Law Firm Marketing Agency
Every SEO or content strategist will tell you the same thing: content should be the driving force behind every organic marketing campaign. You may have even heard the phrase “content is king” when talking to members of our marketing team. But which matters more for search engines, a high volume of content or well-written, focused content on your website?
The answer isn’t as simple as you may think. The quantity of content and the quality of content are both important factors when it comes to your rankings. A well-written page of content that focuses on your users and their legal concerns can pave the way for quality leads that will hopefully convert to clients. However, if you are not pushing out content regularly and your website appears stale, or stagnant, to search engines, you are unlikely to rank well against your competitors.
Favoring one approach over the other, or even striking a balance between both factors, depends entirely on your resources and your own marketing goals for your law firm’s website. In order to find which content strategy works best for you, you must first understand the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Quantity Over Quality
The volume of content and the frequency by which it is published can have a significant impact on your rankings and your website’s traffic.
Consistently uploading fresh page and blog content to your website, or even updating your website, shows search engines that your website is active. If you aren’t uploading new content or updating old content, your website will appear stale and may have old information that may not be relevant to your site visitors.
While regular updates and additions are important to the search engines, it’s important that you avoid strategies that can land you in hot water even though they may result in more content. Mass-producing short, irrelevant content, for example, will not lead to high rankings. and this strategy can actually be detrimental to your rankings, if not properly done. While shorter content is easier to push out, there are still some guidelines you must follow to rank well. For instance, if you are producing content that’s short and irrelevant to your audience, your content could be considered low-quality by search engines, which would harm your rankings. Producing shorter content that is both long enough (at least 300 words) and relevant to your strategy can keep your website from being penalized by Google and other search engines.
While it may be tempting to fill your content with keywords to beef up the word count and reinforce the relevance of certain search queries, this could be considered keyword stuffing. Because keyword stuffing ultimately creates a poor user experience for your site’s visitors, it leads to a higher bounce rate and fewer quality leads for your law firm. Most search engines condemn this strategy and your content could be penalized and removed from search engine results pages.
Quality Over Quantity
Ever hear of the phrase, “less is more”? Well, that’s the same idea with favoring quality over quantity in your strategy. Quality content isn’t just well-written; quality content should be written to be helpful for your audience, which can also help to establish you as a thought leader in your field.
Many of the visitors to your practice’s website are likely potential clients who are looking to better understand the legal services that are available to them and popular search engines, like Google, know this. If you are producing content just for the sake of keywords, that content can easily become redundant and irrelevant to what your potential clients are searching for and may deter them from connecting with your practice.
Search engines favor blogs and pages with topics that are directed to your audience, and they also favor long-form content that extensively covers topics eliminating the need for users to visit multiple sites to find the answers to all of their questions. By having comprehensive, high-quality content, you increase the likelihood of high rankings, which will help bring in good leads.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to produce quality content on a regular basis. Well-written, focused content takes longer to draft and, in any case, can only be done by knowledgeable legal professionals who are focused on the billable work, not the work that leads to the billable hours.
Find the Balance
Ultimately, finding the right balance between quality and quantity is the best strategy for your law firm’s website. Quality and quantity go hand-in-hand, and if you lean too much into one approach, your website can face a few obstacles when generating traffic and good leads. How you find this balance is largely dependent on your law firm’s resources and goals.
If your primary goal is to increase traffic to your site and generate more leads, ranking well is undoubtedly a top priority. In that case, pushing out content that is relevant to your audience regularly should be your main focus. Drafting one blog a week and two pages of fresh content a month can help improve your rankings, however, if you are practicing in a more competitive area, this volume may need to increase significantly. However, if your primary goal is to be a true thought leader in your industry, you may consider publishing fewer, albeit incredibly thorough or thought-provoking, pieces each year.
No matter which end you fall on the spectrum, it’s important to remember that anything published to your site should deliver value to your visitors. If you’re unsure of the best approach for your practice, contact our team for an assessment. We will take time to understand your growth objectives, perform a competitive analysis and deliver a tailored plan to help you create a web presence you’re proud to share with clients, prospects and colleagues.