How to Write Law Firm Blog Posts

Your blog is one of the most valuable law firm marketing tools that allow you to connect with your future clients and strengthen your SEO efforts. 

Law firm blog posts are a great way to get more traffic to your firm’s website. How? Well, let’s look at an example.

Imagine you’re at a party.

Someone who knows you’re a lawyer starts asking you questions about a particular issue they’re having, and you’re happy to provide your two cents. As it turns out, they’re pretty impressed with the scope of your knowledge and ask for your business card. Next thing you know, at least three people contact you during the week, referred to you by your partner in conversation.

This is exactly what law firm blogging can do for your website.

Are you having a hard time web writing for law firms? In this article, we’ve detailed some tips below you can use to craft helpful and unique content for your readers. 

Choosing Topics

Choosing a topic to write about is one of the most difficult parts of the writing process. How do you make sure you’re not wasting your time on topics that no one will read? 

While you can’t predict with 100% certainty which blog topics will perform the best, there are some things you can do to make more informed decisions. 

Research Competitors

Although you may not want to admit it, your competitors are an ideal source for law firm blog posts ideas. However, be sure you don’t copy them word for word. All you need is some inspiration from their posts to get your creative juices going-especially when you feel stuck.

Only Choose Topics Relevant to Your Practice

Just like any blog, yours needs to be relevant. Content for lawyer websites should be related to the kind of law you practice.

Family law should be about custody, divorce, visitation, child support, etc., and could include things like changes to the law, facts, and statistics related to those topics, or recent major decisions that could impact future cases.

Accident and injury attorneys should blog about dealing with insurance, how and why to sue, and other accident and injury-related matters.

Piggyback What’s Trending

A great way to find topics for your blog is to look at legal blog examples from the top legal directories online such as Justia, Nolo, and LegalZoom. There is nothing wrong with seeing what topics they’re covering, and then crafting your spin on the issue.

Try Newsjacking

What legal cases are big in the news right now? You most likely already know, as does everyone else. Blog about those cases—although you might consider specifically sticking with your firm’s area of expertise. When you post links to the blog on social media, people will be more likely to click on something exciting and fresh in everyone’s mind.

Stick with the Basics

Your blogs don’t have to be award-winning, but they should offer value to potential clients. Often, the blogs that provide the most value are the ones that detail the basics of an area of law. 

Blogs such as “A Complete Guide to Slips and Falls in New York,” or “5 Things to Do After a Car Accident” tend to do well in generating traffic. 

The Writing Process

Now that you’ve decided what to write about, now it’s time to actually start writing your law firm blog posts. As you continue to practice and learn, you’ll also see the styles and formats of blogs that resonate the most with readers (you can do this through in-depth analytic research).

Here are some things to keep in mind as you begin content writing for your law firm. 

Write for Your Audience

When you create law firm blog content, write for your target clientele–not your colleagues. Pretend your audience is sitting in front of you while writing your blogs, and molding your content in such a way that you can talk to them directly. In legal blogs, this often means simplifying the law and using layman’s terms.

You probably already know who your clients are and what they need from you. 

For example, if you’re a criminal defense attorney, you already know something about their demographics. 

If you specialize in defending corporations and businesses, then you know that you need to take a different approach to your blog. 

Offer Value 

When you’re crafting posts, centralize yourself on what you think will benefit and offer value to your readers. Whether it be a trending topic or the basics of the law, finding content that offers value to your readers is the best way to create engagement online.

Stay Original

Not only is plagiarism ethically and legally wrong, but duplicate content will actually hurt your content’s rankings. There will be a lot of similar content online, but it shouldn’t be copied. 

Stick with One Topic

When blogging for lawyers, make sure you stick to the topic your title refers to. If you go off-topic and ramble during your blog post, you’ll end up losing your readers and they’ll head over to your competitors. 

Create Scannable Content

Readers rarely read every word in a blog, most will scan to get the information they’re looking for. To aid in the “scanning” process, be sure to break up your content with sub-headings, line breaks, and other elements that are visually appealing. 

Here are some other tips for creating scannable content. 

Identify Your Topic

The main topic of your blog post should be easy to identify by the title and introduction. Readers don’t want to thoroughly read your content to discover what it’s about. If the topic is unclear or hard to understand by the first few sentences, they’ll most likely skip reading your post.

Add Multimedia

When trying to attract a reader’s attention, using elements that will break up content can go a long way. 

Be sure to include several visual elements in your law firm blog posts including photographs, graphics, videos, infographics, and others to improve your content.

Use List Formats

Why should you use list formats for your content?

• Easier to read
• Less intimidating
• Lots of information
• No fluff
• Eye-catching
• Answers questions quickly
• Can be used for nearly anything
• Need I say more?

Optimize for Search Engines 

If you had to boil optimizing content down to one simple idea, the key is just to create excellent content. Google is getting better and better at bringing the most relevant search results directly to web users. 

If you write from a genuine place of experience, and your blogs manage to capture your expertise, that will go a long way to optimizing them for search engines.

However, there are still a couple of things you can do to give your blog a little more of an SEO boost.  

Keywords

When you’re blogging, it’s important to use the right keywords. Keywords help search engines categorize pages for searchers. In other words, using the right keywords attracts the right audience. 

There are lots of tools to find keywords that will work for your content, including Ahrefs, SEMRush, AnswerThePublic, and many more. As you’re researching, make sure your content will satisfy the search query of the user–otherwise, your page might actually lower in rankings. 

Once you’ve researched which keywords to use and you’re ready to add them to your content, remember not to use too many. As a rule of thumb, keep the keyword density between 1-2%.

In addition to content, be sure to add keywords to the following:

• Titles
• Headers
• Meta Descriptions
• Alt Texts

Keyword research can also be a great place to start if you don’t know what topics to write about. 

Create an Internal Linking System

Google ranks content on the web by sending out “spiders” to crawl around and scan information. 

Placing internal links around your website (links from one page on your website to another page within your website) makes navigating your website easier for those crawlers. 

Links also demonstrate relevance and importance. 

If you have a particularly important piece of content (often called cornerstone content) you will want to place more internal links leading readers to that page, and place them in prominent locations like your homepage. 

Internal linking is an important aspect of SEO for your law firm, so you will want to work with someone who can help maximize the effect of an internal linking strategy.

Contact an Experienced Team

If you need assistance with creating content for your firm, our team has years of experience doing so. Contact us today to see if Law Firm Sites is a good fit for your firm.