There’s a good chance that your law firm was producing content for its website years before your marketing managers thought to incorporate SEO elements or other legal content marketing strategies. This is to be expected – the world of digital content marketing is changing every day, and our approach must evolve with it. One way to continue to optimize your law firm’s website is to revisit pieces of content that predate current best practices to rewrite and revitalize them. A few tips towards this end follow.
Combine Several Short Pieces into A Single Long-Form Blog Post
Current best practices tell us that search engines like Google prefer long-form content, starting from a thousand words to as many as two or three thousand. When you produce high-quality content, you should be considering length in addition to the factors that contribute to length like relevance and helpfulness. The term “blog” used to invoke a very different type of content, and there’s likely pages on your law firm’s website that only have two or three hundred words. Comb through these shorter articles and consider whether any of them fit together. Are there any through lines, or similar themes? Can one factually feed into another? Combining too-short content into one cohesive piece with serious length can be a quick and easy way to boost your law firm website’s visibility.
Reassess Whether Your Content is Speaking to Your Target Audience
You may find that your content speaks to too broad of an audience, or can be reworked for your firm’s current target. Refining your content to touch on the pain points and lived experiences of your prospective clients is a major step in gaining conversions from your content marketing efforts.
Similarly, consider whether a targeted piece of content can be reworked to suit another goal. For example, you may have a blog that’s geared to your elder law practice’s target audience. Can that be reengineered to speak to those served by your family law team? The goal is always to ensure that your content targets your potential clients thoroughly and specifically.
Align Content With Your Legal Marketing Goals
Your law firm’s marketing strategies are likely varied and vast. At the end of the day, your content production is a part of this, and you want to make sure that your content is working with your broader marketing goals rather than fighting against them. If your goal is to be seen as a thought leader, revisit old blog posts on staple topics to ensure that they’re thorough and accessible. If your goal is to establish a focused brand, delve into your older, broader content and narrow its focus to your specific niche. Let each aspect of your marketing strategy buoy the others, unified towards your overall goal.
Optimize Your Headings and Call to Action with Keyword Research
From an SEO perspective, there’s always optimizations that can be made to old pieces of content created before the writer was bearing those factors in mind. By utilizing keyword research, you can see what terms your audience is actually searching for and, in rewriting old pieces of content, use those keywords to shape your content in a way that is both informative and will speak to your audience. Work these keywords into your introduction and use them to update your blog’s title to be fresh and relevant.
Additionally, in looking at your old pieces of content, do they use headings? Does your blog end with a call-to-action encouraging the reader to reach out to your law firm? Both of these additions will gain you traction on the search engine results pages and guide your reader through a better user experience, and both additions can be enhanced by keyword use. Label each section of the blog with relevant keywords in the headings so your reader knows what to expect and can find the information they seek quickly and efficiently. Reinforce the focus of your blog in the call-to-action to remind users why they came to the blog in the first place, and encourage them to stay.
Update Old Pieces with Fresh Information
Law is not a static thing – legislation and its interpretations are constantly changing at the local, state, and federal levels. While the bones of a blog may still relay true and relevant information, there may be facets that are outdated. Comb through old content to see if there are pieces that can be rewritten and reworked to factor in new information, laws, and statistics, and take care to explore how those updates affect the topic at-hand.
Make Sure Your Content is Cohesive and Relevant
Look through old content to see whether your website hosts pieces that are scattered or irrelevant to your practice areas. If you have a piece that lacks cohesion because the topic is too broad or doesn’t fit together well, take the opportunity to separate that blog into individual pieces of long-form content where you can explore each of those topics in depth. Similarly, if your site hosts a blog that is irrelevant to your practice area, see if there are ways that you can rewrite it to suit it to the work that you currently do.
Cohesion is also important when it comes to the style of the writing involved. Be sure to look at your rewritten work as a whole – while when viewed piecemeal the new additions may work, you want to ensure that the refreshed blog fits together and flows well. Be sure to go into your rewrites with a plan for each paragraph so you don’t risk missing the forest for the trees.
