Producing legal thought leadership content probably isn’t the first point on a lawyer’s job description. However, when it comes to law firm SEO, thought leadership isn’t a nice to have—it’s imperative.
Following Google’s March 2024 core update, there’s now more emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EEAT) principles. Google is clamping down on spammy, low-quality, often AI-generated content which was created for search engines rather than people.
To produce legal content which meets Google’s standards, you’ll need to harness the experience and authority of your lawyers. With that in mind, we’ve created this guide to content marketing for law firms, helping you engage your lawyers to produce high-quality content valued by both your audience and search engines.
Step 1: Choose your topic and conduct research.
Most law firms provide a wealth of different services.
This can make it difficult to produce enough high-quality content to outperform your competitors across every service area.
That’s why we highly recommend your law firm content marketing focuses on two to three key service areas.
These should be services which generate the majority of your clients and revenue, ensuring you’ll receive optimal returns for the time, effort, and resources you spend producing content.
Once you’ve settled on your potential target service areas, you can begin conducting keyword research. This is the foundation of any robust law firm SEO content strategy.
Tools like Ubersuggest, Semrush, and Ahrefs help you identify relevant keywords used by your target audience in search engines.
Let’s say, for example, your main topic is Wills, Trust and Probate.
Identifying a handful of keywords around such a broad subject won’t help you drive conversions because you’re directly addressing each user’s specific needs.
Instead, you need to identify and group keywords based on the various subtopics that fall under your main service area.
In this case, contesting a will would be an example of a subtopic you might want to target.
Relevant keywords would then be grouped into this subtopic, such as:
- challenging a will
- contesting a will uk
- will disputes
- contest will after probate
- contest a will no win no fee
- will dispute solicitor
- will contest solicitors
- contest a will lawyer
- contesting a will london
In addition to the keywords themselves, you’ll want to take note of the search volume for each one and add these up to get an overall idea of a subtopic’s search popularity.
Keywords with relatively low search volume can still be targeted effectively but there’s no point making a particular subtopic part of your law firm’s content marketing if there’s virtually no interest in it.
Analyse the keywords used—if they have low search volume but high intent then they’re worth exploring as they’ll likely lead to conversions (prospective clients taking desired actions on your website).
If you’re happy with the volume of searches and the intent, move on to the competition difficulty of each keyword. Your keyword research tool should tell you this. The difficulty of a keyword is based on the number of other websites competing to rank for it.
Work out the average search difficulty and total search volume for the entire topic cluster.
In an ideal world, you’ll target topics with high search volume and low competition.
Sounds simple, but there are a few additional factors you need to be aware of.
You shouldn’t be quick to write off targeting a particular topic simply because the competition is high. After all, there’s obviously a reason so many other law firms are targeting that keyword.
Yes, it will be more of a challenge to rank highly, but attempting to do so can prove worthwhile, providing you have the budget and the resources to produce more high-quality content than your competitors.
If you don’t have a solid budget, then you’re better off finding niche services that have higher ROI.
With that in mind, what exactly is it that makes good legal marketing content?
Step 2: Communicate the benefits of content marketing for law firms and provide structure.
Firstly, you need to make everyone aware of the benefits of content marketing.
Producing content is a collaborative effort involving the whole firm, so you’re going to struggle to get the ball rolling if people aren’t on the same page.
According to the US & UK Legal Marketing Leadership Survey 2024, 100% of General Counsels consider thought leadership a responsibility of current and potential suppliers.
It's clear that thought leadership content is needed but that isn’t always enough for lawyers to put the proverbial pen to paper.
According to the survey, there are three key reasons stopping lawyers from producing thought leadership:
- a lack of collaborative culture
- finding the technology too challenging
- a lack of understanding of what’s needed
Clearly, this highlights the lack of a unified approach to content production between legal marketing leaders, Managing Partners and lawyers.
Legal marketing leaders must collaborate with Managing Partners to instil a top-down content culture.
It’s your lawyers who possess the experience and expertise within your service areas, so the unique value you’re offering prospective clients must come from them.
So, how exactly do you do that?
The answer is communicating the benefits and instilling structure and shared goals.
Firstly, legal marketing leaders, backed by Managing Partners, must communicate how the benefits of thought leadership are felt firm-wide.
Get them onside by communicating how it benefits the lawyer and the firm:
- Thought leadership builds personal credibility and authority in your field.
- It enhances your visibility within the legal community and potential clients.
- It showcases your expertise, differentiating you from competitors.
- Sharing insights attracts media and speaking opportunities.
- It strengthens your professional network and fosters industry connections.
- Publishing content can lead to more referrals and client inquiries.
- Thought leadership improves the SEO ranking of the firm's website.
- It positions you as a go-to expert for complex legal issues.
- Regular content can keep you top-of-mind for current and past clients.
- It demonstrates your proactive approach to staying informed and relevant.
With your lawyers onboard, you can focus on instilling structure to better manage the production process.
At Contra, we use this law firm content strategy template to brainstorm thought leadership ideas with lawyers.
The template may need to be modified to meet the unique needs of your firm, but always features the same following foundations. For each service, we break it down into four key areas:
1. Audience challenges
- Common questions/search queries (based on your keyword research)
- Rights & legislation
- Options
- Process
- Similar cases
- Outcomes
Format:
- Guides
- Templates
- Checklists
- Tips
- Lists
2. Personal experiences
- Emotional stories
- My favourite cases
- Lessons
- Challenges
- Achievements
- Community involvement
- Event recaps
Format:
- Guides
- Lists
- Reasons
- Opinion
- Tips
3. Industry updates
- Legal news
- Legislation updates
- Legal trends
Format:
- Summaries
- Opinions
- Reasons
- Challenges
- Trend reports
- Tips
4. Legal breakdown
- Historical cases
- Key legislation
Format:
- Summaries
- Learnings
- Tips
- Reasons
Step 3: Develop a content production plan.
