content marketing Archives - The National Law Forum

10 Content Marketing Best Practices to Implement Today

While many law firms are content producing powerhouses, pushing out alerts, social media posts and other information daily via the many distribution channels with which they engage their target audiences, they often fail to take the time to think about the how, what, when, where and why of the content they are creating and disseminating and how it will help/benefit their clients and other influential readers.

For example, do you ever feel as if you are a content machine who is just going through the content motions, following orders of those around you, because “that’s the way they’ve always done it,” or because you don’t want to question a partner or someone more senior to you?

If so, take a moment to give yourself a “content timeout” so you can really think about why you are doing what you are doing.

If it doesn’t make sense with your brand and business development goals, immediately change your course.

Taking the time to ensure that your content marketing strategy and your BD strategy are aligned will enable you to create more focused, strategic content that will better engage and resonate with your target audiences (more on this below).

Remember that the goal of content marketing is not just about populating your social media feeds with a steady stream of content.

Rather, the goal is to use content as a differentiator and a tool to help position you and your firm as a thought leader, which will help to keep you top of mind with key individuals.

Here are a few things you can do right away to take your content strategy to the next level to help you achieve these goals.

1 – Align your content strategy to your business development goals. I always say that every single person involved in legal marketing is a business development person regardless of your actual job title or function.

You must be focused on lead generation and business development in your position to really understand what the firm’s goals are, especially when it comes to content.

Aligning your content and social media strategy to your BD goals will enable you to choose the right practices and industries on which to focus.

You can then also use your analytics and competitive intelligence to help support your efforts (such as Google analytics, web site, social media and email stats, among others).

Remember, everything you do should be centered on bringing in business for the firm, including every single piece of content you create.

2 – Show vs. tell. Every piece of content you post should be value-added, helpful and client-centric. So, don’t just tell your clients why you are the best lawyers, show them. Think about how to demonstrate that you are a leader in your field versus telling someone.

Write content with this concept in mind – from the highest-level thought leadership article to every social media post.

Think about “why should your clients care about this?” when crafting language.

Remember that most often, your clients are not lawyers, so throw the legalese and jargon out the window and put yourself in their shoes. Clients want to know who you are and how you can help them. It’s that simple.

3 – Reuse and repurpose everything. Think headshots, practice area images, previously published client alerts and articles.

Every image and piece of content you have can be used multiple times. For example, you can pull out an interesting statistic, create a word cloud, use icons or big numbers to bring important points to life, a quote or just tell the story in a different way, and voilà, it’s a different piece of content! Use an editorial calendar to help you track and manage the posts.

3 – Create once, publish everywhere (but adjust the message for the medium). Delving deeper into the point above, while you should leverage the social platforms most frequently used by your clients and prospects, don’t post the same exact content and image to LinkedIn that you would post to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.

It’s very important that you demonstrate to your target audiences that you have mastery of the social media platforms that you are utilizing or else you are committing social media suicide. Incorrectly using a particular platform shows your audience that you lack critical social media skills.

Also, while it’s great if your firm has thousands of followers on LinkedIn and Twitter and the like, don’t forget that you also need to tap into the critical social networks of your lawyers to have maximum engagement.

Ensure that your lawyers are properly trained on how to effectively use LinkedIn to share and like content or else you will miss out on reaching their powerful networks!

4 – Use free online tools to gain a competitive edge. Working with mid-size firms with limited budgets, I often have to get resourceful. I use a lot of online free/low-cost tools to help me gain a competitive advantage over my peers.

Also, set up Google Alerts on your top clients and prospects. These are free and give you great insights into your clients. Arm yourself with as much information as you can and you will have an advantage over your competitors and demonstrate to your clients how much you care about their businesses.

4 – Use evergreen content to your advantage: Evergreen content is SEO-optimized content that doesn’t have an expiration date, or lose its relevancy and value over time. It is high-quality, helpful content that provides value whether it is read today, next week or a year from now.

So why is it called “evergreen?” The evergreen tree is a symbol of everlasting life because this type of tree keeps its leaves throughout the seasons, rather than shedding them. Like the trees, evergreen content is considered sustainable and lasting.

Creating an evergreen content strategy is easier than you think because you already have all of the content and most of the tools that you need. It just requires a little creative thinking on how to effectively repurpose them.

For example, content opportunities (and the visual assets that go along with them) such as lawyer bios, holidays, office openings, firm history, timeless client alerts, case studies on matters/practices, careers, professional development, pro bono and diversity, events, as well as information from transcripts can all be used to fill in content gaps in your editorial calendar.

5 – Incorporate visuals. Taking the point above a step further, I’m a firm believer that you should post nothing to social media without an image. Why? Because social media posts with images gain more views and engagement, period. Anyone can incorporate visuals into their social media strategy, you just need to be creative and resourceful.

You can easily reuse and repurpose images that you already have, and resize them using tools right on your smartphone. In addition, there are many photo and online design tools that enable you to create images for free or at a low cost such as canva.com and Picstitch that enable you to create visually arresting graphics to bring your social media posts to life.

For more low cost and even better – free! – tools that you can incorporate into your social media content strategy, take a look at my JD Supra article that explores 17 really cool martech tools that you should know about.

6 – Focus on the headlines. In order to stand out from the many emails that your in-house counsel receive each day and the countless social media posts they see clogging their feeds, you must create headlines and copy that will draw them in. We already talked about how to effectively use images in your posts, but we didn’t delve into headlines.

The subject lines/headlines of your emails (so client alerts, press releases, white papers, CLE programs and anything else that you send via email to clients/contacts) is the very first thing that they see and determines whether someones wants to open up your email – or not. So make them clear, actionable, short, succinct (and extra points if you can create a “how-to” or “why” piece or use numbers or a list format such as what I did with my title above). “Listcicles” are very popular ways of communicating complex information into digestible chunks.

Network and share online: LinkedIn is the most important social media channel for law firm business development and professional networking. It enables you to quickly build and grow relationships so that you can bring in new business and referrals, build your brand and stay top of mind with key individuals in your professional network. So, use it smartly and use it often (meaning post and share value-added content, and engage meaningfully with your connections). I write a lot about how to maximize LinkedIn and use it effectively – see my latest JD Supra articles on LinkedIn profile basics and more advanced LinkedIn to-do’s – because I have never seen the platform directly lead to new business more than I have in the last year (hint – use the notifications section to give you reasons to be in touch with important contacts in your network – information is power here!).
Think quality not quantity. I touched on this a bit above, but since it’s such an important point, I wanted to dedicate a bullet to it. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to drive readers to take action, preferably in the form of contacting and retaining your firm. So it’s not how often you post content to social media that makes a true impact, but rather what you say and how you say it. The quality not the quantity of your posts should always be your primary focus, and keeping that concept at the forefront of your content strategy will help to guide your overall efforts.

