Once upon a time, search engine optimization (SEO) was about stuffing web pages with key words and hiding links. Lawyers and other businesses flourished, bringing in tons of business through a few quick online searches.
Unfortunately, those days are over. Google has caught on to these ‘tactics’ and penalized (ab)users by dropping them off the top of search results. These days, securing page 1 search engine placement takes, in part, a refined and strategic approach centered on fresh, original content that provides value to visitors. Is your legal blog in line with this new way of online business development?
Is Content Quality that Important?
Yes, the quality of the content that your legal blog provides is crucial to your blog ability to drive new traffic to your website! Creating content for today’s SEO world means for more than traditional SEO practices (like on-page keyword optimization or link building).
Websites that offer visitors valuable content on a regular basis are going to be looked upon more favorably by Google, and will, in turn, appear higher in the search rankings.
Why is Content Part of a Smart SEO Strategy?
Whether content is actually “high quality” may be subjective, but that hasn’t stopped Google from trying to filter the information it finds to be the most beneficial to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
A few of the factors Google considers when determining a blog post’s ‘quality’ include: longer content, images, videos, proper grammar, text formatting and links – including both outbound links to other high quality sites and inbound links (and social shares) from high quality sources.
It’s also important to remember that content must be relevant to the website publishing it and the people who are most likely to read it. This means that your personal injury law firm should stick to writing blog posts on personal injury practice areas, not criminal defense.
How Do You Maximize Content for Search Engines?
There are certain types of content that fit into Google’s loose criteria for “high quality” that can also help businesses move up the search rankings. The most obvious (and the easiest to produce) are blog posts. Yep, these days, Google makes you work for those rankings!
Your legal blog should serve — at minimum — two purposes: 1) satisfying Google (and other search engines) and 2) audience engagement via the publication of original posts that provide your readers with valuable legal information.
In addition, blog posts give lawyers content that they can share on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+…), thereby driving traffic to their website. What’s more, when you like, share or retweet a company’s posts, it provides social signals that act as inbound links, adding credibility to your website and resulting in another SEO benefit.
Blogging not only allows a lawyer to increase his/her reputation as an ‘expert’ on a certain subject matter (or two) but it allows a rainmaker to increase his/her online presence and bring in quality leads through the world wide web.
For more information on how to get set up with your blogging campaign, contact the experienced attorney writers / legal bloggers at WebPresence, Esq. today.
