How Beefing Up Your Content Attracts More Legal Clients

A decade ago, you could stuff your law firm’s website with countless short, targeted pages of content—no matter their quality—and find yourself at the top of Google search results for attorneys.

That’s no longer the case.

Google’s algorithm—and the people behind it—are working much smarter these days. The law firms that climb the highest in the search results for a query like “car accident lawyer” will be the ones with a lot of content, but also the highest quality content, in your area.

You may be wondering: Do I focus first on getting more content on my site? Or should I emphasize quality and ignore volume?

The answer is you need a perfect balance of both.

Managing the line between quality and quantity in your website content can ultimately make a difference for your firm’s new client acquisition—or lack thereof.

This is how you achieve great content marketing. It’s a powerful tool in getting more clients because it provides useful information, not just sales pitches. It attracts clients by building goodwill.

One study found that consumers were 131 percent more likely to buy something after reading informative content from the seller.

But Mike Crimmins, digital manager at Firmidable, emphasized how you can’t just do any content marketing. You have to employ the right strategy. And that means you can’t jam keywords into a weak page and expect results (anymore).

“Your content has to be helpful,” Mike said. “Google’s algorithm is pretty good at deciphering quality content from poor content these days. If you write 200 words filled with spelling errors, and your page is stuffed full of keywords, the algorithm will know it’s useless.”

Keep reading to find out:

• How to balance informative and lead-generating content
• Why you need more content
• Why deleting content is sometimes a great idea

Informative vs. Lead-Generating: Find the Right Content Mix for Law Firm Success

Before you can strike that perfect balance, you need to know the goals of each type of content typically deployed for law firm websites: educational and lead-generating.

A substantial, educational page does what its title intends—gives the reader the information they seek, in (hopefully) an easy-to-read format that will answer the question they typed into Google.

Lead generation, on the other hand, focuses on persuading the searcher to contact your firm and become a lead. That often means shorter copy sections and emphatic, visually striking calls to action.

Remember: Google—and digital marketing technology as a whole—are getting smarter by the day. Good, informative content will please the search engine, bringing prospective clients to your page.

But once they arrive on your site, you need to entice them to enlist your legal services.

“We want information; we want to be a true resource,” Mike said of the strategy our legal marketing agency has developed. “But we want to have a hybrid information page and lead-gen page.

“In a perfect world, all our pages would be like that.”

They would have content calibrated just right to both inform and persuade.

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Getting Your Law Firm’s Content Marketing to Critical Mass

One piece of finely calibrated, informational and inspirational content is great. But it’s not enough.

It’s when you build up a beefy collection of quality content that you start to see results, driving leads to your site who, once there, you deftly guide toward clicking that button to talk to a lawyer.

In fact, according to a recent HubSpot study, both quality and quantity are immeasurably important.

Their stats showed that companies publishing 16 or more blog posts a month earned 3.5  times more internet traffic than those who posted 0 – 4 posts per month. And, more importantly, those companies who posted more content brought 4.5 times more leads than the companies who posted less.

Think about it this way: Your potential clients are searching with questions about attorneys and legal services. The more content your site has—quality, helpful content—the more answers you have. Those people will naturally flock to you.

“The more content you add, the wider net you cast to get more visitors to your website because you were able to target more keywords than just your homepage,” Mike said. “And you can get more specific on those pages, which Google will find to be a valuable resource. Assuming they’re all quality pages.”

Take an inventory of the services your firm provides, down to a detailed level. Do you see specific situations that your attorneys have significant experience helping people with? Write a page for each one—full of useful, substantial content.

How Deleting Content Could Actually Help Your Law Firm’s Online Success

This part seems counterintuitive.

Didn’t we just establish that you need to pump up the amount of content you have on your firm’s website?

Well, yes. But we also said the content needs to achieve a certain quality. Shoddy content will shoo Google away, which is the last thing you want.

When the quality is low, you run into the problem that more is not always better.

So consider combing through your archives. If you find something that’s not much help to potential clients, delete the page.

“Let’s say 5 percent of the time, you should be deleting old, low-quality content,” Mike said. “The other 95 percent of the time, you should be creating new, quality content.”

Pruning old content helps ensure that the overall impression your site makes on both Google and prospective legal clients is high caliber.

There’s no exact formula. But knowing the elements at play—and the general direction your firm should take—gives you a better chance of building a potent presence on the web and in turn creating the kind of thriving practice you’ve always envisioned.

If you need help figuring out your content marketing strategy, talk to the Firmidable legal marketing firm today.

Firmidable has been a national expert in legal marketing for almost 30 years. It brings law firms customized, data-driven marketing strategies and services, including online and traditional media for a wide range of legal practices. From Maine to Hawaii, it has transformed the lives of attorneys—and their clients.