For all firms and lawyers, the goal of content marketing is lead generation and business development. How you get there is by building targeted relationships, staying top of mind, providing helpful content and consistently adding value.

Episode 5: What’s New In Law Firm Thought Leadership? with Alistair Bone, Vice President for Passle

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 5 of Legal News Reach! National Law Review Web Content Specialist Shelby Garrett sits down with Alistair Bone, Vice President with Passle, to catch up on the latest in law firm thought leadership trends. What are four strategies for content marketing success? How can current events play a role in brand development? And why is thought leadership more important—and competitive—than ever?

We’ve included a transcript of the conversation below, transcribed by artificial intelligence. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Shelby Garrett

Thank you for tuning in to the Legal News Reach podcast. My name is Shelby Garrett, Web Publication Specialist with the National Law Review, and in this episode I’ll be speaking to Alistair Bone, Vice President for Passle. Would you mind sharing a bit about your background in legal and what you do at Passle?

Alistair Bone

Thank you very much for having me on, firstly, it’s nice to be kind of the interviewee as opposed to the interviewer. Typically, as you might have come across, there’s the CMO Series podcast at Passle and I’ve been heavily involved with that, which is always enjoyable, so nice to be here. A little bit of background for me is that I was previously a professional sportsman playing rugby, I was very fortunate to have done that. But sadly, that all came to an end about three years ago. I then went into headhunting in the world of law, which kind of sparked the initial interest in law firms and professional services. And I learned a huge amount there. But then my sort of interest was really sparked in technology and how that can kind of really enable law firms to further what they’re doing. And that’s where Passle came along. For me, I love relationships, I love meeting people, I am very much a people person, and this kind of seemed to bring all those different worlds together for me. So yeah, that’s kind of how I ended up Passle, and I’m absolutely loving what I’m doing here.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, I’m really excited to speak with you today. Passle sounds like an amazing tool for professionals, content creation can be an extremely overwhelming process and I think that Passle really removes those roadblocks and kind of simplifies the whole process so that professionals can easily share their expertise

Alistair Bone

Bang on, I mean Passle is a software that has been used by professional services. As you mentioned, we work with Magic Circle firms, Am Law 100, the Big Four accountancies, and fundamentally it’s a platform that makes that critical challenge of demonstrating the firm’s expertise, getting it out to the market nice and quickly and effectively and fundamentally enjoyably.

Shelby Garrett

Amazing, let’s get into a little bit of discussion about thought leadership. Could you give us a nice little definition and why it’s currently a priority for law firms?

Alistair Bone

Yeah, of course, it’s a really nice place to start and hopefully I can give a little bit of an overview. When you come to sort of thought leadership, you know, in professional services, being able to demonstrate your firm’s knowledge and value to the market is really key. Thought leadership definitely sits at the heart of all successful professional service marketing. Really, when you start thinking about it, nearly every growth initiative, business development target, or marketing activity centers around how well that firm can demonstrate the knowledge of its experts. Fundamentally, they want to put out that knowledge to the market. Now, when you start to consider that in terms of what’s happening, we’re really seeing that shift of firms becoming far more global, and certainly more digital. So therefore they’re really starting to prioritize that expertise online and really invest into the thought leadership infrastructure. That said, it’s not happening with everybody. But of the general sort of trends, what we’re really seeing is that the places that have really proved progressive, CMOs are doing very well with it, but also firms are trying to really sort of position themselves in a space or a city and sort of elevate what they’re doing. So hopefully, that’s a nice little bit of an overview of sort of thought leadership and what we’re seeing in the world right now.

Shelby Garrett

When firms start to look into thought leadership, what are ways for them to measure their success, in really cultivating that?

Alistair Bone

So when it comes to how they’re able to sort of really prioritize their thought leadership and what they’re doing, there’s definitely a few reasons sort of behind that in terms of how they can kind of start to prioritize it, and why they might be prioritizing it. For some firms, it’s sort of central to their ethos in their output of what they’re trying to achieve. So if you take, for instance, Reed Smith, they are a global player, they see themselves as a global player in the market, and they want to be first to the market in terms of commenting on what’s happening now, what are those new initiatives, what’s changing in the marketplace. So that’s one way that people are doing it. Again mentioned sort of beforehand, but it can be just that people are wanting to sort of position themselves in a space where they see a really big opportunity. As all law firms know, their clients are really hungry to understand what’s happening in their various markets. And something that at the moment, we’re really seeing that sort of trend of why people are prioritizing it is areas such as your ESG, or your E-Sports are really nice places that people can focus their thought leadership and elevate the sort of teams around that.

A different example is actually, you know, we’ve just launched with Goulston & Storrs, who are a Boston based firm, they’re very established there, but they really want to be recognized in the New York market. And so again, for them thought leadership’s going to be key there to kind of really elevate themselves. So hopefully that’s kind of a nice little bit of a wrap up. I think the other thing that we really noticed with people prioritizing their thought leadership is, we on an annual basis do something called the Digital Performance Index. Now we take a look at a whole host of online activity from law firms, you know, right through from their website, how they’re performing on LinkedIn, etc. And naturally being a thought leadership expert, so to speak, we focus in on that and what we see there is that a lot of firms really sit in sort of amongst their competitors in an area that we would really say is fierce competition. The average attorney in the US and the UK creates one piece of thought leadership a year. So again, firms who want to get themselves out of that fierce competition to be seen as a category leader as kind of mentioned previously, they’re the ones that that are sort of starting to prioritize thought leadership.

Shelby Garrett

Sounds like the measure of success might vary depending on what the goals of the firm are. But is there anything that you’ve noticed that separates successful thought leadership programs from ones that are struggling?

Alistair Bone

Yeah, certainly, I think when you start to measure in what actually makes a successful thought leadership program, as said before, like, those are the reasons that maybe are what made people want to do it. But what’s going to make it successful? I think, before maybe answering that, it’s worth talking about what is a thought leadership program, because it might differ for people. But fundamentally, you know, it’s that sort of concerted effort by firms to demonstrate their expertise to the market. So we’re really fortunate that we get to work on a global scale with the likes of Freshfields, Deloitte, and they’re all having really huge success. On the flip side, we also see what doesn’t work. But fundamentally, success comes down to what we call the four pillars. Within those four pillars, there is the author, there is governance, there’s something that we call “Create Once and Publish Everywhere,” and then your feedback. So that’s a little bit of maybe an introduction in sort of that thought leadership and what makes it successful.

