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As the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way firms reach their customers, their approach must also change by increasing their online presence. Word-of-mouth referrals, although still essential, shouldn’t be the sole strategy anymore and firms, including law firms, should learn how to increase their visibility on the internet through effective content writing to stay competitive.
So why is good content writing important in the legal industry? According to recent survey results, 57% of respondents found their lawyer via an online search engine. This supports the fact that good content writing can help establish your credibility and reliability in providing expert legal services.
The pandemic has caused a shift in how people access legal markets. So lawyers and law firms alike must competitively recognize the need for taking advantage of the different marketing platforms to promote their services. It’s essential to understand the profound significance of content marketing in the legal field to establish your branding as an expert and authoritative firm that can provide reliable legal services, and offer the following advantages below:
Content allows you to differentiate yourself from the rest of your competitor law firms through thought leadership that allows you to express your authority. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) allows you to lead the competition and generate more customers if you optimize your content.
Approximately 49% of potential customers are searching for their legal queries online before consulting with a lawyer. If you properly establish your blog and optimize your content so it becomes searchable, then your target market would always find their way to your website the next time they have legal queries. This builds trust among your target market segment, which can lead to conversions in the form of actual transactions.
Consequently, Zahavian research shows that law firms who have established a website with existing content that isn’t actively or regularly updated may be enough to materialize into significant results.
Having your own blog and producing content may also be a better way to connect the business to the customers. Legal services usually involve problems that affect potential clients on a deeper level. Content marketing can be one way to showcase the capability of law firm to improve their clients’ lives through expert representation in court.
Content marketing results in improved trust between law professionals and their target market. Thus, content marketing isn’t just a way to advertise your services and convert new customers, you can also consider this as a customer relationship management strategy.
The legal industry can be cutthroat and competitive when it comes to reaching clients. So content greatly matters as it gives your customers some perspective on how you handle legal matters. Providing actionable takeaways clarifies to the customer who you are, what you can do, and what they should do.
Creating content that “speaks to search engines” means that your content is optimized to rank higher in search results to boost your content’s reach using SEO tools. The legal industry can be too technical and eloquent so the use of SEO tools is important to make non-specialists understand heavy legal terms.
The legal industry is very relevant. It’s important that people know their rights and responsibilities, however, because of the complexities associated with almost every legal content, most people don’t bother doing so. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can help educate individuals so they can learn more about the relevance of the industry concepts in their lives.
Having a website isn’t a sufficient SEO strategy to drive customers to seek your legal services. Most law firms don’t acknowledge the importance of good content when creating their website, choosing instead to publish impersonal and extremely technical legal content. Some would attempt to incorporate SEO keywords that are too obvious yet not useful or credible in any way.
A website is a collection of pages where relevant written content is supposed to be found. The goal is to give non-referral clients a reason to see your firm as something worth trusting in. This goal should then lead to establishing a personal relationship with your target clients so they can have a deeper knowledge of how well you can provide your legal services. In summary, your content must be something that speaks to your customers on a personal level.
The first step to any marketing strategy is to identify your target market segment. You can fully summarize the pertinent details about the kind of individual you want to cater to by creating a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a detailed description of a fictional person created to represent your audience. This is something that’s often overlooked when identifying the target market segment. However, this is essential if you want to add a personal touch to your content.
Similar to every establishment, some law firms aim to target “everyone” or “as many as could possibly be targeted”. This is a kind of pitfall that makes institutions believe that specific targeting wouldn’t earn favorable results. In contrast, specific targeting is actually the kind of targeting that converts audiences as it not only speaks to the target clients per se but also to the search engine.
Further, the points below can be helpful in determining what your potential audience needs and how you can create content that resonates with them:
Reports show that about 96% of potential legal clients use search engines for legal information. Finding out what your target clients are searching for and incorporating important yet useful keywords into your content can help you stand out.
You can do this the long way by searching frequently asked legal queries online and identifying the main keywords that top-ranking articles have. You can then incorporate this to your content. However, there are available SEO tools that can be more efficient and effective in converting potential clients.
Individuals often find themselves lost when reading legal content because of the complexities presented to them. If you want to convert audiences, you have to know how to speak to them in a way that they can understand. Otherwise, your content becomes a page of nonsense legal blabber.
It may be tempting for most lawyers to exhibit their professionalism and expertise through legal jargon. You don’t have to remove them altogether, you just have to reduce them and make sure to provide enough context clues or definitions so your readers have a hint of what you’re talking about.
Language ensures your authority to drive action and demonstrate your capabilities in providing legal services, but content that relies heavily on legal vocabulary may not achieve its intended purpose.
Credibility and truthfulness of facts are extremely valued in the legal industry. Legal concerns are crucial and often affect clients on a personal level so misleading, outdated, and false content can have deeper effects than you can imagine.
Updating information is also important, especially in the legal profession. Having a website that doesn’t consistently post new content is fine and would still generate more customer conversions than those that don’t create content. However, it’s important to keep every piece of information updated on each piece of content on your website.
The goal isn’t simply to drive traffic to the website, but to convert potential clients into actual transacting customers, and eventually into loyal ones. If your content doesn’t contain reliable information, then it would likely affect the authority and the reputation of the website as well as the law firm or lawyer.
SEO is more than just keyword stuffing or repeating keywords meaninglessly. This wouldn’t have any significant impact on converting leads or generating trust and authority. Optimizing for SEO entails having an effective SEO strategy while creating meaningful content that showcases your capability and credibility in the legal industry.
The manner of presentation of the keywords matters. The content shouldn’t be a nonsense blabber of keywords just to attract more leads to your website, it should actually be able to generate conversions.
Each law firm requires a strategy that’s perfectly tailored to its own needs. This helps you stay on top of the competition. Information about best SEO practices is widely available online, but it’s up to the law firm how they would formulate their content and into which platforms they will plug it.
Evaluate if your strategy is stellar enough to reach or exceed target conversions. Aside from the profit generated through good content marketing, you have to regularly check the metrics available in Google Ads and even in the platforms you used to promote your website.
Improve and update your strategy to adapt to the ever-changing legal needs of the market. Doing these can help build your authority in the competitive legal marketplace.
Hiring a content writer with sufficient knowledge of how to write for the legal industry could help you generate content that’s rich with information and relevance in a way that boosts your brand. Some writers tend to consistently have content with the language of a salesperson. Take note that although you’re supposed to be selling yourself through your content, it shouldn’t have to be too obvious.
The goal of content writing as a marketing strategy is to showcase your knowledge and what you can do for the clients to sell yourself. So you need to publish helpful information in the right language to do so.
Search Engine Marketing through Google Ads is effective in the legal industry in boosting credibility, but there are other platforms and tools that can be complementary with SEO strategies. Using these complementary marketing strategies, you can further enhance the reach and conversions of your SEO-optimized content. The following complementary platforms and tools are:
A change in access to legal markets has been sparked by the pandemic. It is therefore necessary for lawyers and law firms to take advantage of the different marketing platforms to promote their services in order to remain competitive. Increasing search engine rank and visibility through best SEO practices is essential.
Hiring a content team with sufficient knowledge of how to work around important legal vocabulary is recommended. A content team for the legal industry must hit the right keywords while creating meaningful content. This will both increase relevance and boost the authority of your law firm, an impact of good content writing that not many in the legal industry have acknowledged.
