Personal injury attorneys and law firms can benefit greatly from having a regularly updated blog section on their website. Colloquially knows as “blawgs,” they can drive new leads and traffic by ranking well in the organic search results as well as help establish trust when potential clients browse the website.
Creating a persuasive blog post that will rank well in the search engines isn’t as easy as opening up a Microsoft Word document and performing a stream-of-consciousness thought dump. There are a few elements that make up a great blog post that you should take into consideration before you set pen to proverbial paper.
As a company with lawyer website design experience, we’ve created a top five list of essential things that personal injury attorneys and law firms can do to develop persuasive blog posts that can drive new leads and traffic as well as set your practice apart from the rest of the competition:
Feel the Client’s Pain
There are many attorneys out there who will write blog posts that tout their achievements and accomplishments instead of focusing on the pain of the client. They’ll list the law schools they attended, cases they’ve won, and try to use complicated legal jargon in an attempt to show off their qualifications.
The truth of the matter is that the average client doesn’t care where you went to law school. They don’t care what boards you serve on, or your past history. What they want to know is how can you help them get relief from the financial and physical pain that they’re suffering from.
By focusing the blog post on the pain points and needs of the client, you’ll stand a far greater chance at making an honest connection with them. It will help build trust and make you seem more personable and approachable.
Make Sure It’s Keyword-Driven
If you have a legal website, then you probably have Google Analytics or something similar installed to monitor traffic levels and other website metrics.
Before you start writing the blog post, take a few minutes to perform some keyword research.
Google various keywords that pertain to the subject you’re writing about. The Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that will provide keyword suggestions and estimated monthly traffic levels for each of your chosen keywords.
Be sure to use each keyword only once or twice in your content. If you use the same keyword over and over again, Google considers this to be “keyword spam” and can penalize your page and cause it to rank very low in the search results.
Unique Content Ideas
Having unique content on your blog is the key to ranking well in the search engines and driving new traffic. For example, you can highlight a fellow attorney (or yourself) as part of a “getting to know you” series of blog posts that showcases the human beings behind the law office desk.
Some great topics for a legal blog post include:
• New Laws That Went into Effect.
• How to Deal with Insurance Companies.
• Top 10 Things to Do after a Car Accident.
You can also promote these blog posts via your monthly newsletter, email marketing campaigns, or on your social media profiles. As the months start to go by, you might notice that Google will begin to send increased traffic to your website.
To take advantage of these new website visitors, be sure to have your contact info located somewhere at the end of the blog post, preferably in the call-to-action. A “Contact us now!” form located somewhere on the sidebar of the website can also help capture new leads.
Call-to-Action
A call-to-action (CTA) is simply an instruction to the reader that asks them to perform an immediate action such as:
• Contact us now!
• Call us for a free consultation!
• Have any questions that weren’t answered in this blog post? Call us now!
If you don’t include a CTA at the end of your blog post, you could stand to lose out on a potential client or case. There are, however, a few instances where a CTA isn’t required.
For example, if you’re creating a blog post that focuses on the “Top 10 Fun Summer Things to do in Seattle,” it’s permissible to leave out the CTA. These types of blog posts are intended to show your readers that you’re an expert on the geographical area that you represent. It takes the sales pressure off and simply allows people to enjoy reading the blog post.
Grammar and Spelling
Make sure that your blog posts have proper grammar and spelling. While law school may have taught you to write in a certain way, it can sometimes come off as unnatural to the general public.
Many lawyers will use Grammarly to check their blog posts for various grammar, structure, and sentence issues. The paid version of the tool catches a lot more errors than the free version.
There are other tools such as the Hemingway Editor which can really help make your writing clear and bold. It will help cut out the fluff that would otherwise distract from the main points that you’re trying to make.
Having excellent spelling and grammar on your blog posts is not only good from a human conversion perspective, but it also can help out with SEO. If your blog post is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, there’s a chance that Google might not rank it very high in the organic search results due to them viewing it as low quality content.
Seattle Legal Website Design and Content Marketing
If you’re struggling to maintain a regularly updated legal blog that offers persuasive content for your readers, we’d love to hear from you.
At Bizango, in addition to our fantastic website design services, we’re experts in local and national marketing and can help you create the perfect content marketing plan for your personal injury legal practice.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can take the blog writing aspect off your plate, which will allow you and your office staff to focus on running your practice.