Whether you’re planning on revamping your firm’s website or trying to maintain a blog to attract new clients, one of the first questions you’ll need to consider is what you’re going to write. As a professional you know just how important every single word is, so it’s understandable that you want to write every word in-house. Just like writing for legal accuracy is a highly specialised skill, so is writing for the internet. Like many professional service firms, you may be reluctant to outsource your legal content creation to a digital specialist just to ensure it meets the needs of the internet.
If that’s the case, then you’ll need to keep these factors in mind when you’re writing.
Search Engine Optimisation
You may have heard about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but do you know what it is? In a nutshell, it’s the art of optimising your web content so that it ranks highly in search engines (like Google). There are many things that can improve your SEO including the quality of your content, how much trust you have built with external sites, and the authority that your site as. It’s not enough to just include a few keywords into your article, in fact, this process can actually result in Google penalising your web pages if it’s done wrong.
You can read more about how to optimise your website for SEO to attract more clients here.
Write for your target audience
It may sound obvious, but it can be challenging for some lawyers to write effectively for their target audience. It’s a bit like when you go to see a medical specialist and they start explaining what’s wrong with you in medical jargon.You may get the gist of what they’re saying, but you miss the important little details because you don’t speak the medical lingo. So when writing your legal content it’s important to keep in mind who your target client is while you write.
If you’re a personal injury lawyer who helps people who’ve had a car accident, then your content will need to be in a language that non-lawyers understand. Whereas, if you focus on the intricacies of tax law and work with in-house legal and tax specialists, then your target clients will be looking for a depth of legal expertise in your content.
You can read more about identifying target clients and writing legal content here:
Conquer the three challenges of great legal content
How to attract dream clients with buyer personas
Write for the different stages in your target client’s journey
In the Google age, 74% of your potential clients will search the Internet for information before they even think about speaking to a lawyer. You know what’s it like. When you’re trying to work out if that freckle is of any concern, you don’t go straight to reading about the intricacies of melanoma. First, you might search about what to look for in freckles, identify what may be wrong with you and then finally think about making an appointment with your doctor. At each stage in this journey, you read different pieces of information. It’s no different for people who need your services.
That’s why the content on your law firm’s website needs to be created with the three stages of your client’s journey in mind: Awareness, evaluation and purchase. The biggest mistake that many law firms make is to go straight to writing content only for the purchase stage. If your firm is doing this, then you’re missing the opportunity to engage a potential client much earlier in the process.
You can read more about creating legal content for each stage of your target client’s journey here.
Promote your content
While you can just write your website or blog and leave it up to the search engines to help you, this can take a very long time. In reality, it can take 12 months or more before you start seeing results. Promoting your content on social media can help get your message out there, and also build your SEO authority.
There’s a little more to effective social media promotion than just posting a link to your new blog post on LinkedIn or Twitter, although this is a common mistake made by many law firms. You can find out more about common social media mistakes to avoid here.
Act like a publisher
Once you have a blog on your website your firm is a publisher, whether you like it or not. To attract and keep your audience engaged you need to act like a publisher by keeping your content up to date (like when there’s a change in the law), and publishing regularly. Nothing makes it look like you’ve gone out of business more then visiting a blog that hasn’t been updated for months or even years.
I don’t have time to do all this
Yes, yes, I hear you, all of this takes time and effort to get right. That’s why some firms do choose to outsource some or all of their law firm’s content marketing and social media.
But I don’t trust a non-lawyer to write about the law
It’s completely understandable that you don’t want to delegate your precious expertise to someone who doesn’t understand the law. Thankfully, you don’t have to. You see, I’m actually a lawyer and a digital marketing specialist. So when I write about detailed aspects of the law for my clients, I understand how important every word is from both the perspective of a lawyer and a marketer.
So how does the process work?
At Legal Writers we aim to be as flexible as possible with our clients because we understand that every law firm is different. Some clients like to write their own content and then hand it to us to edit. Others prefer to save their fee-earners time and have us do the research and draft up an article for their review. While some do the research themselves and then just give us the relevant dot points and citations, and we take it from there. The choice is really up to you.
We make sure the content is written in a way that appeals to your target clients, is optimised for SEO, and can even upload and publish it to your website. In addition, we can promote it on social media for you, and keep it updated when there are changes in the law.
So the question isn’t really whether you should outsource your content creation, it’s why haven’t you outsourced your content creation already?
If you’d like to know more about how to build and execute your law firm’s marketing strategy, call me on 0409 418 297 or email at rakhee@legalwriters.com.au