A Guide To Content Marketing For Law Firms

Gone are the days of law firms advertising on television, telling people to call them if they need help with their problems. In the era of the internet, people do research to find out what kind of services they need, and legal issues are no different. Content marketing for law firms can improve visibility in the search engine results (SERPs) and help potential clients who find them grow to trust them. 

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves the creation and dissemination of content pieces of a variety of types with the intention of attracting their target audience. 

Why should a law firm use content marketing?

Content marketing can help law firms by driving organic traffic to their website through optimised content, improving the website’s authority and increasing their reach across social media and through other forms of content such as webinars and videos. It can also help generate backlinks from other websites, grow your email list and help your firm acquire more leads through lead magnets and downloadable pieces of content.

How do you write content for a law firm?

Content marketing isn’t as simple as picking a blog title, sitting down and writing it. You have to make sure your audience will find the content you produce valuable and relevant to their needs. Your content should be answering questions they have about the legal sector in as much detail as necessary to give an answer that they will find useful. 

Your audience

Knowing your audience is vital to being able to produce the right kind of content. One of the ways you can do this is by creating personas. A persona is a character who represents your audience: it has their interests, goals, motivations and more, all to help you work out what they’ll find valuable and what will be relevant to them. 

Type of content

There is a wide variety in the types of content you can create including:

• Blog posts
• How-tos and guides
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Videos

You’ll need to find out which of these types of content most appeals to your audience – do they prefer to listen to a podcast explaining the topic or read a long article with diagrams, images and infographics that support the text? 

Topic

Write content about which your audience has questions. You can find this out by researching keywords using a tool like SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner, looking for popular informational searches that you can answer as well as information on the latest news and trends. You could also ask your clients to fill in a form asking them about the questions they have regarding the legal sector, what they struggle with and other things, to give you an idea of what your intended audience might want to know. 

Another way to find things to include in your content is to look at the “People also ask” section on the search results. This shows common questions people search for, giving them answers. It can provide inspiration for your subheadings in your article, helping your structure when you write.

Optimisation

Optimising your content for search engines is crucial as it ensures that people can see and read your content. This means doing things like keyword research and including the keyword in your article, as well as secondary keywords. It also means adding a meta title, meta description and alt text for images, so that search engines and users know what the article is about, and what any images contain. 

Length

A lot of the questions surrounding the legal sector often require in-depth answers, so longer content is often considered better as it allows you to answer your audience’s questions in as much detail as is required. 

However, this doesn’t mean you should waffle. Provide your answers in as much detail as is necessary, but don’t try to reach a specific word count if you don’t need to as this means that that content will give less value to your audience, which is the opposite of what you want. 

When it comes to the length of your piece, you’ll also need to consider paragraph length. Make your paragraphs easily digestible, often four lines long, so that your audience can understand them more easily. 

Editing

If your content isn’t well-written and error-free, you’ll find that your audience won’t consider your content valuable or relevant, and it makes you look like less of an expert on your topic. This means it is crucial you proofread your content and check for any mistakes using a spell checker. You want your audience to be able to trust you, so you have to give them the best first impression you can. 

How much content should my law firm be creating?

Quality over quantity

Quality over quantity is key with content. Producing less content that is valuable and relevant is better than producing a blog post a day. Creating less content also lets the content you’re writing be more in-depth and well-researched, which means it will answer the audience’s questions better. It also means you are less likely to produce duplicate content, which can lead to you being penalised by search engines, so taking your time and being thorough is better.

Repurpose old content

Old content on your site shouldn’t just sit there, it should still bring value to your site and audience. This might mean updating it so that it’s more in line with current trends or changes to the law, making it more relevant to your audience. It can also mean turning an old blog post into a video or infographic, giving it a new lease of life. 

You can also look at old content to see what kind of content is most valued by your audience, using tools like Google Search Console and analysing the data available to you there. This can give you an idea of what to create in the future, as well as telling you what you’ve already written about to avoid writing duplicate content.

Share your content on social media

Sharing your content on social media is a great way for users who subscribe to you to see that you’ve published a new piece of content and engage with it. It allows you to have a conversation about the content and any points you’ve made and the ideas they have. It also lets them share your content, which increases your reach and brings more traffic to your website. 

Don’t try and sell your firm in your content

Content is there for your audience, not to sell your business. Any calls to action (CTAs) in your content should be focused on where your audience is in the conversion funnel, and should always be focused on how the audience can benefit.

Most of the content you produce will be explaining something to your audience, so anything that seems like you’re selling your services will feel out of place and give your audience a reason to distrust you because it seems like you don’t care about them and their problems, only about your business. 

Summary

Content marketing for law firms isn’t complicated: at its foundation, it’s about knowing your audience and what they want to know about the legal sector. Creating a persona should be your first step towards understanding your target audience, and from there you’ll be able to narrow down the content you’re producing, using keyword tools to find the kinds of queries that people are searching for and writing content that answers those questions.