The legal industry is saturated with lawyers trying to put our useful and informative content. So, how do you stand out from the crowd?
Keep Your Content (Diversity) Fresh
Your blog should be onsite (i.e., a part of your main website). Your blog is going to be one of the most consistent and simple ways to add content to your website. I have developed entire guides specifically on the execution of different types of content, but we will keep it shorter on this particular guide. The following article contains more information:
You will see in the above article that there are many different types of content, along with several different approaches. Looking at what is working right now, let us discuss how to combine the content type and approach to create high-intent unique content opportunities for your firm’s website.
FAQs
FAQs are great additions to existing pages, or they can stand alone for their own collection of common questions from your potential clients. You can do a deep dive on the following page to learn more about their benefits.
Blogging
Blogging will always be a great approach to answering timely questions, along with positioning yourself as a thought leader. Creating op-eds and presenting personal experience can be an interesting approach to a topic while still engaging your audience.
Long-Form Content
Long-form content is a trending form of content. It has been referred to as “10X” content or skyscraper content at different times in the past. With some of this content nearing tens of thousands of words, I think long-form sums it up best. Long-form content is the content that truly positions a law firm as an authority/expert on a topic, and it is applied to your most important (and competitive) pages. You will see long-form content for the most highly competitive keywords (think: “Houston car accident lawyer”). Some come with their own custom graphics, charts, and videos. Many have their own specific link building campaigns as well. This is the state of the game when it comes to ranking for the most rewarding search queries.
Make Your New Content Welcome to Your Website
We can add blogs to our website and expect the blogs to pop up in our blog feed. Can the same be said about our pages? When new pages are added to our websites, do we stop for a moment to consider where on the website the pages actually fit?
Pages are essentially an island until they are introduced to page hierarchy on your website. Will the new page fit under an existing practice area page? Does it cover a new practice area altogether? How does this new page associate with related pages on your website?
Remember to make your content feel welcome by giving new pages their proper place on the website. Here are some things to consider:
- If this is a brand new area of your website, will it now receive a place on a dropdown menu or a link on your homepage?
- If this is a subpage (i.e., a Habitual DUI page that falls under a main DUI page), then it should either be a submenu on your website’s top navigation or be linked downward on your main DUI page. The subpage will also link upwards to the main DUI page.
- Will this page be able to link across to other resources on your website? Will other pages on your website now have an opportunity to link to this new page you created to provide supplemental information?
Once your new content fits into your website architecture, keep in mind that you also want the content to be welcoming to your visitors. I cannot stress enough the importance of:
- Fast website load times
- A good mobile experience
- Offering other mediums of presenting your information, such as audio, visual (graphics/infographics), and video
Keep Tabs on What Is Working and What Is Not
There is a mindset that exists on our content team that should resonate with anyone in charge of a content marketing strategy: Who would want to write content day in and day out and never know what was working and what was not?
Since we have an implicit purpose for adding pages to our website, and we do not engage in blogging just for the sake of blogging, we need to make an effort to check in on the performance of content added to the website periodically and gauge the outcome.
Google Analytics provides steps to set up your own goals. For a law firm, such a goal would be to have a visitor on your website either call, fill out form submissions, engage in a chat session, etc. This can be done on the page level. It is important to know whether or not someone came to the website from a specific interior page or landed on the homepage and then went to a specific part of the website. All of these actions need to be measured.
Knowing organic traffic is great. There are some benefits you can glean from time on site and bounce rates. If you do not know what content on your website actually converts visitors into leads, the rest of this is unfortunately pretty pointless.
Whoever is helping you with your content (i.e., your IT or SEO) should be able to set up these goals in your tracking software, even if it is not Google Analytics. Once you know what content on your website is and is not working from an organic standpoint, you will be able to move on to my RRRC method ahead.
Use the RRRC Method
Before proceeding, you may want to know some of the reasons why your content may not be working. It is one thing to check and see which content is or is not working, but you may want to understand why that is. Take a moment to read the article before we discuss RRRC.
RRRC is not terribly memorable, but it works. The real estate investment landscape has BBBR, and we have RRRC. RRRC stands for the following:
- Remove
- Redirect
- Reoptimize
- Consolidate
Once you have gone through your analytics and determined which content on your website is underperforming, you will likely want to execute one of these steps.
One point I would like to emphasize is that not all content is going to be good content. There are reasons why content that sits on your website, seemingly doing nothing, can potentially be a detriment:
- Google crawlers work on a concept called crawl budget, which means that they will go to your website and spend time crawling your website in search of new/refreshed pages. Every time crawlers move through your website and continually reindex old and outdated pages, they may be taking time away from finding and indexing the content on your website that is currently more important.
- After years of producing content on your website, there is a good chance you have either written about the same topics, or the topics are too similar for search engines to really see the difference. Keyword cannibalization is one of the more technical reasons we see websites being held back from their real potential.
- You could have misleading content due to updates to statutes, laws, your own business name and phone number, attorneys that no longer work with you, call-to-actions that no longer embody your firm’s values and philosophy, and so on.
Having an aggressive content plan is always going to be worth it. You just have to approach it with a periodic and systematic method of moving through RRRC, typically on an annual basis. Let us look at how and when we perform each step:
Remove
Completely remove the content from your website. Examples include a firm’s holiday party from 2015, blogs about “recent” local news that no longer get traffic, and any traffic received that would not be relevant.
Redirect
Use a 301 to redirect an existing piece of content to one that is updated or much more timely. You redirect when you do not want to remove since there may still be many links to the page. An example is redirecting an extensive guide you wrote about something that occurred in 2020 to the new guide you wrote in 2021.
Reoptimize
You should reoptimize content that was created for qualified traffic, covered a strong topic, but fell short due to onsite SEO reasons. For example, any important geo or practice area page on your website that has not generated enough traffic yet, but clearly has room for improvement, should be reoptimized.
Consolidate
Find two similar pages on your website in which one of them clearly gets more traffic. The one that is performing better could likely be doing even better if there were not other pages covering this same topic. When there are multiple pages covering the same topics, this confuses Google as far as which page is the official authoritative one. You will want to take what content can be used from the underperforming page, add it to the strongest page, and then either remove the former page or redirect it to the latter.
Contact the Content Marketing Experts at Market My Market Today
By utilizing some of these techniques, our content team may be able to help your law firm engage blog topics that speak to your audiences and stand out on search engine results when potential customers search for solutions to their problems. To learn how we can boost your content marketing game, contact us for a free consultation today.