When it comes to considering the author, if we take the first pillar, you really want to ensure that your thought leadership is author-centric when you’re making that publication. So how can you empower them and motivate your authors, your lawyers, your consultants to create that content in a really easy sort of well understood way? The second pillar would be governance. And so it’s really important to be able to make sure that there’s no friction in the process of actually creating the content. So you know, how do you get those nice, quick, efficient approval processes for the content you’re putting out there, you know, making it a matter of hours, as opposed to days? Because you want to be timely, you want to be putting it out there in a really nice format that’s responding to what’s happening in the market. When we come on to “Create Once and Publish Everywhere,” there’s a really nice term we like to refer to, “Cope.” So it’s about actually, you know, how are you guaranteeing the reach of that content, you know, you’ve created this great piece of thought leadership, where’s it going from there? So of course, you know, the lawyers have really strong networks on LinkedIn, it’s a really nice place to push that out. But equally there’s all the sort of online publications. There’s obviously yourself, the National Law Review, great place, you know, want that content on there. But also, if I hope you don’t mind me mentioning, there’s obviously JD Supra, Mondaq, Lexology—again, nice places that you want your content on. So again, how can you really push that out to the market? And then finally, there’s feedback. And in some ways, once you’ve done all of the above, this is actually the most critical part because there’s no point in creating thought leadership and that content and pushing it out there if people don’t know the benefit of what they’ve done. And actually, it’s got to be in a nice layered way. Because when you think about it, there’s multiple stakeholders who want to understand the feedback. So if we take the authors, you know, that’s very personal, they want their clients, they want their prospects, they want to know who’s been engaging with it. If you take it from the firm’s perspective, the management know, they’re probably looking at that bottom line, you know, who’s bringing in the money for them? So are they getting engagement from those key people? And the third and final sort of layer is actually the marketing business development. So again, when you have a look at all of that feedback put together, that starts to demonstrate the success of all of that time that you’re investing into it. So yeah, hopefully, that’s a nice way to understand it. But fundamentally, success comes with aligning themselves to those four pillars and making sure you’re doing each in the best way possible. And that’s what gets, you know, a real virtuous circle of content creation going.

Shelby Garrett

Amazing, that was really great context and a really full theory of success. For firms that might be looking to really transform their thought leadership programs, is there a good place to start? We talked about the four pillars. Is there one first step that they can really use to jumpstart this?

Alistair Bone

I think there’s a few different places that they can start with, but in some ways, it’s actually quite simple. I’ve mentioned those four pillars there, and actually it’s about assessing those four pillars. Are you engaging your authors? You know, is it very easy for them, if you remove those barriers to entry to make sure that they can create their content? Again, when it comes to governance, you know, have you addressed those workflows? Is it again, a simple process for them to be able to actually create that content? And then get that out there? Once it’s done, where are you putting it out? And finally that feedback, are you actually providing feedback to people? I think by taking that step back and taking a look at the sort of overall process of your thought leadership program, and looking at those four pillars, that really allows you to then hone in on actually, “Okay, we’re not enabling and empowering our authors to create content. That’s why it’s not actually happening. So therefore, we need to do that and then we can start to go from there.” It may be that you’re doing all of this, but there’s no feedback. You know, maybe you give something small once a year. I know that if I was doing something I’m putting time and effort into and I got no feedback and didn’t really know the value that I was adding to people, then I probably wouldn’t want to continue doing it. So again, it’s just a nice way to kind of really address it. So I think that’s a really nice place for people to start when it wants to come to, you know, transforming their thought leadership program, or even beginning it.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, that’s a really great point. I feel like there’s a lot of excitement when starting something new, but you have to take that kind of honest and realistic assessment of what you currently have going on to develop that full game plan. Thank you. That was amazing.

We talked about measurements of success, but are there additional tools and resources that are available for firms that are looking forward to making these changes?

Alistair Bone

I mean, if you look at it from our perspective, on the Passle website, I mentioned it at the top, but the CMO Series podcast is a really nice place for anybody at any level in smart marketing and business development to listen to what’s happening in the market be it from, you know, what it’s like to be a new CMO, be it data, developing your team. So that’s a really nice resource hub. If you think about thought leadership, we have various resources in terms of one-pagers that you can come on, and you can learn a little bit more around what’s happening. Similarly, feel free to reach out, you know, we’re always here to have conversations and discuss what we’re doing here at Passle and how we’re helping a number of different firms with their thought leadership programs and forming that infrastructure for them as they move forward.

Shelby Garrett

Absolutely. Yeah, your website is a great resource, I listened to a couple of those podcasts and you guys have quite the range of guests as well, that are very happy to share their expertise, which is great.

Alistair Bone

Yeah, we’re really fortunate from that perspective. And it’s been a really nice thing to do. I say, normally, I’m sat interviewing people, but it allows myself and my colleagues to ultimately make some great friends throughout the legal world. So it’s been a real success.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, with those connections you’ve definitely built a lot of knowledge that’s accessible for people in that podcast as well, which is wonderful.

Moving away from the firm focus, but kind of looking at more of a macro lens, what are some of the current trends that are happening in law firm thought leadership programs?

Alistair Bone

I think, you know, if we take it back to the start, the biggest trends that we’re noticing is just people, one focusing on key areas. So, you know, be it new practice areas, such as their ESG, or their E-sports, that’s where people are certainly starting to focus in on. I think the other place is that people are looking at it as career development, which is a really nice place to, you know, help elevate what attorneys and lawyers are doing, as they kind of come through that natural path where you become associate, senior associate, you’re not necessarily doing a lot of business development until you get to partner. So again, it’s a nice chance for you to start to be seen in the network and be seen as those experts. The other place that I think people are starting to focus in on is realizing that there’s always a place for your big white papers. They’re fantastic. There’s so much time, effort, money goes into them. They provide a huge amount of knowledge, but what the market wants on the whole, and certainly what us as individuals out there want in this world now is that nice, short, digestible, timely content. So actually, you don’t want to be writing much more than maybe sort of 200, 500 words. So again, that’s a nice shift that we’re starting to see that people understand that value from that perspective.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, absolutely. I have a background in public libraries and having this information available online with these different topics is just so valuable for everybody sharing that information, and your expertise.

