SEO Blog
Everything About SEO Blog
Today, only about 12 percent of lawyers in small firms are using the single best tool for getting your firm's name into search engine results: SEO blogs. If you're not yet doing blog SEO for your firm, you are missing out on new business and a way to really make your firm stand out from your competition.
How is Blog SEO Changing?
When search engines were first developed, they looked largely at how often a keyword was repeated in a web page to decide where to put a page in search rankings, leading to the rise of SEO blogs. However, after some time, SEO blog spam—often computer generated—was coming up in search results ahead of genuine, interesting material.
So the engineers working for Google, Yahoo, and other search engines had to figure out a way to separate legitimate SEO blogs and other websites from the content-less spam sites.
With every move Google made, spammers got cleverer with spam blog SEO. When Google started lowering the search result rank of articles with excessive keyword density, spammers lowered their density too. In 2012, Google has released new changes (called Google Penguin) to their search indexer.
With Penguin, blog SEO depends more than ever on the quality of your content and how often other people are linking to it. This means that SEO blogs today need to focus maintaining quality, original content while also interacting with other websites. If what used to work for your SEO blog doesn't seem to be bringing in clients any more, you may need to change how you think of your blog SEO.
Can SEO Blogs Help My Practice?
The answer to this question is an unequivocal yes. If you're not already using an SEO blog to help drive traffic to your website, you need to start as soon as you can. Over half of small firm attorneys have gotten new business as a direct result of their blog SEO.
SEO blogs can also help any social media initiatives that your firm has begun. If you're not quite sure what to post on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter to keep your audience interested, an SEO blog is a great place to begin. You can include a short piece of your blog SEO post, as well as the headline, and wait for your social media connections to start reading.
What Kind of SEO Blog Should I Start?
The answer to this question, of course, depends on what you're good at and what your practice focuses on. In all likelihood, it's not a good idea for a criminal defense attorney to have blog SEO about divorces or bankruptcy.
Don't make your SEO blog topic too general. Remember that there are already many other SEO blogs, and you want yours to stand out. You should pick some specific aspect of your practice area you know a great deal about, and keep your blog focused on developments in that area.
Even more important is your audience. Who do you want reading your SEO blog? Some lawyers start SEO blogs that are designed to attract clients who are searching for terms related to their legal case online. Other attorneys prefer to make their blog SEO more attractive to other attorneys, who can then see the content and send referrals on to your law office or link your blog in their blogs.
Considerations about your audience can affect the topic of your SEO blog. SEO blogs that are about more consumer-friendly topics may get a little traffic from other attorneys, especially if they want to link your content. On the other hand, blog SEO designed for other lawyers will probably be over the heads of most clients.
How Often Should I Post to My SEO Blog?
There's a tricky line that SEO blogs need to walk when it comes to posting frequency. If you post too many times, people won't have time to read all of your blog SEO content and may even stop reading. Even if they don't stop reading, the time and effort you spent making SEO blog entries will have been wasted if people don't have time to read it all.
At the same time, you don't want to post too infrequently. SEO blogs with no entries written for a month or more can look abandoned, and will have a much harder time bringing in new business.
Your SEO blog should shoot for a happy medium—which will also give you enough time to make sure that you can produce quality blog SEO content. Try posting once or twice a week to start, and then see whether you feel comfortable with producing a third (possibly short) article per week.
Before you start any SEO blogs, it's a good idea to have a reserve stockpile of articles. That way, if you get busy, your SEO blog doesn't suffer from a lack of content: just take an article out of the stockpile and post whenever you need to.
What Should My SEO Blog Entries Look Like?
The key to great blog SEO is having great titles that capture the attention of your audience. When SEO blogs have confusing titles—or titles that don't really capture what the article is about—they are often indexed incorrectly or ranked much lower.
If you still want to have clever or cute headlines instead of descriptive ones, include them as sub-headlines within your article. This will allow your voice to shine through but won't result in your blog SEO being misread by search spiders.
Don't flood your blog entries with too many repetitive keywords. You should be making sure your keywords appear several times in your entries, but in the best case scenario, they should flow seamlessly as part of your prose. Usually, just 2 or 3 repetitions of keywords will be plenty for a 400 word article.
You should also make sure that your blog entries link back to landing pages on your own website at least once or twice. Don't just link to a firm homepage, but instead make sure that you're using targeted landing pages designed to generate conversions.
