To blog or not to blog, that is the question.
The last business I owned benefited tremendously by its blog. I owned that company from 2000 – 2012. I’ll spare you the details, but after selling that business life would lead me to operating several successful personal injury law firm’s blogs who actually get intake via articles on their blog. To make a long story short, people have heard of miscellaneous success stories like these and wonder if their website needs content as well. As 2019 approaches I am still asked this question at least a few times each week.
Below I’ll cover common misconceptions about content and blogs and why an attorney or law firm may or may not need a blog.
Content myths
Below are some myths about blog content we should dispel right away. These are things which will not improve your online presence or result in new clients or cases:
- Just adding “fresh content” doesn’t improve SEO and rankings. It does keep Google coming back to your site frequently but just adding things to a blog doesn’t automatically make it more relevant.
- People aren’t going to share your articles. Unless you have something really interesting to share, like a controversial opinion piece, nobody is going to share it. If they did, it wouldn’t matter anyways since social media doesn’t help SEO either.
- Nobody is going to navigate to your blog to read it. I have the data here for dozens of law firm websites and I can promise you that this just isn’t happening.
Why you might want to have a blog:
- Answering people’s questions. Every page is a landing page, including blog pages. gAnd, people are indeed asking Google questions with a local intent. For example, people ask Google questions about statutes of limitations, DUI laws, and what happens if they’re injured while riding in the back seat of an Uber vehicle while on vacation from out of state when it was rear-ended. As you can see, the possibilities are endless.
- They CAN be good for SEO, but you need to add content which could be linked to. Getting (good) links to your internal pages is good and builds the authority and trust of your websites. You have to think outside of the box here. My most linked to article on a blog was about the Snapchat speed filter. Even CNN linked to it. In other words, they’re good for SEO IF you can either get natural links to articles on the blog or build links to articles on the blog.
- Covering recent accidents is a form of content marketing which takes place in any competitive city. Big tour bus accident? Write about it on the blog within a few hours and watch the traffic pour in. This occasionally results in a case. You have to be careful here and keep it classy.
Law firms should not blog when:
Unfortunately, there are “marketing agencies” out there who have taken advantage of lawyer’s trust in them. A lawyer may hear through the grapevine that they need content and ask their marketing agency to add a blog. This almost always results in a garbage blog where they add recycled content that they’re putting on other law firm’s sites. This is extremely deceptive and misleading and is totally unhelpful. In some cases, it’s detrimental to a site’s health. Some other content marketing agencies add other content such as “do cigarettes cause cancer?” – that’s another sure way to make sure that nobody reads your blog, EVER.
You never want to have a blog JUST to have a blog. Adding content is good when it’s relevant, unique, and answers questions that people are asking.
How to get a great blog!
Assuming you do not have the time to sit around learning how to write for the web, get pages crawled, indexed and ranking and write content that people will actually read, you need to find someone who specializes in creating legal content. That’s what we do here where our content marketers and attorneys craft content daily!
