As a constant source of fresh content, your law firm blog is a great tool for building your online authority and boosting your SEO. Research shows that blogs consistently deliver the goods in terms of more traffic to your website, more leads, and higher ranking in search engine results pages.
But could you be doing more? Could you think more strategically about how to squeeze every bit of potential good from your blog? Of course you could! Here are five tips to get you started:
#1: Don’t just focus on keywords.
Putting too much emphasis on optimizing blog content for keywords is a common error. Even if your primary objective for your blog is SEO, you can still obtain a good ranking with content that isn’t optimized for keywords. How? By crafting content that is well written and unique and promoting it heavily on social media and email, you build authority, which is also an important ranking factor for SEO.
#2: Include internal links.
Many marketers focus solely on external links without realizing that once you have established enough authority for your blog, you can use internal links to rank for your important keywords. Internal links let search engines know which pages on your site are important. As you create new posts, link to pages on your website that support your subject matter as well as to older posts that have proven popular in the past to drive traffic to your best content.
#3: Promote older posts.
Promoting older content is a great way to boost SEO, but is usually neglected by bloggers who tend to focus only on pumping out new content. There are several ways to do this:
- Update and relaunch— take a good evergreen article you’ve written in the past and update it with new information or add more content to lengthen your article, then repost it with a note at the beginning that you have updated the post. Be sure to remove any old links that are no longer relevant.
- Promote on social media— use a social media scheduling tool to schedule social sharing for older posts to drive traffic to them on an ongoing basis.
- Autoresponders— send autoresponders to new subscribers to your blog that direct them to older content they haven’t seen yet.
- Email— include links in your e-newsletter or launch an email series that includes links to evergreen posts of interest to your target audience.
#4: Publish frequently.
Firms that blog frequently get more traffic. In fact, research shows that companies that blog 16+ times per month get 3.5 times as much traffic as companies that only post a couple of times per month. If you blog for SEO reasons, then you need enough content on your blog to attract search traffic.
#5: Don’t worry about post length.
While long-form content has been shown to outperform short content when it comes to SEO and social sharing, putting out lengthy posts just for the sake of length is not a good strategy. What counts is the quality of your content. Also keep in mind that most people prefer shorter content, spending an average of 37 seconds on an article, according to a recent study. The best practice is to write both short and long posts and then check your analytics to see which ones resonate best with your readers.