Alistair Bone

It’s that chance to kind of dip into different areas of people’s expertise. You know, something’s changed and, you know, the interest rates have moved here in the UK, how’s that affecting your mortgage rate? And what’s the law behind that? Or, you know, unfortunately, there was the big storm, you know, Hurricane Ian down in Florida recently, you know, maybe an employment lawyer might want to put out some recent content or something around, “What are your employment rights around working from home?” or whatever it might be. So it’s a really nice way to kind of start engaging with people, you know, don’t have to look at it in the lens of simply being the law and client alerts and that sort of thing. So as you said, you can dip into these different things and learn something.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, absolutely. The new iOS update for Apple with the ability to delete text messages and e-Discovery that’s, like, so intriguing to me. And yeah, just as like a public person. I think that’s like, extremely interesting.

When we’re looking at all of these big changes, like you’ve mentioned the hurricane, have you seen law firms kind of shift their content marketing approaches, in light of that?

Alistair Bone

I think on the whole, we are seeing people just start to engage in maybe a slightly different way. I mean, I’ve been fortunate enough on some of those podcasts to have great conversations with people in the industry for a long time and they kind of talked about what they’ve seen the marketing functions of law firms do and the real shift. But I think now people are starting to realize that ultimately it really is about elevating your attorneys and what you’re doing and therefore how can you push out, ultimately their knowledge? I think the other thing to consider in the world we’re all now living in is that a lot more people will be working from home, you know people, or law firm should I say spend a huge amount of money on the infrastructure of offices, office spaces, people aren’t necessarily coming into it, you’re not necessarily having your clients come into it so that online presence is becoming ever more important. So again, what you’re putting out there on the website, what your attorneys are able to do, what your consultants are able to do becomes that bit more important. So yeah, there’s definitely I think that more of a shift online to being able to elevate what people are doing.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, that kind of ties into with the smaller or the shorter pieces that are being created, you could kind of shift your topics more quickly. Looks like we are nearly coming to a close. But I do want to pull this all together and talk about where Passle exactly fits in and helping these law firms create and share their thought leadership. I know you kind of walked us through the tool that you guys have and your Chrome plugin previously. But if you could explain that a little bit more for our listeners?

Alistair Bone

Sure, well, I’ll give a very brief overview of how Passle works for people who don’t know. Passle is a piece of software that quite simply goes onto the laptop. And as they removed all the barriers of entry for the attorneys, the consultants, your experts to create the content. So it can be used in a host of different ways. Not only you can write content but you can do your podcasts, you can do your videos, you can host PDFs, you can embed different content, there’s so much that you’re able to do with it. And once you’ve got over the fundamental hurdle of people being able to create the content, you can then do a host of different things then in terms of starting to form that infrastructure on the website. So be that plugging into the attorneys’ profiles or consultants’ profiles, plugging it into the practice areas. Yeah, kind of the world’s your oyster, once you get up and running with it, which is, which is really cool. If you want to launch with Passle, the way that we always do it, because we know this is tried, tested, and works incredibly well is we do a Proof of Value that we run over the course of two months. It’s all about that behavioral change, you know, taking a group of 20, 25, attorneys, consultants, experts within your firm, and getting that shift of going from, “I don’t understand thought leadership, I don’t know how to create content, I don’t necessarily want to, I haven’t done it before,” to overnight, shifting them into actually understanding the benefits that come from thought leadership and what they can do with it. So that’s kind of the launch process. I don’t want to bore people too much with it. But hopefully, that’s a bit of an overview of Passle and where it kind of plugs in. But it’s a very exciting time for us. And we’re very fortunate to be working with some of the world’s global firms and some real leading players there.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, absolutely. I, when you were talking about the four pillars, I certainly could immediately connect it to what you were showing us earlier through your demonstration.

Alistair Bone

I think that’s the thing with Passle is that once you have the opportunity to see it, everything clicks, and you understand the value that it’s going to bring and how easy it is because it’s not just on the attorney side. If you take the marketing, the BD, the communications team, we obviously elevate everything that they’re doing and make it very easy for them. But also because it’s all focused in on one sort of screen. You know, when you have that Passle posts, that completes the content you’ve created approved, the marketing, the BD teams get a notification, it’s all in one place, they can top and tail it, do what they want to before it’s going live on to the website. So you remove that arduous process of back and forth again, which is a really nice place to be. So it’s not just about the attorneys. It’s actually about the marketing, the BD, comms teams and elevating everything they’re doing as well.

Shelby Garrett

It certainly is daunting for lawyers to create their own content. And it’s a large task and Passle makes it a bit of a smoother process I think, at least from what I’ve seen.

Alistair Bone

Everybody has the impostor syndrome, whatever you do. Once you get over that hurdle, you know, it’s pretty smooth sailing.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, absolutely. How has Passle’s technology been able to help firms succeed over the years? I know we’ve covered it throughout. But if you could really like, bring that all together in a nice little package for us?

Alistair Bone

Yeah, sure. I think what might be the best thing to do, and I thought it might be able to answer it earlier but didn’t have the chance to was, you know, what actually makes a successful thought leadership program? So maybe if I can demonstrate some of the successes people have had, that kind of demonstrates what’s happened over the years. I think success can be defined in multiple ways for different people in terms of what your ultimate outcome is from a thought leadership program. But what we’ve seen is it really differs over time. So in the initial instance, you know it’s that overnight change the behavior change in in the attorneys, you know, you go from individuals never having created content to writing and understanding value. We launched with a law firm here in London called Forsters. One of my fantastic stories I absolutely love from it was one of their senior partners who didn’t like technology, had never used it, didn’t want to engage with it was part of our launch, the Proof of Value. Not only did he write four pieces of content, which again was a huge change, he started using LinkedIn. And even then he got himself an Instagram account, because he understood the value of technology all of a sudden, obviously slightly different to your work stuff. But again, a really nice story of kind of people seeing that change. You then kind of start to look at what’s happening over the next couple of months. And as you get deeper into that sort of thought leadership program, and more success starts to come in terms of the impact on people’s diaries. You know, they’re starting to have conversations with clients, they’re starting to meet prospects, you know, they get engaged with all of the right people. Additionally, and I sort of want to touch on it, as well is there’s that career development I mentioned earlier when you were sort of saying some of the trends, but there’s a real understanding for sort of the associates, senior associates of how they can help develop their career. So again, a really nice example there was there’s a lawyer, a senior associate called JJ Shaw at a firm called Lewis Silkin in the sports team there and he was sharing with us that actually, you know, from creating content, putting it out there to his network, he started to have people come back to him asking him to post panels to sit on different talks, which is amazing, because all of a sudden, he’s being seen as that go-to expert, and people are actually engaging with what he’s doing. So again, a really nice development tool. And then I just think longer term, it’s fundamentally about winning business. And once you start winning the business, everything you’re doing with that big thought leadership program makes sense. So again, we’ve got a lot of anecdotal examples. One that I know I can share with the public was from Alvarez & Marsal, one of the big US consultancies, and we were fortunate enough to sit down with Linda Orton, who’s the former CMO there. And she shared with us that Mike Carter, who was again, a former Senior Director there had done this post around anti-money laundering, he put it onto LinkedIn, she’d actually invested a little bit of spending into that to sort of elevate what was happening, you know, something like 50 quid, not a huge amount of money. That then led to a conversation, which then led to business and over the past couple of years, that’s actually generated 12 million in revenue. So all of a sudden, admittedly, there’s a whole host of work that went into that. But it’s that understanding that by being seen as those go-to experts elevating what you’re doing, you know, the business starts to come. So hopefully, you know, I know, I’ve broken it down there, but that gives an idea of how actually, we’ve helped firms over the years, and particularly now, just really forming that thought leadership infrastructure for people.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, amazing. I can certainly see the building the confidence aspect of the technology that you have making it simplified, but also seeing those results really would build your confidence in creation.

