The legal industry hinges on trust between lawyers and their clients. With the high stakes and the potential for an unfavorable outcome, potential clients want to know they’re choosing the best legal representative in their area. And increasingly great legal content is how you make the case.
Addressing your audience’s specific needs and concerns can establish your firm as a trusted authority. Learning how to create great content for legal services starts with a commitment to generating helpful information online and leveraging it to generate law firm leads.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Who are you trying to reach online? First, you know they need the legal services you offer. But there’s more. They also have similar characteristics, goals, and backgrounds. These elements make them an ideal client.
Developing detailed client personas is crucial for understanding your audience’s needs. By analyzing factors such as demographics, legal concerns, and preferred communication channels, you can tailor your content to resonate with potential clients.
Analytics can provide valuable insights into client demographics and behaviors, enabling you to refine your content strategy effectively. You can create great legal content around this group’s needs, goals, and expectations.
2. Localize Your Content
As a local law firm, your audience isn’t around the country or the globe. They’re in your community.
They live, work, go to school, hit the gym, and walk their dogs near where you practice. So, it’s important to recognize your audience’s regionality and leverage it to create more locally relevant content.
By covering local cases, laws, events, and news of interest—you can strengthen trust by demonstrating that you’re part of their community. Perform local keyword research to learn more about the legal topics people search for in your area and build helpful content around it.
But what’s more, you can build an online presence that’s supremely visible in the community where you practice. Search engines like Google actively try to showcase local services businesses over those big national law firms and massive DIY legal websites.
So, by localizing your content, you’re taking advantage of Google’s preference for local companies. You’re ensuring your content is seen by those that matter most—locals.
Even if you dream of becoming one of those multi-state firms someday, gain traction locally first to grow your online presence faster.
3. Prioritize Educational & Informative Topics
You’ll build trust fast by establishing yourself as a trusted source for local legal information. You can shout until you’re blue in the face that you’re the best law firm in {your town}.
But those words don’t mean much. People want you to prove it.
And one of the best ways to do that is by focusing on “helpfulness” first. Producing high-quality content that addresses common legal questions can position your firm as an industry authority. It can increase your visibility in search, social media, and traditional media.
Consider creating blog posts, articles, and guides that offer clear explanations and practical advice. A content management platform can help you create and publish informative content through blog posts, social media site updates, and local check-ins published on your website, and more.
It can automate the publishing process, allowing you to create once and publish across platforms. Less work; more visibility online for your great legal content.
4. Utilize Multimedia Content
Written content like legal FAQs, blog posts, and guides are important. But people today expect multimedia content, too! And it’s easier to create with the right content management tools.
While other local law firms are sticking with the written word because it’s in their comfort zone, you can dazzle potential clients with videos, video testimonials, local imagery, and infographics.
For those who are visually inclined (which is most people), mediums like these are easier and faster to understand. They’re more engaging. They get attention.
They can also give you opportunities to showcase the people who work behind the scenes for your clients. This humanizes your firm, further building trust that yours is the right law firm for them.
5. Implement Local SEO Best Practices
Investing in local SEO strategies for lawyers will help more people in your community find your content in searches.
At the end of the day, great content is only as good as its visibility. It’s that whole “if a tree falls and no one hears, does it make a sound?” conundrum.
Attend to local SEO tasks like these to dominate local search:
- Making your site fast and user-friendly
- Ensuring contact information is accurate
- Filling out information on local directories and legal websites
- Completing key business profiles like Google Business and Yelp and publishing regular check-ins.
- Conducting local keyword research and building content around it
- Maintaining a social media presence.
- Generating more online reviews and managing your reputation
- Optimizing for voice search
- Adding tags and descriptions to help search engines understand the local relevance of each page
We’re only scratching the surface here. Once again, SEO marketing tools can streamline and manage these tasks to get found in local searches.
6. Engage with Clients Through Interactive Content
Interactive content opens up a two (or more)-way conversation with leads, which can result in analytics data you can use to improve your overall marketing strategies and create great legal content.
Consider developing webinars on pertinent legal topics, hosting live Q&A sessions to address client inquiries, or implementing live chat features on your website for real-time interaction.
A content management platform can help you manage and promote these events to generate buzz, rev up attendance, and get the most out of this content.
7. Build Content with Others
Take your interactive content to the next level by inviting other local authorities to join you for these live events. This allows you to pool resources, generate even more buzz, and speak to each other’s audiences for mutual growth.
Plus, working with non-competitors in your community strengthens your bonds within your town. It demonstrates your commitment to the people in your city.
8. Share the Content of Others
Build a network of local, non-competing professionals who share each other’s content on social media. This will help each of you expand your reach while supporting clients beyond the services you offer.
You can also encourage clients to post testimonials or experiences on their own social media. Then (with permission), share these on your website, social media, and business profiles.
This third-party validation is powerful.
9. Get More Reviews
Yes, reviews are content! They’re critical for building trust. And you need more of them.
Use review automation tools to request reviews on essential review sites and remind people at least once because we can all use reminders.
Then, leverage reputation management software to track the number of reviews and the sentiment. This will allow you to respond quickly and professionally to unfavorable reviews.
Sometimes, this will prompt someone to change their review. But at the very least, it shows you’re paying attention. Other leads and clients will see that and know you care.
Also, respond to some or all good reviews, demonstrating how much you appreciate clients taking the time to share their experiences with others.
Reviewers can add images to their reviews, which makes your review profile feel more engaging and complete. Invite clients to take pictures (where appropriate) and post them with their reviews.
10. Create Video Testimonials
Of course, another form of visual review is the video testimonial. These are the ones that are professionally produced in a studio or designated room in your office.
Place this powerful legal content in key decision-making locations to reassure legal leads that you’re the right firm for them.
11. Maintain Consistency Across Platforms
One of the great things about content is that you can share it across platforms. So, create it once. Post it in multiple locations to amplify online visibility.
This is how to create great content for legal services and grow awareness online. As people see your content in multiple places, they begin to remember you. Brand recall is the first very important step in generating a legal lead.
Multi-platform content management tools will make sharing the same content across platforms even faster and easier.
12. Monitor Content Performance and Adapt
Use content analytics tools to track content performance. This will help you understand what you need to create more of. These tools can help you make the connection between great legal content and leads generated with cross-platform analytics for websites, social media, review sites, text marketing, email, and call tracking that can reveal the whole customer journey.
Also, look for AI analytics tools to deliver deep insights on things you might miss to ensure you generate the most leads from your content.
This Is How to Create Great Content for Legal Services
Get to know your audience, focus on being helpful, think multimedia, automate cross-platform publishing, treat reviews as content, analyze and optimize.
Our all-in-one online marketing platform makes doing all this possible with easy-to-manage tools that bring all your marketing into one place. To see how a marketing automation and analytics software like this can do, be sure to schedule your free demo.