A strong content strategy is the cornerstone of nearly every digital marketing campaign, especially in the legal space. Content drives qualified traffic, educates and engages your readers, and empowers your ideal clients to take the initiative and inquire about your legal services.

Content should not be created for the sake of creating content. We flood our website with hundreds of blogs and create pages for every single city, community, and neighborhood we serve. We think that we cannot go wrong by adding hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of content to our website in the hopes that something will stick. However, would it not be better if we knew the most important topics, how to properly execute them according to best practices, and made sure we are not losing footing in a competitive space?

This guide will cover ten content marketing techniques that cover every angle of planning, executing, and optimizing your pages and blogs to maximize the impact they have for your law firm. Good content can take time and resources. It is important to have peace of mind, knowing what you are putting out will have the highest potential to yield what you expect in return.

The guide will walk you through the proper process for employing tried and true techniques. These include:

  • Doing the correct research and creating a strong strategy
  • Deciding what types of content to produce and the current best practices to apply to content
  • Techniques for increasing engagement and conversion for the content on your website
  • Auditing and analyzing which of your efforts are working, which ones are not, and what to do about content that is not improving after being reworked

Before we dive into each technique, let us start by taking a step back. You need to understand where you currently fit into your competitive landscape and what degree of aggressiveness you will need to adopt in order for your content marketing to work.

Understanding How Content Makes You Competitive 

When I describe putting a piece of content on a website, I equate it to throwing additional fishing lines in the ocean with the potential of catching a fish. With your lines in the water, the potential for traffic increases. As some lines become stale over time, whether the topic becomes outdated or too competitive, it is always important to cast out consistently to keep things moving. This is why we have an ongoing content strategy. 

Understanding how much content you should be producing from a competitive standpoint is not complicated. You simply can compare your volume to your competition. Often, the websites that show up online for many keywords, especially the competitive ones, are the websites that have a strong ongoing content strategy. To gauge how much content you should be creating, all you need to do is set the bar relative to the websites that consistently come up on the first page for your main keywords search.

You will find that most digital marketing (more specifically, SEO) is relative. The common mentality is to “do what the best guy is doing, only do it a little better.” You could do this through getting positive reviews on Google for Google My Business, backlinks for building authority, and the amount of content your biggest competitors are producing. There is an easy way to find out the amount of content your competitors have on their website. The majority of websites have sitemaps, which outline all of the pages on a website for search engines to find. You can navigate to it easily by typing in the URL and adding “sitemap.xml” to the end. Here is an example: “example.com/sitemap.xml”.

In our article listed below, we looked at law firms in metro areas, such as Houston and Seattle. We found that the average law firm had 264 blogs and 135 pages on the first page for their main keyword (e.g., Houston Car Accident Lawyer). That number did not drop too much on the second page since many of those law firms were also very proactive with their marketing. The fifth page or so provided the stark difference, containing websites that averaged significantly less content. In this particular study, those websites only had 66 blogs and 38 pages on average.

Once you find out Competitor #1 has 300 blogs and 200 pages, and Competitor #2 has 500 blogs and 400 pages, you will know what to aim for as far as quantity. What comes next, more importantly, is the strategy for finding the right topics to cover.

To learn more about what benchmarks you can make for your content goals, please visit the following article.

Contact Market My Market Today

At Market My Market, our goal is to help each of our clients gain more organic traffic and qualified leads by utilizing a variety of proven SEO tools and research methods to build your online presence. By utilizing our own successful marketing techniques, we can make the most of your marketing. Schedule a free consultation by completing our contact form today.