Alistair Bone

And it spans throughout firms, because someone else sees that and they want to get involved and do something around it. So it’s really nice.

Shelby Garrett

Yeah, it’s wonderful. Before we wrap up today, are there any final thoughts that you would like to share with us?

Alistair Bone

There’s probably one or two, I just want to keep it really succinct. I think just the main thing is that thought leadership really is for everybody, and is something that everyone should be considering at the moment, I think, whether it’s that you’re really wanting to stand out in a specific field or elevate some of the great work that you’re already doing, you know, whether that is the marketing or BD teams or for the attorneys, there’s so much that you can invest into it. And you know, that online presence has never been more important. So I think those two things are probably the key takeaways for me that hopefully it resonates with people as they listen to this. And you know, if there’s anything that you want to do in terms of understanding more than please feel free to obviously reach out to me via email or on LinkedIn or equally you can visit home.passle.net. There are plenty of places that you can get some information, but hopefully this has been some worthwhile information for people to listen to.

Shelby Garrett

We can’t thank you enough for joining us today and sharing your thoughts. Thank you to our listeners as well for tuning in. We will see you all next time.

Conclusion

Thank you for listening to the National Law Review’s Legal News Reach podcast. Be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for more episodes. For the latest legal news, or if you’re interested in publishing and advertising with us, visit www.natlawreview.com. We’ll be back soon with our next episode.

For more Legal Marketing News, click here to visit the National Law Review.

Legal Marketing and SEO Trends for 2020 Part 2: Dwell Time, EAT and Law Firm Branding

John McDougall discussed creating Deep Content, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and topic clusters with us yesterday, detailing how these SEO concepts present great opportunities for law firms who are looking to position their attorneys as subject matter experts. John explained how Google’s recent algorithm changes such as BERT, which is designed to help users find true topic experts, provide a bounty of opportunities for legal marketers who properly position their lawyers’ expertise to achieve top search results. Today John is going into more detail on the concepts of webpage dwell time, expertise, authority and trustworthiness (EAT), and law firm branding.

NLR: In your book, you talk about the intersection of “dwell time” and the idea of the “long click” as ways Google is using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to try to figure out the relationship between the search term and the webpage that term led the user to. Do you see any other areas AI will impact SEO on the horizon?

JM: Google has been modifying its search engine, to improve its ability to understand complex queries for some time.

Hummingbird in 2013 was a rebuild of their main “engine” partially in response to there being more searches via voice.

RankBrain in 2015 added more machine learning to improve Hummingbird even further (for searches they had never seen before and complex long-tail queries). They said it was the 3rd most important factor with content and links.

Now with BERT in 2019/2020, they can already understand the intent of a search much better.

Considering they keep increasing the ability to provide relevant results that match the searcher’s intent, I would assume it will change SEO, yet again…

I would expect writing tools to get much more robust. This might be based on “big data” from social profiles, and through analyzing massive volumes of the world’s information written by experts that can be given to a writer/attorney on a silver platter. That might help in one part of SEO.

It is exciting to watch as long as you can stay nimble, follow the “algorithm weather channel” and adjust quickly when new updates are released.

NLR: Another core theme of your book is the role of brands, and the idea of EAT, or expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. How do these ideas enter into a keyword strategy for law firms?

JM: As an expert in a particular field of law, you should be associated with certain keywords which show you are a thought leader in that topical area. With SEO being MUCH more competitive and complex than ever, you may need to be more realistic and pick keywords that better match what you can write about comprehensively.

This can also affect the design of law firm websites and brand positioning. If you have fifty practice areas on your home page, you might consider featuring ones where you will be doing extensive writing and SEO work.

NLR: Can you explain the idea behind the Eric Schmidt quote: “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool,” which you discuss in your book?

JM: There are “black hat” SEO people that are the cesspool. They do sketchy things to try and trick Google into “liking” websites. Those tactics used to work on small law firm’s websites that did not deserve rankings. Thankfully, using brand signals like how many times people search for your brand and mention/link to your brand, Google is better able to rank sites that have a real-world value beyond SEO tactics. The book, Content Marketing and SEO for Law Firms, offers several examples of brand signals and how they apply in a law firm context.

NLR: What audience did you write your book for and who do you think will be the best audience for your January 15th webinar?

JM: Anyone trying to improve their law firm website and marketing will benefit greatly from Content Marketing and SEO for Law Firms, but firms that take action on it will get the most out of it. These content and SEO actions can be small to start but the key is to be consistent.

The content marketing and SEO guide is primarily written for law firm marketers, but it’s also for attorneys because they need to have an idea of how marketing strategy can directly affect the growth of their firm. The sections the attorneys should consider as “must-reads” are marked with a gavel icon.

This webinar will have enough insight on strategy that both law firm marketers and attorneys/department heads should attend.

Thanks, John for your time and insight. For those who haven’t had the opportunity to hear John speak at various legal marketing events or read his previous publications to gain insight from his 20+ years of experience, the following webinar and his new book are great opportunities to get actionable advice on how to build an SEO roadmap for legal marketers in 2020:

Register for the January 15th complimentary webinar: How to Develop an Effective Law Firm Content Marketing and SEO Action Plan for 2020.

