Blogging is a great way to market your law firm. When done well it can be a great marketing/branding tool and can gain strong visibility online in addition to increasing the visibility of your website. Here are a few key tips on how to write an effective blog:

Blog writing with SEO:

1. Style of writing. Remember who your audience is and write for that audience. If you expect that non legal professionals will be the main audience for your site then make sure you keep the language in layman’s terms.
2. Topics to write about. Stuck on what to write about? Think of every question a client has ever asked you – each one is an opportunity to write a blog posting! In addition share your thoughts and commentary on recent new events which are relevant to your practice, talk about recent events in your practice etc…
3. Focus. Keep the topic of your blog as focused as possible around the area(s) of law in which you practice.
4. Keywords. Your blog posting should be as rich as possible with keywords but remember that it still needs to read well. Don’t simply say ‘criminal lawyer’ 20 times in one post as Google can consider that ‘keyword stuffing’ which could result in a penalty and of course when someone reads the blog it will sound terrible. So make sure the post reads well however do use as many keywords as possible. In addition try to use those keywords in sentences which make sense but also in a way that people might use them when searching. For example you could start a posting by saying ‘Orange County Estate Planning Attorney Bob Jones was recently blah blah……..’. The first 5 words are clearly what someone could enter into a search engine.
5. Blog post titles. The title of your blog post is very important. Make sure that you use keywords in the title.
6. Hyperlinks with anchor text. In your postings you should link to your website where appropriate. Create links to the home page of course but be sure to create plenty of links to the internal pages of your website also. For example if you write a post on Chapter 7 bankruptcy laws then link to your Chapter 7 page. Create a hyperlink from the relevant words. So for example if the blog was about Chapter 7, highlight Chapter 7 and then click the link button (usually looks something like this ) and then enter the url of the page you want to link to on the screen that will pop up. Click ok and you have now linked those words to the relevant page.
7. Inbound links. Make sure that your blog is linked to your website and your website is linked to your blog. In addition you should create as many inbound links to your blog as possible from as many different websites as possible. If you know other attorneys who blog ask them to write a post about you and link to your blog and of course you will do the same for them (make sure that no more than 50% of your links are these ‘reciprocal’ links however as more than that will not look good to Google). Do a search for ‘blog directories’. You’ll find a slew of blog directories many of which you can create a listing with free of charge.
8. Blog regularly. The more often you blog the more credibility your blog will gain and the more it will help your website results. I would recommend a minimum of 1-2 times per month to make it worthwhile. Any less than once a month and it’s probably not going to do much for you.

Happy blogging!