Hosting a legal blog on your law firm’s webpage is one of the best ways to do online legal marketing. Not only does a legal blog help your site on the search engine optimization (SEO), front to get it in front of potential clients, it also helps convert those potential clients into paying ones.
This distinction – between SEO and the act of turning potential clients into people who pay money for your legal services – is nuanced. It is also important, if you want to fully understand how this whole “online legal marketing” thing works.
SEO is All About Getting Volume
SEO is, as its name implies, optimizing your website for search engines.
The goal of this optimization is a high ranking in search results. Ranking at the top of the page has been proven to attract more people to your site from your listing on the search engine results page (SERP): Nearly a third of people who conduct a search query click on the first result, while more than half click on one of the top three hits.
Optimizing your law firm’s website for search engines helps you obtain those rankings, and maintain them once you have them, bringing a steady flow of potential clients to your website and then keeping that flow coming.
SEO, though, doesn’t care about what happens once those clients are on your site. Once they’re browsing your law firm’s webpage, SEO’s job is done.
Conversion is About Tapping that Volume
Once potential clients are on your website, it’s up to your website to convert them. There are numerous ways to make this happen, largely limited only by your creativity. Just some of the examples that we’ve seen in our countless hours looking at legal websites have been:
- Videos that aim to personally connect with website viewers, while conveying legal information to help sort out simple problems,
- Interactive graphics about the legal process,
- Synopses of wins in the courtroom, and
- Animated recommendations from prior clients.
These are all conversion techniques meant to convince a potential client to take that next step and hire you as their attorney.
Legal Blogs Help Both Your Site’s SEO and Its Conversion Abilities
Legal blogging is one of the rare pieces of your law firm’s website that can have a significant impact on both its SEO and its converting abilities.
On the one hand, a major perk of keeping a legal blog running is that it publicizes the fact that you’re up-to-date on all of the developments going on in your field, and that you’re well-versed in the law. These both look great for potential clients, who are often looking for any reason they can find to separate one lawyer from another as they look for the kind of legal representation that makes them feel secure. Giving those potential clients concrete examples of your knowledge and reputation in your legal blog can help convert them into paying clients.
On the other hand, maintaining a legal blog adds content to your website that search engines see as relevant and important to given searches. A particular blog post on your site can then rank well for search queries that deal with the same specific topic as your blog post, and help the rest of your law firm’s site rank well for the post’s general topic, as well.
Even better, this SEO improvement can snowball into an improvement in your site’s ability to convert the leads that it generates, as well – when a legal blog post ranks well for very specific, long tail searches, the potential clients that it attracts to your website will be warmer leads who are more likely to be looking for an attorney, like you. Converting those warm leads is far easier than the cold leads that click on your site after doing general search engine queries.