As you know, content is king, and your blog is the best way to push your SEO efforts forward. Share your knowledge and make sure your keywords are well represented, but avoid these common mistakes that law firms tend to make.
Know who you’re talking to. The biggest mistake you can make when running your own blog is not defining your audience. Many law firms make the mistake of not thinking about who they are blogging for.
If you’re blogging for other attorneys, then your language can be more lawyerly, but if you’re writing to potential clients, keep the legalese to a minimum—or better yet, include it, but be sure to explain what it means in layman’s terms. If you do a good job of educating your readers, they will turn to you as an expert source.
Keep your posts simple yet informative. Choose relevant and trending topics related to your practice areas to write about, and explain your stance in a way that makes sense to either the lawyers or the potential clients you’re trying to reach. Either way, if you write like a lawyer to the public, they’ll get confused and click off. By the same token, if you write provincially to lawyers, you’ll instantly lose credibility. Language is everything.
Another blogging mistake you may be making is creating long-form blogs without subheadings. You may not realize the importance of adding subheadings when you’re writing a blog post. In your mind, the content is written in a perfect flow that makes complete sense. It doesn’t need to be categorized, or so you think.
The truth is, your readers are likely to be overwhelmed by lengthy paragraphs in your blog post. You may have produced exceptional content, but the lack of subheadings separating the text can make it too dense for readers. The never-ending text in your blog makes your content less effective, because most people scan-read content instead of reading every single word.
The same content can appear as more reader friendly when it’s broken down into sections. Using subheadings allows the reader to consume the information faster and makes your content more SEO-friendly.
Blogging is an important SEO tool that helps lure traffic from each SEO-optimized post rather than just your webpages. With SEO, a rising tide lifts all boats, so the harder each page and each post works, the more it helps the entire website. SEO strategy involves keyword research and strategic placement. By using relevant keywords in your blogs, you can help your content rank higher on search engine results for specific topics.
For instance, if you want your blog posts to show up in the top rankings when internet users search for “attorneys in Houston,” it is a good idea to use region-specific keywords in your blogs. Another thing you can do is add long-tail keywords to highlight specific practice areas or issues related to those areas.
Make sure the keywords you’re using are relevant. You can incorporate these in your subheadings, call to actions, and image captions as well as in alt text.
OAK Interactive is a creative branding company in Houston that has helped law firms and related businesses generate more leads through content marketing and blogging, digital marketing, and expert SEO services. Get in touch with our team today to see how we can help you grow.
