What is content marketing?

Content marketing entails the creation and distribution of relevant online content targeted to both the interests of your audience and the strategic fulfilment of the business needs of your law firm.

It has never been more important to have a content marketing plan in place. Words, sentences and paragraphs are the mainstay of all the major search engine ranking algorithms. Simply put, without a clear and comprehensive content marketing strategy in place it will be virtually impossible for any law firm website to rank highly in search engines such as Google or Bing either in the short or long term. Furthermore, if you are already experiencing poor or limited online visibility then the lack of a content marketing strategy will inevitably lead to further decreased online visibility as your direct competitors expand their own marketing efforts.

Why use content marketing?

Creating the right type of online content for your law firm is beneficial in a variety of ways and can often represent the best return on investment on your marketing spend.

Content marketing can be uniquely important to the legal profession and includes the following advantages –

• The creation of authoritative, well researched, well written content can position a solicitor, legal department or law firm as a particular specialist expert in an area of law. This type of authority not only carries weight as part of major search engine ranking algorithms, but it also conveys authority to the outside world of peers and potential clients.
• Content can be created to target areas of law which are aligned with current strengths of the firm. On the other hand content can be created based upon areas of law which a smaller firm would like to extend their reach, with a view to being seen as experts over time.
• The regular creation of quality legal written content on a law firm website can help to convince would-be clients that your firm is the go-to firm and actively seek you out when legal advice is required.
• The regular creation of content will help to create and maintain a long term audience interested in your law firm and help to establish your brand.

Content marketing strategy

The type of law firm content strategies we will employ will be very much dependent on yourselves. All of our content management services are completely bespoke. We will only be able to ascertain exactly what would be the optimum strategy for your law firm by meeting with you and getting to know your business.

By speaking to you in detail we will be able to ascertain company priorities, strengths, weaknesses, aims and aspirations. It is only then that we will begin to see a picture of what you want to achieve online. Often, this exercise is very useful for a law firm internally as it can help to solidify aims within the firm between staff and departments and ensure that there is a concerted content marketing plan for all going forward. Having the objective opinion of specialists such as ourselves is invaluable in helping you to focus on the most effective areas.

Our discussions with you about your content marketing requirements will cover areas such as –

• Who would be your ideal audience? (This could be based upon geographic location, age, gender, health, wealth, etc.)
• Is there a type of channel which is particularly relevant to your company? (For example, different social media channels, other websites your audience may frequent, etc.)
• Do you have specific goals or areas of law which are or will be of particular focus to your company?
• Do you have specific competitors (these can be law firms or solicitors that are local or national law firms) and are there any strengths and weaknesses that you have identified in their strategy?

Once we have a greater understanding of your prospective audience we will have a better understanding of which types of content would be most successful for your campaign.

Content marketing audit

Unless you are a brand new law firm starting out with no digital presence it is likely that you will already have a website with some content already in place.

Before starting our content marketing campaign and deciding which content marketing options would offer the greatest chances of success for your law firm we will audit the content currently on your site.

A detailed analysis of your current website content will show us which content is working well and sending traffic, which pages are not sending traffic, which areas of law which are covered by your current content and areas which may have been neglected.

Different types of content will obviously be produced with different aims in mind, for example, a page might be primarily produced to convert into a lead, to promote your legal brand or to be shared widely on social media so each type of content will have different parameters that determine whether it can be deemed successful or not. That said, we will take a holistic view of the pages on your site to be included in our content audit and we will consider the following aspects –

What is the type of page?

Traditionally law firm websites can be broken down into formulaic frameworks which consist of the most important pages being “type of service” pages, “staff”, “testimonials”, “sectors”, “news”, and the often neglected “contact” page. Each type of page will serve its own purpose specific to the law firm. We will analyse whether these have been optimally produced.

The level of content on the page

In order to rank a page in a competitive sector it is a necessity to have a certain amount of content present on the page. A page with a couple of hundred words will not rank highly in most cases. If there is insufficient content on a page this will be increased.

Content relevance

Creating a long page containing 1,500 words would be all but pointless unless the legal content was relevant and extremely well researched. We have a variety of software tools that will help to analyse keywords and key phrases that are highly relevant to the subject matter.

Content age

There is some content that is effectively ageless (particularly in the legal sector), other areas where content will need to be updated semi-regularly based upon new legislation and other types of content that will become irrelevant quickly. Our initial audit will highlight which page types require immediate work and schedule a plan of immediate and ongoing action.

Page success

Quite simply the ultimate test of the success of a content page is whether there are regular targeted visitors viewing the page through ranking highly in a search engine, through strategic content placement off site or through social media sharing.

Mechanisms which we can use to determine the success of existing content pages include an analysis of website analytics (this will tell us how much web traffic a page receives as well as a host of other important metrics) and also the quality of the leads or business which is derived from the page (where appropriate).

Gap analysis

Performing a gap analysis will allow us to uncover current pages where the relevant content is missing or the content that is present is not covering the optimum areas.

Competitor analysis

By comparing rival law firm content pages whose search engine rankings are high in areas of specific interest for your law firm we will be able to analyse important competitor keyword and key phrase patterns which will help to inform content strategy.

Final audit

Taking into account the above factors we will be left with a detailed content audit of your website which will highlight both strengths and weaknesses.

There are many other important areas when conducting a website audit such as code mark-up, titles, schema, etc. however, these are more suited to our technical SEO audit as opposed to a site content audit.

Our audit will help to inform the type of content that we believe would be most suitable for your content marketing campaign.

What type of content?

Content can include any type of online written communication aimed to represent yourself or your company to an audience. The type of content that will be required will be unique to the requirements of each client based on current and future aspirations but content marketing strategies that we will discuss with you as a law firm will include –

• Auditing and optimising current website content
• Writing and launching new core website pages in areas of interest to your law firm
• The creation of bespoke landing pages
• Creating detailed articles aimed at dominating a particular area of search
• Researching and creating company blog posts
• Social media outreach

All of the content we provide is unique and the IP is owned solely by you the client.

Unlike some companies we do not create licenced content which can only be used whilst under contract. Nor do we supply the same content to multiple clients which can be seen by search engines as duplicate content.

Content marketing services

We are extremely experienced in providing written content for legal websites. We have written and managed hundreds of law related websites over the last 10 years – many of which have held first page Google rankings for several years in extremely competitive sectors.

Our experience in the legal sector gives us a competitive edge against other digital marketing agencies. We know what content works for different legal niches and how to make that content rank highly in search engines.

Our content marketing services are aimed at producing a targeted audience for your website based upon pre-requisites that we will discuss initially and on an ongoing basis, therefore, our service to you will include –

• Speaking with key stakeholders within your law firm (partners, solicitors, associates, IT or marketing) to gain a deep understanding of the ethos, content tone and ongoing content needs of the law firm.
• A detailed content marketing website audit.
• Recommendations for an ongoing content marketing campaign across a variety of channels and content types.
• The creation and dissemination of unique content specifically tailored towards the pre-agreed needs of your law firm over the period of a contract (flexible contract terms are available and content created will be the sole ownership of your law firm).

We would advise that our content marketing services should be taken in conjunction with our full range of online marketing services for law firms.

Read an overview of our full range of marketing for law firms services for more details.