Creating unique content for your law firm’s website is something that your potential clients find valuable — and Google does, too.
But how do you write unique content when it seems like there are already hundreds of pages on other law firm website that cover the same topic that you want to write about?
One of the best ways to take any topic and make it yours — even when it’s a topic that seems as if it’s been covered again and again — is to make the topic local and take an angle on it.
Here’s what you need to know about developing a framework for local marketing on your law firm’s website.
What is a local page?
Local pages are law firm website pages that provide relevant local information to your potential clients.
A number of your law firm’s website pages can be designed to engage local clients by providing local information that they’re searching for. Practice area pages, blog posts, case results, and many other types of pages can have a local focus.
For example:
- Personal injury law firms could create content that addresses local topics such as intersections that are often sites of accidents; local hospitals or places where people frequently get injured, such as parks and schools.
- Criminal defense attorneys can create pages that provide information about local criminal courts, police stations, jails or checkpoints.
How do I make a page unique by making it local?
Local pages are designed to get found in organic searches by viable potential clients. They’re designed to not only be found by viable potential clients, but also to convert them into leads for your firm. As these pages get increasingly specific, they aren’t necessarily going to attract a high level of visitors to any individual page — but that’s not the point.
The idea with these unique local pages is to attract highly targeted visitors that have an issue you can help them — an issue that is very specific to the topic you’ve written about on the page. The effect is this: when your potential new clients do highly specific searches — which a lot of people do — your page is going to closely match their query and is more likely to be returned in search results.
Keep in mind that rather than searching for something like “Phoenix divorce attorney”, many potential clients will search for things that are much more specific than that. They’re going to be searching for topics such as, “When I get a divorce in Maricopa County who gets the kids?”
These kinds of searches are referred to as “the longtail” — to learn more about these kinds of searches, listen to our podcast episode: “Law Firm Websites & The Longtail Search.”
Create a broad-to-specific framework for your law firm’s local pages
You can take the concept of “local” and go several levels deep with it. For example, look at the first three items in this list:
- General location-specific “we serve” pages
- Practice type + location
- Practice type + case type + location
- Practice type + case type + circumstance + location
- Practice type + case type + circumstance + person/entity + location
- Practice type + case type + circumstance + person/entity + date/event + location
This location hierarchy drills down from broad to specific — and the result is that you can target part of the state, county, city, town, precinct, district, subdivision, neighborhood, and so on. Keep in mind that people tend to think locally, not legally, so even if something is governed at the state level, you’ll see your potential clients search with a much more granular, local focus. For example, they may search for something like “What happens if I’m arrested for a DUI on the I-10 in Phoenix?”
There are all kinds of different entry points into the relationship with your potential clients. And, when you use a framework like the one above, there’s essentially an infinite number of pages that you can create.
You could have a list of different local considerations. Let’s say you practice criminal law; you could have a page on local DUI information for each court, each police department, etc.
A personal injury attorney could develop pages for each city where he or she practices, for various hospitals, pages for tow truck companies, and more.
But many attorneys just think about having a single page that talks about all the locations that you serve. That’s not going to be nearly as effective as the highly specific pages that closely match queries that your potential new clients are searching for.
For example, let’s say you focus on DUI defense. Instead of sticking with a single page that says “We serve Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, Tacoma…”
Start at the city level and develop pages with DUI information for each of those cities. From there, you can develop pages for each specific case type in each city (“DUI + Marijuana + Seattle” or “DUI + Marijuana + Car Accident + Tacoma”, just as a few examples).
Once you’ve done that, you can move on to make pages even more unique by taking specific angles on each case type.
How do I make a page even more unique by taking an angle on a topic?
Now that we’ve examined the first part of the framework list for developing local pages, let’s look at the second part of the list:
- General location-specific “we serve” pages.
- Practice type + location.
- Practice type + case type + location.
- Practice type + case type + circumstance + location.
- Practice type + case type + circumstance + person/entity + location.
- Practice type + case type + circumstance + person/entity + date/event + location
Once you’ve covered combinations such as examining specific case types in each location, you can move on to developing pages surrounding local attractions, business locations, street, addresses, intersections and more.
To continue on with our earlier example, “DUI + Marijuana + Seattle” could evolve into a page such as “DUI + Marijuana + Seattle + Car Accident + Seattle Police + Seahawks Game.”
You can get incredibly granular with these. Again, while you may not attract a large volume of traffic from each of these pages — that is not the main purpose of these pages. You want to be able to attract potential clients who are doing these specific kinds of searches.
You can take inspiration from clients you’ve served in the past or from things that you see on a daily basis. For example, a personal injury attorney may notice a particular intersection that seems to be a magnet for car accidents.
So instead of writing a page about “Car accidents in Tucson,” you can get much more granular by discussing “Car accidents in Tucson at the intersection of Broadway Boulevard and Wilmot Road.”
Have you seen a lot of accidents that seem to involve making a left-hand turn through this intersection? Are there a large number of pedestrian-related or cycling-related accidents? That may be something to target if you want to look at the circumstance level. There are a lot of opportunities to not only make something like this your own but to target how people actually search in the process.
Learn more about local marketing for your law firm’s website
An effective local content strategy can help increase your law firm website’s visibility in search engine results and improve your ability to connect with and engage local clients. To learn more about creating a local focus on your law firm’s website, see the following blog posts:
