A legal blog is one of the best tools you have for attracting and informing clients. It helps search engine results and ensures that visitors to your site stick around once they arrive.
But blogging isn’t as easy as you might think.
There are plenty of business owners who have invested hours or more into their blogs, only to find what they’ve posted is doing little to help them.
What is the reason for this?
Blogs should be thoughtful, long-form content. Focusing your energy on understanding your ideal client and the target audience of your blog, keeping it organized, and posting quality content regularly are all essential parts of managing a successful blog.
And if those things weren’t enough, you also need to think about keyword research, including internal and external links, and ensuring each post drives readers to take action.
It takes a decent amount of effort and it’s why so many blogs don’t work.
The most common mistakes made with blogs include:
1. Targeting Everyone with Your Legal Blog Posts
It might seem like a good idea to throw out a wide net and hope that out of all the things you catch, a few are close to your idea of an ideal client.
The trouble with this strategy is that you are less likely to catch your ideal client when you generalize. Look at it this way: you wouldn’t create a marketing message targeting people looking for personal injury AND criminal justice AND estate planning and guidance if your firm focuses on divorce.
Take the time to develop client profiles and target their interests when creating blogs. Doing so means you’ll have a clear understanding of who’s looking for the information you’re able to provide based on your experience and expertise. And you’ll know your blog posts target your ideal client.
2. Creating a Content Plan
Another common error made in the world of blogging is failing to conduct content planning and development. As the saying goes “failing to plan is just planning to fail.”
Developing a backup cache of post ideas and articles saves you time and frustration. Even writing posts in advance helps you through busier periods or times when you aren’t motivated to be creative.
At the very least, you should have a selection of timeless or “evergreen” content ready to go at a moment’s notice. This also allows you to schedule posts in advance. And it frees up time to focus on more immediate issues that arise that you’d like to address on your blog. If something happens in your industry that you want to create a post about, you’ll be able to do so knowing your backlog of evergreen content is set to go when it’s needed.
3. Ignoring Search Engines
As much as it might help your blog to post insightful content for the sake of informing readers and sharing the information and experience you’ve accumulated over the years, it’s not enough to get you to the finish line when it comes to having a successful blog.
For a blog to work as well as possible, you need to optimize your content to appeal to search engines. Google must be able to find your legal blog and like it enough to share it with people searching for content related to yours.
This requires content research, promotion of your blog, and plenty of patience. Your blog is one of your best promotional tools, but achieving the greatest level of success with it is a marathon, not a sprint.
If the idea of managing a successful blog sounds like a full-time job and something you don’t have the time to do, we can help. Contact Legal Web Design at 888-480-3585 or sign up for a free consultation here.
