If you’ve made the decision to invest in content for your law firm’s website, congrats! You’ve made a really good choice.
At Juris Digital we can genuinely claim to have built our business on the back of targeted, compelling, and useful website content.
In turn, we have helped hundreds of law firms grow their practices and get more of their best cases by deploying strategic lawyer website content.
Did You Know: Juris Digital is a marketing and SEO agency that also staffs a 30-attorney content writing team with experience in dozens of practice areas and jurisdictions? It’s a potent combination. Ready to put us to work for your law firm?
Let’s Talk ContentMy name is Matt Green and I am one of the founding partners here at Juris Digital. I love to help lawyers and legal marketers make smart investments in effective website content that creates measurable growth for their business.
In this post, I’ll discuss 9 of the most important questions that you ought to ask yourself before you invest in website content for your law firm.
9 Key Questions to Answer Before Investing in Law Firm Web Content
1. What is the Primary Purpose of the Website Content I Want to Create?
It’s important that you understand why you’re creating content for your law firm’s website. What do you hope to achieve by publishing content? In most cases law firms use website content for marketing –– to directly attract new clients to the firm.
However, there are plenty of other productive reasons to invest in content for your website:
- You want to be able to refer your current clients to your website for common questions.
- You want to become known as an authority in your area of law.
- You want to more clearly position yourself apart from your competitors.
- You want to explain your services more clearly in order to reduce the number of leads your get from folks with unqualified cases.
Before investing in legal web content it’s important that you clarify the purpose of the content you’re creating. A strategic content service provider will help you with this during the initial phase of your engagement.
RELATED: How Much Should I Pay for Legal Content?
2. Who is the Audience for My Website Content?
For most law firms the primary audience for their website content is prospective new clients. In other words, the individuals that they hope will hire the firm to help with their legal issues.
For some though, the primary audience is the firm’s existing clients, attorneys who refer cases to the firm, other attorneys at the firm, or even journalists and news media who cover the firm’s casework.
Before investing in website content it’s crucial that you define who your primary audience is for each piece of content that you create.
3. What Type of Website Content is Required to Satisfy My Audience and Achieve My Goals?
Once we have defined who the audience is for our website content we need to ask ourselves what type of content is required to satisfy those folks and ultimately have them take the action we want them to take.
There are a several website content archetypes that we deploy for our clients at Juris Digital:
a. Service Pages
These are pages on your website that convey your primary services. These tend to be linked-to from the main website navigation and are more or less “static” in nature. These pages are normally aimed directly at potential new clients.
Service pages are generally optimized for search keywords that have a strong transactional and local intent (eg. “DUI attorney houston”). Service pages are a more-or-less essential ingredient of any law firm website.
Here are a few examples of service pages that perform well for our clients:
b. About the Firm Pages
About the firm pages are just what you’d expect: Pages that convey things about the law firm such as the firm’s history and mission, biographies of the firm’s attorneys, examples of the firm’s results for clients, testimonials from the firm’s clients, and honors, awards, and media coverage that the firm has received.
I sometimes refer to these as braggy pages. They represent the firm’s opportunity to talk themselves up. Here are a few examples of About the Firm pages that perform well for our clients:
c. Client Success Stories
Client success stories are among this author’s favorite types of website content for law firms. These are pages that tell the story of the firm’s clients. In my opinion, there is no better way to convince your audience – whether they be your potential clients, your existing clients, or people who can refer you clients – that your firm is the right choice than by telling the stories of others that you’ve helped.
At Juris Digital we offer client success story creation as a service. You can learn all about what that looks like – and see examples of our work – on our client success story service page.
RELATED: How to Create Client Success Stories That Turn Website Visitors Into Your Best Clients
d. Informational Legal Articles
Informational articles are aimed at folks who have questions or are doing research about your area(s) of practice. Law firms who are serious about deploying content as a means of widening their reach and gaining more new clients online invest in informational content. Whereas service pages are written for folks who are presumably ready to hire a lawyer, informational articles attract a much wider audience because people who search for legal information are not necessarily ready to – or even considering – hiring a lawyer (though they often are!).
An example of a search that someone looking for an informational legal article might conduct is “average payout fo 18-wheeler accident“. Someone who searches a query like this is looking for information that is relevant to the services of a personal injury law firm, even if they are not yet convinced that they need to hire a lawyer. Law firms who publish this sort of website content give themselves an opportunity to get in front of these folks.
Here are a few examples of informational legal articles that perform well for our clients.
- Are Non-Compete Agreements Enforceable In Texas? (TexasNoncompeteLaw.com) – This page gets over a thousand unique visits each month.
- 6 Common Remedies for Breach of Contract in Business (MillerLawPC.com) – This page gets over 10k organic search visits each month.
- Wrongful Termination in California (OttingerLaw.com) This page gets nearly 2k visits from organic search each month.