Receive a sample chapter of John’s new book: Content Marketing and SEO for Law Firms.

ARTICLE BY Jennifer Schaller of The National Law Review / The National Law Forum LLC.

Read more about marketing for law firms in the Law Office Management section of the National Law Review.

Digital Marketing and Your Law Firm: Essential Tips for Attorneys

If you have been in law for a long time, you may never have envisioned having to pay attention to digital marketing to help your practice grow. But the good news is, law firm marketing can benefit tremendously from digital marketing techniques, and there are many you can put into place yourself, without major investment.

The key to succeeding in digital law firm marketing is commitment and consistency. You shouldn’t try to tackle everything at once, because you may be overwhelmed. If you have never done any digital marketing, your first step will be to map out a strategy that’s reasonable for your level of time and resources.

Document a Content Marketing Strategy

A 2014 survey on digital content marketing found that companies that actually write down a content marketing strategy are more effective than those that either have a verbal-only strategy or no strategy at all. Documenting your content marketing strategy helps ensure that all participants are on the same page, so to speak, helps you to remember the tasks you set out for your team, and gives you a baseline document you can use to help you determine the effectiveness of the various digital marketing strategies you use. A documented strategy sets the tone and the pace.

Phase in Social Media Marketing

You might think writing a few Tweets per day, or updating your firm’s Facebook page is a trivial activity. However, consistency is essential for successful social media marketing. Too often, businesses start out with a blitz of social media content that they are unable to maintain, and this can detract from their brand. Quality is more important than quantity. Start small, perhaps on one social media site, ramp up your social media posts, and learn to use the site’s built-in analytics. Once you get into a consistent posting schedule and can use analytics to learn what is and isn’t effective, you can branch out to other social media platforms.

Ensure that mobile users can learn about your law firm on the go.

Ensure Mobile Friendliness

Digital marketing today must be mobile-friendly, particularly for local businesses like law firms. There are a number of ways to use mobile platforms for law firm marketing. You can develop a mobile website or an app, for example. People have mobile devices with them around the clock, so if you can reach people on their mobile devices, you have many more opportunities than if you rely solely on them finding your website on their desktop. Thirty-one percent of traffic to law websites is from mobile devices. You don’t want to ignore an audience of that size.

Blogging Can Benefit Law Firm Marketing Significantly

Blogging, like social media marketing, requires commitment. Fortunately, you can outsource blogging to ensure your blog has a steady drumbeat of fresh content. Again, quality trumps quantity, so don’t rush to add a lot of content to your blog without ensuring it is timely, relevant to your practice, and well written. Topics for law blogs can come from any number of places, including government statistics, news stories, and even popular culture. As your blog grows, so does your credibility as an authority source, something that will inspire confidence in those who hire your firm.

Non-Text Content Broadens Your Reach

Digital law firm marketing doesn’t have to consist solely of text content. Visual elements can take digital marketing to a higher level and make a measurable impact. You can add visual content in many ways, such as creating a video holiday card for your clients and business partners, creating captivating infographics (using free sites like piktochart), or hosting online webinars that you publicize on your blog and social media. If you create a YouTube channel for video content, create a Google+ profile as well to help boost your content in Google results.

Don’t be afraid of digital marketing for your law firm. With the ability to target audiences on social media and take your content to a potentially huge audience, digital is the future of law firm marketing. You need a defined strategy, commitment to maintaining it, and the ability to use web analytics to determine what works best.

ARTICLE BY

Brian Lynch

RW Lynch Company, Inc.

Content Marketing for Law Firms with John McDougall

Listen as we speak this week with John McDougall, CEO of McDougall Interactive, on content marketing for law firms.

Nicole Minnis: Hi. This is Nicole Minnis again, with the National Law Review. I’m here today with John McDougall, president of McDougall Interactive and author of LegalMarketingReview.com.

We spoke last time about Authority Marketing and thought leadership for law firms, so be sure to check out a link to that podcast. But today, we’re going to be talking about content marketing for law firms. Welcome back, John.

John McDougall: How you doing?

Nicole: I am doing great. How are you?

John: Excellent.

Nicole: We had a great time last time. Tell me, why are eBooks and the top of the funnel calls to action important?

John: A lot of people with website marketing make the mistake of expecting customers to only call them on the phone or fill out a form. When you don’t have a top of the funnel call to action, like an eBook or a case study that’s downloadable, or a whitepaper, you miss a huge portion of the Internet that is casually surfing and could become a lead, but a more casual lead.

A ToFu offer, as we call it — not to be confused with soy products [laughs] — a ToFu offer, a top of the funnel offer, is, again, like an eBook, and it’s somewhere around 85 percent of the Web is looking at the top of the funnel. When you search the web, do you buy something from Amazon or hire a lawyer every time you search the web? You don’t.

You tend to, most of the time, you’re searching and looking for things. You’re in the early stage of the buyer’s journey. Eventually, you’re making bookmarks, and later you go back and hire someone or buy a product. It’s about 85 percent there.

Maybe another 10 percent, roughly, are at the middle of the funnel. In the middle of the funnel, you’re comparing one law firm to another, you’re in that comparison stage. At the bottom of the funnel, maybe only five percent of people using that free consultation form on the attorney’s site or calling the phone number, et cetera, going to the contact page.

That’s such a small percentage of Web visitors that you’re really missing, a huge amount, potentially as much as 95 percent of visitors, if you don’t offer some way for them to casually connect with you — signing up for your email newsletter or getting your eBook.

Nicole: Where are these ToFu calls, top of the funnel calls, most effective? Are we looking at a law firm home page or a blog page? Where will it have the most impact?

John: You want to put them consistently throughout your site, so definitely at the home page level, because that’s usually the most visited page. Not always, but often the most visited part of your site. You should have at least one top of the funnel, if not a top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel, like your phone number or consultation form, call to action, at the home page level.

Then, if you go into a practice area, like intellectual property law, you might want to have a little sidebar there with a call to action for an eBook or a whitepaper or something around that topic. Then, you go to the blog, and you’re reading the blog, either in the right sidebar you can put an irresistible offer to download maybe a collection of the blog posts into one PDF for printing.

Or, at the bottom of a blog post, that’s a very effective way, after someone reads something and they’ve been very engaged, to then put a nice little…maybe a banner or a nice graphic that sells them on the idea of filling out the form to get your eBook.

Nicole: Would you include these top of the funnel calls to action on a law firm publications page? To follow up, you wouldn’t limit it to just having a special page for all of their thought leadership?

John: Yeah. I think it’s good to have a resources section, definitely. After Google Hummingbird that looks even more deeply at Q&A content and natural language search for mobile — Google eats up that kind of content where you’re answering customers’ questions.

It’s great to have that on a blog. That’s one of the most typical places to put it. But sometimes you can have the resources, Q&A library also, and then you have the collection of eBook and podcasts and videos and links to lots of blog posts, and break up your thought leadership in an area like that.

I would say all of the above. There are different types of people that…some are going to like the blogs, some will like the resources area, some will like video, some will like podcasts, some will like the text posts. Break it up and put it throughout your content, and ideally make content top of the funnel calls to action to match the page they’re on.

If at some point you can get around to having 30 eBooks or an eBook for every practice area — it’s a pretty tall order, but, again, made easier through podcasting. One hour of podcasting can be turned into an eBook, and that’s pretty easy to do. You can get a nice cover design and go to each practice area and then have a top of the funnel call to action for each area. That’s the ideal.

Nicole: That way, you can cover all your bases, so to speak, in terms of who’s looking at your website and what they’re looking for.

John: Absolutely.

Nicole: Tell me, how can attorneys use content for their business development?

John: I’m not a business development expert for law firms, per se. But this has been a very hot topic recently, because we’re doing so much blogging for law firms and content marketing for law firms. I’ve been interviewing people for one of my sites, both Legal Marketing Review and AuthorityMarketing.com, and talking about these issues.

I interviewed a couple of different people specifically on business development, and time and time again they’re saying that they do like to have their attorneys make use of their own posts, if possible. It’s great if the attorneys have their own content to share when they’re pitching people and following up with potential customers.

But even if there’s a blog on the law firm’s site, and then an individual attorney, even if they didn’t write the post, they can share that content. You can share your newsletters and alerts and all different things.

But the more thought leadership content you have, the better off you are at reaching out to, say, a general council, and not annoying them with, “Hey, can we get together? I’d really like to work for you guys.” [laughs] Because that’s really salesy. That’s more old school marketing.

New school, inbound marketing is more, “Hey, Mr. or Mrs. General Council, I thought you’d really appreciate this blog post that we wrote, because I know you’re going through this particular issue with your company. I saw something on the news, and we have a post that really addresses just that issue. Just thought you might like to see this and that you might find it helpful.”

I’ve heard that a lot at the LMA conferences. I spoke recently at the LMA New England conference, and I’ve heard a lot of people talking about that in both my interviews and at conferences — that it’s a healthy way to extend that strategy we’re talking about, about SEO and content marketing and doing it for Google reasons. But there’s this great, of course, offline reason that lets you extend the value of that further.

Nicole: This content marketing that’s being produced by attorneys, is it trackable in terms of improving these sales? I was going to say they’re selling themselves, but I don’t mean to make it sound so silly. But attorneys are marketing their services, so is the content marketing trackable?

John: Absolutely not. No, I’m just kidding.

[laughter]

John: Here’s when it’s not trackable — when you don’t track it. It sounds really simplistic, but you would be amazed, actually shocked, if I told you how many people come to us and they have no tracking mechanism to see if it’s working. First, some people don’t even have something like Google Analytics installed on their site, if you can believe it in this day and age.

Is it trackable? It’s trackable if, number one, you take the 10 minutes to take the snippet of code from Google Analytics and put it onto every page of your site and embed the code. That’s really easy to do, but it is still amazing to us that we see people not doing it.

Number two, and this is a really big point I’d like to make, is that, with the goal tracking on your website, for example, if someone fills out the form for a free consultation, it should be set up so that they hit the submit button and they go to a “Thank You” page.

Some programmers like to make it tricky so that it doesn’t even need to produce a “Thank You” page, and there are ways to track that. But we prefer to have a traditional “Thank You” page, so yourlawfirm.com/thankyou.html kind of thing.

Then, you need to set that up in Google Analytics to register as what is called a “goal conversion”. You can do that also with phone tracking, with the free consultation forms, you can do it with your eBook signups, you can do it with the email newsletter signups.

You can do it even if you want to set up a goal conversion to track in Google Analytics if someone just views your “about us” page or an attorney’s bio page. There are all different things you can set up. But, again, it really only works if you take the time to set those up.

It’s so beautiful, and it sounds so geeky of me, but it’s so beautiful to go into Google Analytics and see basically the numbers. You can actually see, OK, last year in November, say, we got 18 leads, but this year in November we got 37 leads or 87 leads, and they came from these channels, from SEO, from social media, from Google paid ads, from email marketing.

You can track all the different channels they came from, and then you can see which lead forms or eBooks were downloaded. You can get a really good picture of the amount of leads coming in. Then, it goes a step further if you start to do lead scoring and lead nurturing.

Very briefly, lead scoring is when you’ll let your agency know, now that you’re tracking these leads in great detail, you let your agency know that, “These leads are good and these leads are bad”, or even feed back into Google Analytics the data on what the value of those leads were.

You can plug in, “This lead generated a million dollars in a mesothelioma case for the firm, and a $400,000 profit”, or whatever it might be. You can even go that far, if you want, to tell the agency that, “These are good leads. These are bad leads. They’re worth this much.” You could feed that back into the system.

Then, you can make better determinations on what keywords and what channels are driving the best quality leads, not just the most leads. Then, lead nurturing, or marketing automation is when you’re getting so many leads that you can’t even follow up manually with everyone.

Say you’re getting a thousand eBook downloads a month, or even 300. You would want to have a trigger mechanism to automatically say, “Hey, thanks for downloading the eBooks.” Send another email a few days later, “Hey, you might like this case study.” Another few days later, you might say, “Would you like a free consultation?”

You can set up a work flow in something like HubSpot or Eloqua, Pardot, to use marketing automation to send these automated emails so that people feel like, “Wow, I downloaded this eBook, next thing you know they’re giving me other ideas.”

But the salespeople don’t have to, every single eBook that gets downloaded, manually do it. That’s where you can take the tracking and Google Analytics, and then extend it with nurturing those people that are coming to your site.

Nicole: If we’re talking about a law firm or an attorney who’s starting from scratch, how much of this data do you think needs to be collected before they can really start to implement changes for their marketing strategy, or implement their marketing strategy at all?

