How to create a content marketing strategy for your law firm

The power of content goes far beyond rankings in search engines. While high-quality content will help your organic results, a thought-out digital marketing strategy offers many other benefits.

If you run a law firm, your content needs to fit your brand and meet your potential clients’ needs. So, where can you start?

There are a few pointers specific to law firm marketing that will help you in the long term.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the approach that puts a website’s content in focus. Designed with user intention in mind, it involves carefully creating content to help a website rank. As mentioned, this content has to be high quality to help the audience find the answers they need. If you can achieve this, you’ll have more chance of turning that website visitor into a converting client – resulting in profit.

Law firm content marketing

Law firm content marketing needs to address specific legal issues in your field. It needs to provide advice and tips from the position of a legal expert, helping to foster trust between the law firm and the reader.

For example, let’s say you specialise in family law. A common issue that comes up in family law is divorce, so it would be wise to answer the most common questions related to this topic.

Engaging, useful content will capture visitors’ attention and encourage them to stay on the website. We can then capitalise on this engagement by inviting users with a call to action. This guides users to do something which will benefit them and/or the website owner, for example downloading a PDF or filling out a contact form. This brings us to our next topic.

Why is content marketing important for your law firm?

These days, every serious company has its own website. A well-designed website can help to:

• Improve rankings
• Establish the brand
• Communicate with clients.

Good content marketing will help a website gain more coverage on search engines, which means it will gain more organic visitors.

As a matter of fact, keeping your visitors interested is one of the most important ranking factors for search engines. Google measures how much time each person spends on a page. If it sees that people are taking their time to read what you have to say, it will realise that your content has value. As a reward, your website will rank higher.

This is why content marketing is so important for lawyers. When someone needs legal help, a well-optimised website will help them find your firm first.

Local SEO for law firms

Another thing to keep in mind is local SEO. With so many law firms to choose from, it’s crucial that your company’s website pops up first in local searches for your area. So, if a person is looking for a term such as “lawyers in X city”, or even in your neighbourhood, you’ll want to be at the top of those Google results.

This is why content marketing for lawyers should also take location into consideration. Your clients are likely going to be people within a reasonable distance of your office.

How to create a content marketing strategy that works?

First and foremost, you need to define two things:

• The goal of the content strategy
• The audience the strategy is going to target.

In other words, only once you know what you want to achieve and who you’re writing for can you move on to the next step. This concerns the content itself.

Factors to consider with your content strategy

You need to consider how you’ll create your content, what channels you’ll use, and how you’ll come up with topics. Think about:

Content management systems

Otherwise known as a CMS, a content management system is the tool you’ll use to populate content onto your website. For many people, WordPress is a popular choice, thanks to its code-free layout and ease of use. The simplest systems are often the most popular ones!

Channels

The form your content takes goes beyond your website alone. You need to decide if you’d prefer to write blog posts, film videos, post social media content or even run podcasts – or a mixture of all four. It’s worth doing some trials to see which channels engage your audience the most.

Coming up with ideas

This is the trickiest of all three because it’s something you’ll have to work on constantly. Sometimes you may have to react quickly to cover an event relevant to your field of expertise. This will attract readers while said event is a “hot topic”.

However, most of the time you’ll be publishing content which isn’t as time-sensitive – but it should be regular. You still have to make sure that content is relevant, of course. This is where (keyword) research comes in handy.

Hiring a legal content writer vs hiring a specialized agency

When it comes to high-quality legal copy, there are benefits to working with both individuals and agencies. Certainly, it’s great to work with a knowledgeable legal writer who has a good grasp of SEO. You’ll also benefit from communicating directly with one person. He or she may have a portfolio, so you can inspect the quality of their work with ease.

However, for optimum results, it’s best to work with an agency specialised in law firm SEO. This simply comes down to resource: the mammoth task of optimising content for search engines is not easy. Moreover, there are hundreds of SEO best practices, and it’s difficult for one person to cover them all.

With a team of people working on your content, you will get a better result that will help it rank much quicker. You’ll also have a whole team of specialists working for you, allowing you to publish more content in the same timeframe.

If you want top-quality website content underpinned by a solid strategy, a specialist agency is always the answer. To get started on your law firm content marketing strategy, contact Legmark today.