- Living Trusts in Texas: 7 Things You Need to Know (CurleyBusinessLaw.com)- This page gets nearly 2k visits from organic search each month.
- Guidelines for Federal Workplace Drug Testing (FedEmploymentAttorneys.com) – This page gets over 1,100 visits per month from Google alone.
RELATED: Evergreen Content Marketing for Law Firms
e. Research and Commentary Content
This sort of content is typically delivered in the form of blog posts. This includes reactions to and analysis of legal rulings in the firm’s practice areas, and research related to the firm’s areas of practice. Generally, this is not content that can be effectively ghost-written by an agency like ours. This sort of content needs to be produced by experts in the field (ie. the attorneys at your firm).
The audience for this type of content is generally folks who can help amplify the law firm such as journalists, bloggers, thought-leaders, etc. While this type of content can absolutely generate positive outcomes for the firm, those outcomes tend to be much more difficult to track and attribute because the benefits they produce are indirect.
4. How Will I Get My Website Content in Front of My Audience After It’s Published?
At Juris Digital we believe that the best way for law firms to get their content in front of their audience is via organic search (SEO). When a content strategy is backed by keyword search data the results can be transformative.
But there are other digital channels for getting your website content in front of your audience as well including:
A strategic website content partner like Juris Digital will work with you to understand the best channels for promoting your law firm’s website content.
5. Do I Need New Content, Or Do I Have Content Already That Can be Repurposed or Revamped?
For law firms that have been engaged in content marketing or other forms of web marketing for some time, there is often an opportunity to significantly improve results by evaluating what content exists and then repurposing and revamping that content strategically.
One of the things that separate Juris Digital from other legal web content vendors is that we take the time to assess our client’s current website content before making recommendations for new content. Of course, sometimes the clients who come to us are starting from scratch and so they need new content written from the ground-up. But often we are able to save time and money and achieve positive outcomes by repurposing and revamping existing content.
CLIENT SUCCESS STORY
How Massingill Achieved Consistent Growth with Website Content
See how we deployed legal content marketing to help Massingill Law massively increase traffic and leads from the web.
6. How Will I Know if the Website Content I Create is Effective, and What Specific Content is Most Effective?
Before investing in website content for your law firm you need a plan for measuring the performance of the content you published.
At Juris Digital, because we are a marketing agency and not just a purveyor of written words, we help our clients understand the potential outcomes of any given piece of content, and we help them measure the performance of the content after it’s published. We do this by ensuring that web traffic tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are properly configured on your website. This enables us to help our clients understand what specific pieces of content are most effective at generating positive outcomes so that those pieces can be prioritized for continual updates and improvements.
7. Where Will My Content Live Within the Structure of My Website?
You might be noticing a theme here, which is: Simply “ordering” pieces of website content is not good enough. There needs to be strategic consideration behind each new piece of website content your law firm produces. One of the key considerations before investing in legal web content is to understand where that content should live within the existing structure of your website.
For example, if you want to do a piece on the penalties for a third DUI charge in your state, should that content be presented as a service page? Or as an informational article? Or, should it not even be its own page, but instead, be incorporated as a new section in your existing DUI service page?
In making this determination, we may uncover opportunities to make improvements to the way that your website’s existing content is structured. At Juris Digital we help our clients uncover these opportunities by taking a holistic approach to website content creation.
RELATED: How to Use Topic Clusters and Keyword Clusters for More Effective Legal Content Marketing
8. Beyond Written Words, What Other Elements Do I Need for My Web Content to be Effective?
In the world of legal marketing, the word content is often synonymous with written content — words. But written words are far from the only format for conveying information on the web. Based on the nature of your law firm’s practice and the specific topics you want to cover, you may benefit from producing other forms of content including:
- Explainer videos
- Quick reference graphics
- Downloadable PDFs
- Audio recordings
At Juris Digital we advise our clients on what supplemental content types might be needed to achieve their goals, and because we are a full-service digital marketing shop, we have the talent and resources to create those additional assets.
9. What Ongoing Attention Will My Website Content Require to be Effective?
It’s important to understand that website content is simultaneously an asset and a liability. It is an asset in the sense that it can fundamentally transform the quantity and quality of new business opportunities that your firm generates from the web.
But it’s also a liability in the sense that it’s something that must be hosted, managed, and updated over time. Accordingly, it’s important that before you invest in content for your attorney website you consider whose job it will be to manage that content, and what that process ought to look like.
At Juris Digital we can help you define what must be done to maintain high-performing content over the long term, and put a plan in place for ensuring that is achieved.
To sum up: It’s possible that you understand perfectly what sort of content you need for your law firm’s website, and you simply need someone to write the words. In that case, we might not be the best fit for you. But if you’re like most of our clients, you’d benefit from a website content provider who will go beyond typeing words, and will also take the time up-front to understand your goals and your audience – using a rubric like the one I’ve presented here – in order to maximize the efficacy of your investment.
Let’s Talk Content