

So, if you can’t easily rank for a relevant keyword like “lawyer,” what are you supposed to do? This is where long tail keywords come in. These are keywords that narrow the search a little more, which is actually what you want. When someone searches for lawyer, they are looking for general information. If you want people who are ready to hire a lawyer, you want more specific searches.

Narrowing down your keywords by using the type of lawyer you are can really give you much better results. For example:

  • Business lawyer
  • Divorce lawyer
  • Family lawyer
  • Personal injury lawyer
  • Litigation lawyer

These keywords are more specific and they’re also slightly easier to rank for. If you’re new to SEO, though, you probably won’t get to the top of the search results with just these words. After all, there are plenty of divorce lawyers out there.

Now you need to get even more niche. There are a few ways to do this.

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Localized Keywords

Instead of just using the keyword “business lawyer,” you can make sure those in your area are finding you. “Business lawyer in Tampa” will instantly eliminate a lot of the random results and competition. Also, if someone is looking for a business lawyer in Tampa, they’re seriously considering hiring someone.

Adding your location is a useful way to ensure you show up on local searches. Consider using any of the following:

“Type of Lawyer” in “Location”

“Location” “Type of Lawyer”

Best/Top “Type of Lawyer” in “Location”

These are all excellent keywords to help you find potential clients via content marketing.


Buyer Intent Keywords


Certain keywords indicate that someone is about to buy or hire. That means you can include these words in your content to ensure anyone searching in earnest will find your site. For example, words like top, best, or most successful are high in the searches when people need to hire someone.

In this case, you could use something like “best personal injury lawyer” or “top business attorney.” These will narrow the search results and they’re also easier to rank for on the search engines because fewer sites are putting out content with these types of long tail keywords.

The more specific the keyword, the more likely people are trying to find something to buy.


Related Keywords


Sometimes, it’s best not to aim directly for the main keyword. You may be an attorney, but people might not be looking for you. They may be searching for what you can do for them. In this case, you want to use long tail keywords to provide these people with the information they want, and in the content, you can offer your services.

Where “lawyer” has plenty of competition, something like “how to sue a truck company” has far fewer competitors and is much simpler to rank for. Other similar long tail keywords include things like:

  • How to sue my doctor
  • How to get a divorce
  • Can I go to jail over payday loans
  • What happens if you don’t pay child support

As you can see, these are very specific keywords. Anyone searching for them is usually doing so for a reason and they likely need a lawyer. Your content can give them the information they need, while suggesting your services.

Of course, this isn’t just for lawyers, it can apply to any legal service. The idea behind them all is the same.

To make the long tail keywords even more powerful, you can combine each of the above techniques. You’ll end up with something like:

  • Best divorce attorney in Orlando Florida
  • Top Austin business lawyer
  • What are the child support laws in Seattle
  • How do I form an LLC in Vancouver Washington

A little keyword research can go a long way. Once you know which keywords people are looking for, you can easily create the content (or have someone do it for you) in order to reach those people. The less competition there is for the keyword, the more likely you’ll hit the first page in the results.


SEO Strategies You Need to Use

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Obviously, you’ll want keywords to appear naturally in your article, but should you just sprinkle them in or is there a bigger game? In order to increase organic traffic, keywords really need to be carefully used.

While doing guest posts or getting a link to your site from another site is good, SEO starts with your content pages. These include a few things.

Link to Your Site: Even within your own content, you should practice deep linking, or linking to other content within your site.

Case Studies: These are often favored by readers and search engines, so include some anonymous case studies. Your potential clients can read these and get a better idea of how things work.

Featured Snippet: There’s no guarantee you’ll get a featured snippet, but you can boost your chances. Just be sure to add answers to commonly asked questions in order to be considered.

With these methods, in combination with regular SEO throughout your website and blog, you’ll find that Google looks favorably on your site.


Quality Over Quantity

Quality

We’ve talked a bit about the usefulness of keywords and long tail keywords in particular in your content strategy planning, but how does this help you rank in Google? Is focusing on keywords enough?

Google is constantly looking for the most useful content for its searchers. That means what you provide has to be useful or it simply won’t last in the rankings. High quality content is every bit as important as on-page SEO. We know this because pages that used to spam their keywords throughout the content no longer rank at all.

There are two things to keep in mind. First, Google and its users are looking for information that they can use. If you’re providing fluff and regurgitating what has already been put out there, you won’t get very far.

Second, SEO strategies can take you a long way, but if there’s too much competition, you probably won’t rank well anyway. The trick to fixing this is to focus on quality instead of quantity. Consider this . . . someone looking for the word “lawyer” could be anyone. It could be someone in Asia trying to figure out what the word means. The searcher could be a child, trying to write a report. These are not useful searches for you, even if they mean traffic to your site.

