When attorneys build websites for their law firms, it’s usually with the goal of maximizing their online visibility.
But just launching a law firm website is not enough to guarantee that it will automatically start bringing in traffic by qualified potential clients. In order for your site to be found by your potential clients, it needs to appear in search engine results for the search queries that potential clients make.
To do that, your site needs to provide content that addresses the subject of those queries in ways that prove satisfactory to search engine users. The content on your law firm’s website needs to be high-quality, accurate, and up to date, and it also needs to provide a positive user experience for anyone that navigates to it.
What Is High-Quality Content?
Google wants to return content to its users that will answer the user’s questions and provide value to them. Since Google’s business model depends on its ability to attract users back for future searches, it would not behoove the company to return results that failed to answer a user’s specific questions, or that simply pointed a user toward a sales or contact form when they were looking for specific information.
Both Google and its users want the same thing, and if you want your law firm website content to appeal to Google, it needs to appeal to Google’s users. This means that you need to fully answer the questions that you address in your law firm website content, and you need to write content to answer as many potential user questions as possible in order for that content to be returned on SERPs for each one of those prospective queries.
Writing a blog post that addresses the long tail search phrase, “What should I do if I’m charged with DUI while visiting Florida?” but then provides body content that simply directs users to call your law firm is not going to be sufficient for that content to rank well for that particular search query. In fact, such content will likely register to Google as “thin,” and providing thin content on your site is a violation of the search engine’s Webmaster Guidelines.
A post addressing the same search phrase that goes into some detail about specific Florida DUI laws and the penalties for violating those laws would likely rank much better on SERPs than the “thin” example provided above. And a post that provided all of this information, and then went on to provide some insight about expectations for court proceedings, including whether or not a defendant needs to be present for those proceedings, would likely perform even better.
For reference, it would still be perfectly appropriate — even advisable — to provide your firm’s contact information and a call-to-action (CTA) asking potential clients to reach out for a legal consultation on that very same high-quality, detailed content page. But providing your contact information alone is akin to making your content to trick search engines, not to provide valuable information to search engine users, and that is also a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
What Should I Write About on My Law Firm Website?
There’s an almost limitless number of topics that attorneys in any practice area can address on their law firm websites in an effort to maximize their law firm SEO. Still, sometimes just coming up with new ideas for that content is the hardest part of the content marketing process.
In this series, we cover content ideas that attorneys can cover on their law firm websites. Each post features ideas for a different practice area — including topics that can be covered in your website’s substantive pages and blog:
