Law Firm Marketing Agency
Optimization is for machines and blogs are for people—but a website has to satisfy both people and search engines. So what’s the solution?
Start by obeying the cardinal of content: Never write content purely for SEO. Instead, your goal should be to create content that helps site visitors.
The trick here is that useful content is actually good for SEO! Useful, focused content encourages visitors to stay on your site longer. Plus, high-quality content is easier for search engines to find and index.
Follow these five fundamental principles and you’ll optimize for SEO and humans alike.
Write about topics that matter to your audience
Start your blog optimization process by identifying the right topics for content creation.
What subjects matter to your audience? What questions do people tend to ask, and what words do they use to describe their legal issue? Look back through your emails for inspiration and verbiage.
Once you have a topic, it’s time to corroborate with keyword research. Google offers tools to simplify keyword research as do vendors like SEMRush and Moz’s Keyword Explorer.
Create compelling and descriptive article titles
After writing an excellent article, you still need one final component: a compelling title.
A good title does not have to be clever or fancy—but an article is not truly dressed to go out in public without a title as its final accessory.
Use statistics sparingly and avoid vague click-baiting. Be as descriptive as possible without sounding robotic. Tell the reader what to expect. The best strategy is to title the article with the actual question or keyphrase your article answers.
A title like “89% of elderly Americans don’t have this important document on file” is neither accurate nor sympathetic to your users. Instead, try “What is the purpose of a medical directive and how do I set one up?”
Descriptive titles instill confidence in readers that their question will be answered, and they also help search engines understand the focus of the content.
Furthermore, article titles show up in the SERP. As a result, good titles can really help with click-through rates—especially if the title addresses the exact question being asked by a searcher.
Serve up relevant content, as appropriate
A smart way to get visitors to stay on your site longer and further engage with your content is to serve up relevant content.
Have you noticed the way that Amazon helpfully suggests products to shoppers? At the bottom of every listing, there are several additional links to related products. This personalization strategy results in a ton more sales, not to mention the extra data Amazon receives by tracking which links you click.
Include topical internal links in every article to encourage people to click around and explore content related to a single topic. Then, add a live section below each article titled “We thought you might also enjoy these articles” with active links. In order to have the latter, tagging is required, allowing your web developer to build a dynamic section that pulls the most recent relevant articles based on selected tags or categories.
Focus on delivering comprehensive information
Comprehensive blog posts are one of the absolute best strategies for pleasing both readers and search engines.
What is a comprehensive blog post?
- Long-form
- Extremely detailed
- Related external and internal links
Strive to be a one-stop shop for your visitors’ legal inquiries. The key to this strategy is thoroughness. Try to answer every single question and include every relevant link. Bring all the information you have about a topic together into one place, leaving no stone unturned. In addition to delivering value to site visitors, these comprehensive pages are also more likely to be linked to from other websites, aiding in your backlink strategy.
Prioritize the user experience
Finally, we know that Google favors websites that deliver a better user experience—and users obviously prefer good websites, too. So, what are the three main elements of a good user experience? You should prioritize fast load times, mobile responsiveness, and accessibility.
To be fully accessible, your blog must facilitate a good online experience for individuals using assistive technologies. If your posts have videos, be sure to include captions or make a transcript available. If your blog has photos, make sure that each photo includes an accurate alt text description of the photo (not a stuffed keyword tag).
Accessibility overlay tools are not a good solution.
Review and next steps
Blog posts must be written for humans and optimized for algorithms. The key to optimizing articles for search engines is creating valuable content.
Valuable content should include these five elements:
- Relevant topic and popular keywords
- Compelling and descriptive title
- Suggesting related content to increase value and keep visitors on the site longer
- Comprehensive, thorough information
- Good user experience (load time, mobile responsiveness, accessibility)
Great content and SEO can be a challenge—but it doesn’t have to be a mystery. Get a quote for content marketing support from Omnizant. Optimization is easier with help!