How to Build and Manage a Blog – Make a Legal Blog Engaging

If you are a legal professional, it matters to write about topics that your clients will find helpful. Apart from educating your clients, blogging also enhances your website’s searchability. Consider starting a legal blog with your website to attract potential clients to your practice. There is a learning curve to creating a legal blog, and starting one requires a certain level of technical knowledge. Apart from the content itself, you must also ensure that your blog is search-optimized, readable, and valuable to your audience. Fortunately, it won’t take long for you to create a successful blog. This guide will give you the basics of how to build and manage a blog that supports your practice.

Why Start a Blog?

Blogging is considered an important marketing tool for small businesses. Now that more people are going online for their needs, brands must stand out. The best way to do this is to build credibility and authority. Blogs allow businesses to showcase their industry knowledge. Using how-to articles, infographics, and editorials, brands can attract audiences with their insights and knowledge about their respective field.

Law firms will benefit from blogging, considering how complicated the legal world is to people who are not attorneys. Here are a few things you can achieve by building and managing a legal blog:

• Provide answers to questions that cover litigation, liability, and rules of court
• Give common advice on how to prepare for a legal challenge
• Discuss the latest enacted laws and their impact on certain groups
• Define legal terms and concepts that are related to your practice
• Debunk legal myths and bad advice that could complicate a person’s legal situation

There’s a lot more you can write about in a legal blog, so long as it gives value to your audience. However, as you find topics to explore, you must understand the other aspects of starting a blog.

Tips for Starting Your Blog

Whether you are a managing partner or a solo practitioner, you need to spend as much time setting up the blog as you do putting ideas on paper. For that, here is a few things that might help you out:

Write from Your Audience’s Perspective

The fact that a legal blog helps you establish authority and credibility doesn’t mean you should cram as many legal terms as you know into the content. Your blog should be targeted towards people who need lawyers to make sense of their situation. In other words, you shouldn’t tempt yourself into adding technical language to every article.

While keeping your audience in mind, aim to deliver the information clearly and in simpler terms. If you will be using words such as “declaratory judgment” or “motion in limine,” consider including a short explanation and an example. After all, a legal blog aims to educate visitors and showcase your legal prowess. In addition, make sure to keep your paragraphs and sentences short. Add graphics and photos if you write long-form blogs exceeding 1,000 words.

Relate It to Your Practice

If you are a specialty lawyer and promote yourself as such, your blog should be focused on the field you practice in. If you are a personal injury attorney, for instance, you can talk about such topics as wrongful death and legal options for employees who were injured on the job. Focusing your blog on your specialty will help you reach out to people who need your services. Plus, you won’t have to spend so much time drafting a blog on a topic you know so much about.

Do Keyword Research

Keyword research is crucial to creating content for your legal website. Search engines like Google use keywords to determine a web page’s relevance to a search query. If a potential client searches for “divorce lawyers,” Google links relevant web pages. The most pertinent are often placed in the first position in this list. The challenge here is to compete with other firms and solar practitioners who are also writing search-optimized blogs. You will not be the only one writing blogs on specific topics.

It matters to develop a keyword strategy that includes terms and phrases that competing practitioners are using. The most basic approach is to understand what potential clients are searching for. If you are a divorce lawyer in Arizona, you can type “divorce lawyer Phoenix” in the search engine field and hit enter. Next, scroll down to the bottom of the search results page to see a list of queries Google suggests. These are queries that users also look for if they need a divorce lawyer.

If you want a more accurate way to build a list of relevant keywords, you can always use keyword research tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs. Once you have your list, include these terms or target keywords in your blogs. Make sure the keywords fit naturally into the text so it doesn’t appear awkward to readers.

Write Great Headlines

When it comes to attracting readers to your legal blog, you need to come up with effective headlines that are concise and engaging. The process is not as simple as it looks, as HubSpot suggests an ideal length of 60 characters for a headline. That’s because shorter headlines are easier to read and provide a straightforward glimpse of the entire content.

How do you create a 60-character headline that includes a target keyword and sets the audience’s expectations about the article? The key here is to prepare at least three or four headline versions and test them using a headline analyzer. This tool can suggest how to improve your headline for maximum results.

Add Links to Related Content

Another way you can improve your blog’s searchability is by adding links to web pages within and outside your website. With internal linking, You can add links to other blog articles to keep audiences engaged. The more they find valuable information, the more likely they are to schedule an initial consultation.

It’s also essential to include backlinks from authoritative sites. If you find content relevant to the topic you are writing, link to add credibility and value to the piece.

Don’t Forget Metadata

Blogging is not just about delivering information. To make your blog more visible online, you must include meta-data or meta-tags before publishing a write-up. Meta-data provides additional details on what your blog is about to search engines. Examples include the meta description and alt image tags (if you have high-quality photos in your articles).

If you need help when it comes to adding meta-data and optimizing the other aspects of your blog, consider using plugins such as Yoast, RankMath, or SEOPress. These plugins offer numerous features that can improve your blog’s online visibility. They are also helpful in making sure your articles are readable so you can keep visitors on your page until the content ends.

How to Manage a Legal Blog – Final Points

Are you ready to start your own blog for your legal practice? Keep these tips on managing a blog in mind so you will have a readable, searchable, and valuable blog to your profession.