Law Firm Blogging and Measuring ROI

search engine optimization for attorneys

It’s no secret these days that content marketing is a must for law firms when it comes to boosting online presence and attracting new clients. What better way to achieve brand awareness and traffic to your website than blogging? When done correctly, a blog can be one of the most powerful tools to increase organic search visibility, promote your legal expertise, and engage with your audience.  Whether you are already consistently blogging or are ready to start from scratch, read our top six tips below to help you achieve a successful law firm blog.

1. Keep It Relevant

Your blog has a specific purpose – to inform your audience about what your law firm does and how you do it. Chances are a potential client interested in specific legal services found your blog through a Google search. Your law firm’s blog is one of the best places to display thoughtful commentary and demonstrate expertise in your field. Make sure your content is useful to consumers, includes valuable information, and is 100% relevant to your law firm’s practice areas.

2. Focus on Quality Content

While it’s important to post consistently, you want to make sure the quality of your blog content takes precedence over quantity. Focus on material that people actually want to read and worry less about how long a post is or how many blogs you post that week. Your blogs need to be informative, to the point, and helpful.

3. Research Keywords

Even with no search engine optimization (SEO) experience, you can research keywords to use in your blog in order to rank higher in Google search results. While most SEO keyword research tools cost money, there are several resources out there like Buzzsumo or Ubersuggest that will help you identify keywords, trending topics, and the best terms to use throughout your blog.

4. Offer Fresh Perspective

Another key to a successful blog is to write about what you know but in a new or interesting way.  Make sure your blog doesn’t get dull or repetitive. A great way to combat monotony is to have different attorneys write for the blog and cover areas they specialize in. Alternative perspectives, formats, and writing styles will keep things interesting and will attract different types of readers. While mixing it up spreads the workload across more people and allows for more variety in subject matter, be sure to keep a consistent voice for your brand.

5. Check Out the Competition

Chances are most of your competitors already have a blog. There is no harm in researching your competition’s blogs to see how you can do it better. Are they actually answering questions clients will want answers to? How often are they posting? Are they engaging with their audience?  Take notice of how much attention their blogs are getting, and use their best posts as inspiration for your future content.  The key here is to make sure your blogs are not only better but also 100% original.

6. Promote and Engage

Once you post a blog on your website, it’s important to get the word out. You can’t expect your audience to automatically read every piece you write, which is why you must remind them and guide them to it. Share your law firm’s blogs on your social media channels, in your email newsletters, and/or even in email signatures to expand the reach of your posts.

The final key factor to remember is to engage with your audiences. Once you’ve encouraged them to read your blog, be sure to respond to any comments or interactions with your content. It’s important to acknowledge what your readers have to say, whether you agree or not. This will ensure loyal readers and support for future blogs.

Measuring ROI

Most lawyers know by now that adding quality content on a regular basis to their law firm website is a crucial part of a successful digital marketing strategy. But, even if law firms are adding content to their websites, most do not monitor any metrics of blogging effectiveness.

Legal Content Can Be Kind Of Boring

Creating interesting or compelling law firm website content must be done on a continuous basis, and you should always improve upon it. How many times can one write about car accidents, how to draft a will, child custody tips, or other such legal topics and not put your audience to sleep?

Before you can measure the success of your blogging efforts, you must keep yourself on a schedule. You should come up with an editorial calendar that touches upon your primary practice areas, industry events, newsworthy happenings related to your business, holidays, and community involvement.

Measuring and tracking the success of your blog analytically isn’t nearly as difficult as structuring and executing the content associated with an effective law firm website editorial calendar.

What Are Your Goals?

Before you can measure your own success, you need to articulate what your actual goals are – and please don’t say “to make more money” or “to get more clients” – we need to dig deeper and be more specific here. Just as you would use Key Performance Indicator (KPI) excel spreadsheets to calculate the percentage change from month to month for items including increase in Twitter followers and increase in socially shared link clicks, you can create a sheet for blog metrics as well.

Your goals can be tracked by measuring certain data associated with them from month to month, so you know what content is performing best, what strategy changes are working, what days of the week get the best readership, and more.

Some Basic Law Firm Website Goals Include:

  1. Increase unique blog visitors – While one visitor can visit your website multiple times, Google Analytics does make a distinction between repeat visitors and unique visitors.
  2. Increase engagement surrounding your blog content – Engagement with a blog includes social sharing, blog commenting, and linking from other sites or reblogging. If you have a great number of unique blog visitors, but extremely limited or nonexistent engagement, design adjustments and tweaking your blog’s content can be considered to encourage site visitors to engage more.
  3. Increase number of RSS subscribers – Track and measure how blog readers interact with your content through tools like RSS reader Feedly. Users generally subscribe to your blog feed via a clickable RSS icon and your analytics should be set up show how often the icon is clicked.
  4. Decrease blog bounce rate – While your blog’s bounce rate is affected by a wide variety of factors, it is important to look at how long law firm website visitors spend reading your blog posts and if they continue on to other pages of your website after their initial page of entry.
  5. Inbound links to your blog – Links to your law firm blog from credible, high Page Rank websites will generally improve search engines’ view of your blog’s digital stature. Digital press releases and guest blog posting used to be two of the most popular and most effective components of blog link-building strategies; however, recent Google algorithmic changes have hit many of these resources hard with spam ratings and other penalties.

If your law firm has a blog (or more than one) and you want to know if it is performing optimally, we can help. We can perform an Audit of all of your digital assets, or a more comprehensive view of your entire law practice. Contact us today so that we can help you get your blog back on track and develop a plan to keep it that way.

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