Table of Contents
- 1. Do Thorough Keyword Research
- How to Do Keyword Research for Lawyers
- Step 1: Define Your Goals and Objectives
- Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
- Step 3: Brainstorm Seed Keywords:
- Step 4: Use Keyword Research Software
- Research Competition
- How to Do Competitive Analysis for Lawyers
- Identify Your Competitors
- Audit Your Competitors
- Identify Content Gaps
- Generate Content That Positions You as a Subject Matter Expert
- Research FAQs to Provide Quick Answers
- Optimize Your Content for Search Engines
- Promote Your Content
- Content Marketing for Law Firms is Key - Do it Right!
Do not index
Do not index
Done right, content marketing for law firms is a tried-and-true strategy for acquiring new leads.
You see, one of the biggest roadblocks for prospects hiring an attorney is understanding the legal jargon, which can be confusing for a layman.
Content marketing allows you to speak the language of your target clients, making it easy for them to interact with your law firm.
Hence, you must develop a content marketing plan to boost your law firm’s profile and generate new leads regularly.
But how do you formulate an effective law firm content marketing strategy?
This guide outlines everything you need to know.
Rank higher on Google and boost organic traffic with Linkactions' AI-driven tools. Get started for free and add hundreds of internal links in under 10 minutes.
1. Do Thorough Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important steps when developing a content marketing strategy for law firms.
Keyword research lets you discover phrases your target client searches for online. In addition, it lets you see how prospects search for legal services and, most importantly, how they find other law firms.
When you understand your potential clients' search terms and phrases, you can create content that meets their needs, ranks well on search engine results pages (SERPs), and generates organic traffic.
As a rule of thumb, pay attention to a keyword’s monthly search volume and difficulty. You want to target high-search-volume keywords with moderate competition.
How to Do Keyword Research for Lawyers
Step 1: Define Your Goals and Objectives
Determine what you want to achieve. Are you aiming to increase website traffic, generate more leads, or enhance your visibility in specific legal areas?
Clear goals will help you choose the right keywords and develop content that meets those objectives.
Example:
Goal: To increase online family law inquiries in New York City.
Objective: To rank higher in search engine results for keywords related to family law and child custody cases.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience ensures that the keywords you choose resonate with potential clients looking for your services.
When identifying your target audience, consider their demographics, geographic location, specific legal needs, and how they search for legal services online.
Tailoring your keywords to your audience's search behavior will help attract more relevant traffic to your website.
Example:
Audience: Individuals and families in New York City looking for legal assistance with family matters, particularly child custody.
Characteristics: Likely to search for specialized, reputable lawyers within their locality.
Step 3: Brainstorm Seed Keywords:
Your seed keywords allow you to generate more specific and targeted search terms.
Start with broad terms describing your legal services. Think about the basic phrases potential clients might use when searching for a lawyer in your specialty.
In addition, consider different variations, synonyms, and related terms to create a comprehensive list of potential keywords.
Example:
Seed Keywords: "family lawyer," "child custody lawyer," "divorce attorney," "New York City lawyer," "family law."
Variations: "family attorney NYC," "child custody attorney New York," "best family lawyer Manhattan."
Step 4: Use Keyword Research Software
Keyword research tools enable you to refine your seed keywords into more effective and targeted search terms.
Popular keyword research tools include Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest. These tools allow you to analyze your target phrase’s search volume, competition, and related keywords.
Research Competition
How can you create legal content that stands and, most importantly, attracts the right potential clients? Analyze the content created by other lawyers in the same practice area.
Knowing your competitors' publishing lets you create better, more engaging, and differentiated content.
How to Do Competitive Analysis for Lawyers
Identify Your Competitors
Perform Google searches using your primary and long-tail keywords.
Note law firms on the first search results page, including local keywords if you operate in a specific area. You can use SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz to find websites ranking for the same keywords as you.
Audit Your Competitors
Once you’ve identified your competitors, analyze their content to understand what works for them and where your firm can stand out.
List the different types of content they produce, such as blog posts, videos, whitepapers, case studies, and infographics.
In addition, evaluate the quality of their content, looking at information depth, clarity, engagement, and presentation.
You’ll also want to check engagement by examining social shares, comments, likes, and other audience interactions. Analyze SEO aspects like keyword usage, meta descriptions, header tags, and backlink profiles.
Identify Content Gaps
When you know what’s working for your competitor, the next step is to perform a content gap analysis to find areas where these law firms fall short or haven't fully addressed specific topics.
Check if their content answers the target audience’s needs and pain points using surveys, feedback forms, and social listening.
You can also identify content gaps by checking whether your competitors cover new trends or recent legal updates. If they don’t, this can be a good opportunity to position your firm as a thought leader by talking about new developments first.
Competitor analysis can be time-consuming, yet essential for law firms content marketing.
With LinkActions, however, lawyers can do comprehensive competitor analysis in minutes.
Our AI-powered competitor analysis tool can automatically monitor your competitor’s keywords and identify content gaps with a few clicks. It’ll even suggest how you can optimize your content to outrank your competition.
You don’t have to spend days on competitor analysis; let LinkActions do it for you automatically and instantly.
Generate Content That Positions You as a Subject Matter Expert
Keyword research, check. Competitor analysis, check. It’s time to create content that stamps your authority as the go-to lawyer in your space.
Google wants content published on an attorney’s website to show the author’s Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
If you don’t have the time to write the content yourself, this means:
- You must seek the help of a subject matter expert to develop the content.
- You need to include the author’s bio, byline, and credentials.
- It would help if you could include awards, endorsements, and testimonials to increase trust and credibility.
In addition, you want to create content that answers your target audience's search intent.
It's easier to attract and engage potential clients if your content answers the question behind the user's search query.
Search intent can be informational, e.g., "What is a personal injury claim?", transactional, e.g., "Smith Law Firm website," or transactional, e.g.," Hire a personal injury lawyer."
The table below shows the type of content you can create to best address your target audience's search intent.
Search Intent | Type of Content | Example |
Informational | Blog posts, videos, case studies, social media posts, podcasts | • How to File a Personal Injury Claim
• White Paper on Recent Changes in Tax Law
• Explaining the Divorce Process (video) |
Navigational | Homepage, About Us Page, Service Pages, Attorney Profiles | • Direct link to practice areas,
• Information about the firm's history
• Biographies of each attorney, |
Transactional | Consultation Request Forms, Case Evaluation Tool, Pricing Information | • Schedule a Free Consultation (Consultation Request Page)
• Transparent pricing for services (Pricing Page)
• Request a Quote for Legal Services (CTA) |
Research FAQs to Provide Quick Answers
Creating blog posts, videos, About Us, whitepapers, etc, is good for developing a solid law firm content marketing strategy.
However, you also need to give quick answers to your audience that may not have the time to read your blog posts or watch explainer videos. That’s where FAQs come in.
To generate questions potential clients are asking, you can take the long route, which involves:
- Having your paralegals or content marketing team manually collect FAQs from your prospects and clients.
- Note and record the questions your target audience asks on social media.
- Manually search for FAQs on platforms like People Also Ask, Reddit, local forums, and Quora.
Or you can let LinkActions do the heavy lifting for you.
Our platform uses AI to help you generate SEO-optimized legal glossaries and FAQs with the click of a button.
In minutes, you can create legal FAQs complete with detailed answers and targeted keywords to educate your audience and, at the same time, increase your law firm’s online visibility.
Optimize Your Content for Search Engines
Your legal content should focus on educating your reader first. However, you need to optimize it for search engines. Why? …because you don’t want to create high-quality content that no one sees.
Here’s how to optimize your content for search engines.
- Place your target keywords in strategic locations such as the title, headers, meta descriptions, and throughout the content. In addition, avoid keyword stuffing.
- Ensure your content is comprehensive and detailed. Longer, well-researched articles tend to perform better in search rankings.
- Frequently update your content to keep it relevant and accurate, which signals to search engines that your site is active and authoritative.
Also, optimize the following on-page elements. Here’s how;
- Write compelling and keyword-rich title tags and meta descriptions that accurately describe the content and encourage clicks.
- Use header tags to structure your content. That way, you can improve your content readability and help search engines understand the information hierarchy.
- Link to other relevant pages on your website to improve navigation and keep visitors engaged. Interlinking also helps search engines crawl your site more effectively.
Furthermore, improve your website’s performance and user experience. Here’s how;
- Ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Over 60% of your target audience will access your site via mobile devices. Plus, Google prioritizes mobile-optimized sites.
- Compress images, use browser caching, and use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve your website's load time. Faster sites rank better and provide a better user experience.
- Use HTTPS to ensure your website's security. Search engines favor secure sites. Moreover, HTTPS helps build trust with visitors.
While optimizing your legal content and website for search engines is a must, it doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg.
LinkActions allows you to perform on-site SEO tasks with a click.
In a few seconds, you can optimize your content and change code to improve your law firm’s website speed, structure, and more for higher rankings and visibility.
Moreover, our AI-powered software can update all your new content automatically.
Sounds like something you’d want to try? Book a demo below to learn more.
Promote Your Content
Once you’ve created high-quality content and optimized it for search engines, you must promote it to ensure it reaches more people.
Here are free ways to boost your content marketing efforts.
- Social Media Platforms: Post your content on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to reach your followers. Also, participate in relevant groups and communities to share your content and engage with members.
- Email Marketing: Include your latest content in regular newsletters sent to your email subscribers. You’ll also want to send personalized emails to specific audience segments based on their interests and behaviors.
- Content Syndication: Write guest articles for high-authority legal websites and blogs. You can also use platforms like Medium and LinkedIn Pulse to republish your content.
- Online Communities and Forums: Engage in discussions on legal forums like Reddit, Quora, and specialized legal communities, sharing your content when relevant.
- Multimedia Content: Create video summaries or explainer videos of your articles and share them on YouTube and social media. Also, discuss your content in podcast episodes and encourage listeners to visit your site for more details.
- Cross-Promotions and Partnerships: Work with other legal professionals to co-create content and promote each other’s work.
Content Marketing for Law Firms is Key - Do it Right!
Like any business, law firms need a steady stream of clients to thrive. That's why it's important to launch a well-thought-out, cost-effective law marketing strategy.
The legal industry is a technical sector, and content marketing is one of the best strategies for affirming your business's capabilities. It offers multiple avenues for attorneys to showcase their abilities and achievements.
.png%3Ftable%3Dblock%26id%3D79df3b58-67ea-4aa5-a7f5-657f218597d8%26cache%3Dv2&optimizer=image&quality=80&width=280)
.png%3Ftable%3Dblock%26id%3Df9fff4c5-262d-48d1-a43e-ab27c7a163b8%26cache%3Dv2&optimizer=image&quality=80&width=280)
![What is Legal Marketing? [ 5 Ways to Grow Your Law Firm]](https://cdn.feather.blog?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.notion.so%2Fimage%2Fhttps%3A%252F%252Fprod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%252F4f2909c6-3bd9-44f9-aaf9-7af1cc5bae92%252F69459537-4f15-4174-8910-b9fedd8d6b00%252FLinkactions_-_Blog_Cover_Template_(2).png%3Ftable%3Dblock%26id%3Df7b98ee9-8265-4ea8-8d93-eaec90e8f808%26cache%3Dv2&optimizer=image&quality=80&width=280)
![Best Law Firm SEO Company [Does LinkActions Fit the Bill?]](https://cdn.feather.blog?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.notion.so%2Fimage%2Fhttps%3A%252F%252Fprod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%252F4f2909c6-3bd9-44f9-aaf9-7af1cc5bae92%252F576fc9d8-760a-43d1-8769-478862dfaee1%252FLinkactions_-_Blog_Cover_Template.png%3Ftable%3Dblock%26id%3D7c72a5f2-0f07-46b9-a257-5a7c568a141c%26cache%3Dv2&optimizer=image&quality=80&width=280)