Instead, consider someone searching for “the best divorce lawyer near me in Orlando Florida.” This person is looking for something very specific. They need help and they need it now. If they like what they see, they’re going to go ahead and call and book a consultation.

Which would you rather have? 5,000 kids writing essays on law or 50 people looking for you in particular and ready to hire? The answer is pretty obvious, so now we just need to get that content out there.

When it comes to ranking for Google, you need to think beyond the search engine. SEO strategies, blog posts, and content marketing are all great and can increase organic traffic, but really, you need to make sure you are focused on the big picture . . . getting clients.

If someone shows up on your site, looking for your specialty, and they only find the same stuff you can find in Wikipedia, they’ll leave. Not only that, but Google will notice that people are landing on your page and leaving and consider you to be less worthy of ranking than someone with a lower bounce rate.

You can find out what your bounce rate is by signing up for Google Analytics and setting it up on your site. This will provide you with all the information you need on who is visiting the site and what they do while there.

Google also looks at who else is recommending your content. We’ll look at that in a minute, but keep in mind that you need to focus on more than just your site. Expand your horizons and make sure your content is shared elsewhere.


What Makes Great Legal Content

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You know that quality is the most important thing when it comes to content writing and digital marketing, but now it’s time to look at just what quality looks like. First, try doing a search for your own legal specialty. There are multiple tools you can use to analyze the sites that show up in your search, but you can also do it manually.

Now, you should click on the top three results that are not ads. This will provide you with a good idea of what Google is ranking well. Check out the length of the content on the sites and look at the keywords. How is the content structured? Are they reaching the target audience? Is the content tailored to the audience?

Once you have seen what other sites are doing, you can combine the best of all of them to build your own content out. This is what our Scripted writers do. They carefully examine the top sites in your niche and then create content that takes the best ideas from each of those. Plagiarism is never okay, but using other sites for inspiration is fine.


You can learn more about the
top legal content sites here


Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

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Every company needs a content strategy, especially anyone in the legal industry. Even though we know content is the way to go with promoting your business, a whopping 63% of businesses are lacking a proper content strategy.


Steps
Step 1: Define Your Audience

You can’t market to anyone who might need a lawyer. Not only will that bring you a lot of unrelated traffic, it’s a waste of your time. The first thing you need to do is determine who your ideal client is and create an avatar for them. This is who you will be marketing to and writing content for.


Steps
Step 2: Identify the Problem You Solve

When you work with your clients, what do you help them with? This will depend on the type of law you practice. A divorce lawyer helps people get a divorce and manage the ins and outs of splitting up a household, for example. You need to have a very good idea of what pressing issue you’re resolving for your clients.

This is a good time to look at the purpose of your content, too. Are you trying to get them to call you? To book a consult? Keep this in mind as you work.


Steps
Step 3: What Type of Content Will You Produce?

We went over the best types of content to use in your marketing above, but there are dozens of options open to you. Where will you promote your practice? What type of content will you produce?

Many legal firms use video, blogging, and social media to provide information to their potential clients. It’s always a good idea to have your own blog, but producing content to put on social media sites and even guest posting on other blogs can be useful.


Steps
Step 4: Pick a Schedule

If you’re running a blog, you can easily post once or twice a week. However, social media posts will need to be daily in most cases. This means creating a schedule where you mark which type of content will be posted, along with when and where.

Having a schedule means you can plan ahead. This is particularly important when it comes to holidays and promotions. You want to schedule the content ahead so you are sure to hit those big days.


Steps
Step 5: Guest post and Share

Guest posting means writing posts for other websites. You may post an article on divorces on Huffpost or another widely popular site, then link back to your own site. This is a great way to get some off-page SEO and to build up some good feedback.

Search engines look at what you write, but they also look at what other sites link back to you. If high quality websites have links to your website, that’s a good indication your content is valuable and worth ranking well.


Steps
Step 6: Track Your Results

While the ROI for your content strategy may not be obvious in the beginning, it will eventually begin to show. It’s a good idea to set up Google Analytics to see exactly how effective your content is.

When you realize that certain topics or types of content are more popular than others, you can spin off on those. For example, if you offer a step-by-step guide to hiring an attorney and people love it, you can create more step-by-step guides.


What’s Next?

At this point, you should have a good idea of what good legal content looks like and you should be familiar with what top sites in your area are doing. From there, you can set up your own content strategy and start working on it. Of course, not everyone is up for creating content on a regular basis.