John: I think it’s almost immediate. Once you start to get a few days or a few weeks of data, you can start to make assessments. But it does get a lot better when you have year-over-year data. If you’re looking at, again, November of 2014 versus November of 2013, or all of 2013 versus 2014, in terms of what channels drove traffic, the amount of leads per channel — it really gives you data to show where you’re headed and how things are improving or not.

We do something called conversion rate optimization, where we look at the data in Analytics, and we say, “You know what? Barely anybody is going to our about us page,” or, conversely, “Everybody goes to the about us page.” Usually, they’re the second most visited page on a website.

If there are pages that are hit very consistently, you want to go and fix up those pages and make them even better. Conversely, if there’s a page on your site that nobody ever goes to, but you think it’s really valuable, you can then go make more links to that page or make calls to action that highlight that content. You can definitely, very quickly get data from Google Analytics to go and make very practical changes to your site.

Nicole: These are all great ideas and strategies for attorneys and marketing professionals at law firms. Thank you so much, John, for sharing your thoughts on this topic today.

John: Absolutely. I appreciate you having me.

Nicole: No problem. We hope to have you back another time. Thanks so much for listening.

How to Build a Lead Generation Machine Online with Content Marketing (Part 2 of 2)

If you struggle with creating quality content for your website or blog, I’ve pulled together 8 best practices for content marketing to guide you. If you missed the first four in the series of eight, see yesterday’s blog post here.

These are the second 4 of 8 best practices in content marketing:

Best Practice 5: Use video to give visitors a sense of who you are. Video is one of the best ways to improve your website conversion rates. I highly recommend you record several videos for your website: an overview of each major practice area your firm offers, a few case studies of typical clients you want to attract, a video introduction for each attorney, and reasons why people should hire you versus a competitor. You can also add videos from seminars or presentations you make to add more content to your site.

Best Practice 6: Take a position on a topic and frequently update your blog. When you begin a blog, you need to make sure that it is a topic you feel passionate about. Make sure that you will still be energized to write about the topic in six months or a year. You also need to make sure that there is an audience for your blog.

In order to keep your website and blog at the forefront of Google’s mind, you will need to post regularly. The most successful lead generation blogs post every day. If you aren’t willing to post new content at least a few times per week then you should seriously consider hiring someone to do the writing for you. In a survey of over 7,000 small businesses, Hubspot.com found companies that blog 15 or more times per month generate five times as much traffic as companies that don’t blog!

Best Practice 7: Add social media to your website to make it easier for people to share your content online. Most major websites people visit have fully integrated social media-whether its Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter you want to make it easy for people to share your content with their friends and colleagues.

Best Practice 8: Keep your content consistent with your brand. If you’re an estate planning attorney, write about estate planning and rarely about anything else. Professional blogs need to remain professional. The tone, content and focus should demonstrate the type of attorney you are. If your office is more relaxed and friendly, then try to convey that in the tone of your blogs. If your firm is more traditional, that too should be apparent in the tone of your piece.

Your content also needs to stay relevant. If there is a major change in what area of law you practice in, then you should be discussing it right away on your blog. If there is a big ruling in your practice area that is causing a lot of questions or anxiety for clients and prospects and you are the last person to mention in on their website or blog, then chances are the readers will have moved on to someone who is more on top of things.

Conclusion. Content marketing is one of the best ways to build targeted traffic to your website and become recognized as a thought leader. However, it is a long-term strategy so set your expectations appropriately. Depending on the level of competition in your practice area, how well-established your website/blog is, which key terms you are targeting, and how frequently you update your blog it may take several months to start seeing some significant results.

Content Marketing

ARTICLE BY
Stephen Fairley

The Rainmaker Institute

How to Build a Lead Generation Machine Online with Content Marketing (Part 1 of 2)

If you are looking to drive more high quality traffic to your law firm’s website, one of the best ways to do so is via unique, high quality content on your blog.

lead generation It is estimated that 95% of law firms already have a website, but too few attorneys are consistently generating quality leads from their online presence because they lack great content.

Google has made it increasingly difficult to rank high without putting a lot of quality content on your website. If you want to continue ranking well on Google, which drives more qualified traffic to your website so you can generate more online leads, you must put more and more content on your website.

Here are the first 4 of 8 best practices in content marketing:

Best Practice 1: Create content prospects will connect with and will want to read. If your website is the first to pop up in a Google search, but a potential client reads your home page and finds it littered with meaningless legal jargon, then chances are they are going to move on to website number two. People hire attorneys they feel a connection with. If the viewer doesn’t connect with your website, then chances are they aren’t going to call you.

By creating content that viewers find informative and relevant, easy to digest and in multiple formats (like audio or video as well as written) you are encouraging them to spend more time on your site. By filling each page with informative and easy-to-understand language, an attorney is boosting their visibility on the web and converting browsers into believers.

Best Practice 2: Know the critical keywords prospects use to search. While Google is making sure the context fits the keywords, websites still need to focus on certain keywords. Start by making a list of at least 20-30 terms you believe an interested prospect might use to search for your kind of services. Then do your research.

I recommend two sites: Google Keyword Tool and WordTracker.com. You can find the first one simply by searching on Google for it. The terms definitely emphasize Google’s pay-per-click model, which is why I strongly recommend double checking your findings against the results from WordTracker.com. Use only one or two key terms per blog post and do not post duplicate content.

Best Practice 3: Make sure your blog is on the same domain/subdomain. I used to recommend having two different sites: your primary website and a separate blog site. Due to the recent changes in Google I now recommend keeping your blog on your website (use ABClaw.com/blog instead of blog.ABClaw.com). If you already have two separate sites don’t combine them unless they are less than six months old.

By integrating your blog and your website in one place, you can increase your rankings by adding more content via your blog. Topics for your blog can include recent cases you have handled, commenting on current events or stories in the media, answering frequently asked questions, and discuss aspects of the law.

Best Practice 4: Create geo-targeted pages. You need to write several pages for each city you want to target. For example, if you are a business litigation attorney in the East Valley of Phoenix, you want to have several pages of content focusing on each of the following cities: Phoenix, Tempe, Chandler, Scottsdale, Mesa, Gilbert, etc.

Do not make the mistake of only targeting Phoenix because every single other attorney is doing that. Put as many pages of content up there for the secondary cities. Even though you will not receive nearly as many hits for those cities the competition to rank on the first page of Google will be significantly less.

Come back here tomorrow where I will share the last 4 of 8 best practices for content marketing.

ARTICLE BY

Stephen Fairley

The Rainmaker Institute

Tag: content marketing

10 Content Marketing Best Practices to Implement Today

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