Step 1: Know your audience. Understand that each blog that you create has a target audience. Do some research and put some thought into it. If you’re a personal injury attorney in Duluth, MN writing about Mesothelioma, your most likely audience is going to be the taconite miners and their friends and family. Stop writing generic articles about premises liability or product liability. Speak towards your client’s needs. Instead of writing about faulty drugs, write about specific drug’s side effects. So for example, this blog will be targeted towards personal injury attorneys wanting to generate organic seo traffic through blogging.

Step 2: Be sure to value what the customer values most. Since our target market was defined earlier, I think we all know personal injury value above all else…money. I am kidding. Quality relevant cases without wasting time on irrelevant leads. Be sure to always have what your customer values most  in mind when writing your blog. Each client is different but over the course of a law career trends will become apparent. It also helps to be unique and original in your topic selection and write about rare and uncommon topics where your competition is too slow or inept to respond to the market, or the market might be viewed as too small to warrant a blog post.

Really what they were looking for was more business through the internet. The particulars of which strategy they should use in order to make that happen was the reason they were talking to me in the first place. However, there is enough hype around SEO these days that most law firms assume this is route they need to take.

If a law firm has the appropriate budget, time, and resources available they should be involved in SEO, paid search, email marketing, social media, content creation, and every other type of online marketing avenue But in many cases, time and money are finite resources. As a result, a law firm must prioritize which strategies make the most sense depending on the needs, goals, and resources available.

Why Do I Need To Create Content?

There are a myriad of reasons why you should produce new content for your site on a regular basis. In the interest of keeping this post succinct, I’ll list 5 of the most important reasons in my opinion:

I have 3 different friends living in Chicago that are attorneys. However, none of them practice in the landlord/tenant field. So naturally, I asked around to see if they could refer anyone who could help with my specific problem. One of my friends gave me the name and number of a lawyer that handled landlord/tenant issues.

What Happened Next

The Econsultancy blog discusses the study in a recent post:

According to the study, 92% of internet users in the United States use search engines and send email. The number using social networking services? 65%.

Now with Google Related, a new Chrome Extension and Google Toolbar feature, you’ll automatically see interesting content relevant to what’s on the page you’re viewing, right where you’re viewing it.

Here is a video that describes the new tool in more detail:

According to the update:

“The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.”

The Greater Significance

At this time, the impact of these Google News badges isn’t entirely clear. However, when you start to look at the bigger picture you can see the puzzle pieces Google is putting together.

The grand plan appears to be a fundamental shift in how Google views authority on the web. Google wants to tie authority and expertise back to individuals and real people. Proof can be found in the approach with Google+ and usernames and changes such as Authorship Markup. They are looking for signals beyond links and social is becoming a more important component of the algorithm. Google wants to identify subject matter experts and deliver their expertise to its users.

What this means for law firms is that they are going to have to get serious about becoming online publishers, content producers, and subject matter experts in their respective fields.

The days of throwing up a 5 page firm website, performing some link building, and thinking you have a web strategy in place are long gone.

What the leading experts in the local space have stressed is that you should not confuse the updated look to mean there is a new algorithm.

Let’s take a closer look at the various changes.

No one does a better job of explaining the philosophy and practice of inbound marketing than Hubspot, pioneers in the field. Here is a short explanation from Hubspot on Inbound Marketing:

In traditional marketing (outbound marketing) companies focus on finding customers. They use techniques that are poorly targeted and that interrupt people. They use cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam and trade shows.