Stating that the legal field is competitive would be an understatement. Do you want to know the secret to getting ahead of the competition? It’s content.

All types of content are helpful to a law firm's marketing strategy, including: copy, video, images, info-graphs, and audio, such as podcasts. However, we tend to focus on blogs because they require the least amount of production work. The key to having a blog that actually helps promote your firm is to update it consistently. This is where many people and companies fail. Sometimes it’s for lack of ideas, lack of time, or lack of discipline; the fact is that maintaining a blog takes a lot of work.

Below, we will go into further detail on why your law firm, absolutely, needs a blog:

SEO BOOST

Search engine optimization, many people know about it, and know they need it, but don’t exactly know how it works and how to optimize their website. Adding fresh, relevant content to your site is a way to do this. Ideally, you’ll want to work with a marketing firm so that they can do the research necessary to determine what topics are relevant and what keywords should be used.

However, simply writing on topics related to the area of law that you practice will still help, it just won’t be quite as targeted. Continuously publishing new content on your website will keep you relevant in the eyes of the search engines.

ATTRACT NEW CLIENTS

Now that you know that writing blogs helps Google find your website, a natural question to follow is, “will anyone read my blogs?” The answer is yes, of course. Before picking up the phone and calling a lawyer, most people will do some online research.

For example, there are many legal matters that people can foresee early on, such as divorce. Before they tell anyone, even their closest friend, they might be thinking about it and wondering what custody rights they will have if they proceed with a divorce. This is one of the earliest stages to get through to a potential client. If your site can provide valuable answers at this stage, they are more likely to remember and use your firm in the future.

ESTABLISH YOURSELF AS AN EXPERT

You have a plethora of knowledge, but it needs to be shared for people to know that you are an expert. It’s impossible to share all of your knowledge at once. Which is why you can’t simply write the content for your website or marketing materials, and expect for it to convey everything that you know.

There’s also the fact that as an expert, you’re learning new information on your particular field every day. A blog provides you the opportunity to share your knowledge a little bit at a time. If you have been consistent with your blog updates, by writing a couple of posts a week, you will find that at the end of a full year you would have written over a 100 pages of new content.

LOCAL AWARENESS

Aside from online searches, many people ask their friends for a recommendation for a good attorney. By writing blogs, more people are exposed to your firm, and are more likely to recommend your firm to a friend. This is why we’ll often recommend writing posts that are of interest to the target audience even if it’s not directly related to the area of law that the firm practices.

Going back to the divorce attorney example, they could benefit from discussing tax law for married couples. If you don’t see the connection yet, here it is: married couples may one day need a divorce or have friends that will go through a divorce. The target audience in this case isn’t couples going through a divorce, it’s really married couples.

TOP OF MIND

Until now, we’ve primarily focused on attracting potential clients, but we shouldn’t forget about past clients. They’re a great resource as well because they have already had previous experience with your firm, the key is not to let them forget about you. We usually recommend that law firms send regular emails to past clients. Blogs serve as a valid reason to email.

As long as you’re sharing interesting information, they’ll be happy to receive your emails, read them, and forward them; but even if they don’t do any of these things, they’ll see the name of your firm in their inbox frequently and are more likely to remember you when a friend needs an attorney.

SHARING

Many firms choose to maintain social networks for marketing purposes because it’s a relatively low-cost way to gain more exposure. A way to optimize this marketing channel is to share your own content. Sharing links from your site will get you more exposure as people like and repost your posts. It will help the ranking of your page on Facebook, but it will also bump your SEO if the links are getting people onto your company’s website. As you can see, blogs serve many purposes and remain one of the most efficient ways of marketing oneself online.

There are many other things that you can do to gain more online visibility, and they should be done in tandem with content creation. Ultimately, creating and sharing new content through your website is something that you own and have complete control over.

Whether you have someone in your office do it or hire an outside marketing company, keep in mind all the benefits provided by starting and maintaining a blog on your website. It will take time and work before you start seeing results, but it is by far one of the best things you can do to promote your firm.

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