Each piece of content will inevitably vary depending on the type and subject you’re covering.
However, much like your content strategy template, there are several core elements of a production plan which will feature in every piece of content.
With our legal clients, we use this content production plan, which includes the following features:
- H1 title
- Focus keyword
- Secondary keywords
- Total search volume
- Subtopic
- H2 subtitles
- Notes
- Key interviewee/contributor
- Key statistics
- CTA
- Internal links
- Meta title
- Meta description
- Progress made
- In production
- In review
- Signed off
- Scheduled
- Published
By including each of these features, every piece of content your team produces will have the foundations in place to provide a positive user experience and be optimised for search engines.
Mapping out your topic clusters within the plan is a key part of that.
Topic clusters are created by planning which other relevant pages your article will link to, helping to build search engine authority on that particular subject.
Once you’ve drafted your article and are confident it includes everything that makes a high-quality piece of content, you can focus on the approval process.
The second tab of our content production plan provides a checklist of elements you should tick off when it comes to building and publishing the article.
These include:
- Tags
- Links to relevant service page
- Links to other relevant articles
- Research and outbound links
- Metadata
- Custom slug
- Hero image and alt text
- Body copy images and alt text
- Linked CTA at the end of the article
Again, running through this checklist makes it easy to ensure your content always incorporates all the SEO and UX features it needs before being published.
Because, while it might be easy for a legal marketer to effortlessly produce, it might not always be straightforward for your lawyers.
Having a plan and checklist streamlines the process for team members who might not be overly familiar with it, saving both time and effort while maintaining the quality of your law firm’s content marketing.
Step 4: Start content production, considering SEO and UX.
As a legal marketer, you’re probably familiar with the specifics that make a strong piece of content.
Several of these are mentioned in your content production plan, but for the sake of clarity for your lawyers, here’s how each aspect should be applied within a thought leadership piece to optimise for SEO and UX:
- H1s, H2s, and H3s
- Utilised in a sequential order of importance, featuring target keywords used in your audience’s common search queries.
- Meta title and description
- Optimised with your target keyword while being careful to remain within the character limit to ensure all text remains visible on SERPs.
- Image alt text
- All images should be high-quality with accompanying alt text describing what’s being displayed to enhance user experience and usability.
- Outbound links
- Only link to other credible sources, building reliability and trust amongst users and search engines. Don’t link direct competitor sites.
- Internal content
- Internal links are vital to the structure of your law firm web design. Include links to other relevant pieces of content, including your pillar page related blogs to build topic authority and establish a topic cluster structure.
- Author schema
- Author schema helps to show search engines who produced a piece of content, proving that it’s authentic and sending trust signals to search engines.
- Lawyer bios
- Referring back to EEAT, linking to the lawyer’s author bio page is an important trust signal for search engines. Include a short bio outlining their experience and expertise, further emphasising their subject knowledge.
- Jump-to menu
- A lot goes into explaining in-depth legal processes. Be sure to provide a jump-to menu, making it easy for the user to navigate to the specific information they’re looking for.
Of course, it’s one thing knowing what needs to be included in a blog, and another putting it all into action.
If your lawyers are struggling to know where to start when creating a piece of thought leadership content, Contra provides this example template of what the rough structure of legal article might look like.
Simply apply a similar structure to the topics you’re focusing on and include all the points discussed above to produce your own high-quality legal marketing content.
Step 5: Set up keyword tracking.
If you’re putting all this time, effort, and resources into producing legal thought leadership content, you’ll need a way of measuring its success.
This starts by implementing keyword tracking.
There are a variety of tools available to you, although our preference would be Semrush because of the ability to group your keywords based on their topic (service area, subservice area etc.).
It’s important to take a holistic approach to keyword tracking, understanding that all related pieces of content are interconnected.
Therefore, every relevant blog or article contributes to your ranking for the particular service or subservice you’re focusing on, which is what makes grouping keywords so important.
When analysing changes in your search rankings, you should also note that you’re not going to shoot to the top spot overnight.
In general, it takes three to six months for SEO to show results, but can be significantly longer depending on multiple factors, such as your specific strategy, your competition, and your website’s history.
SEO is a long-term investment so expect to see gradual improvements but treat each milestone as a success.
And make sure your senior stakeholders and lawyers are aware of that too when showcasing your success.
This is vital in maintaining investment in the project and ensuring your lawyers see the value and remain motivated to keep producing content.
Step 6: Showcase success.
Speaking of showcasing success, that’s the next step of your law firm content marketing strategy.
In addition to your keyword tracking, we highly recommend you integrate Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and set up key events.
These can be any form of user action which plays a role in your firm generating its clients, whether it be form submissions, live chat interactions, phone calls, or otherwise.
Ultimately, the purpose of generating legal thought leadership content is to drive conversions, so it’s essential you monitor how many you generate—particularly because all pieces of content you produce should encourage users to convert through the placement of your CTAs.
With GA4 successfully implemented and key conversion events set up, it can then be integrated with your keyword tracker and Looker Studio, presenting the opportunity to create highly visual, engaging dashboards.
These are great for showcasing metrics to lawyers and Managing Partners who might not be as marketing-minded as you are, further helping them understand the value of content marketing and see the difference made by their efforts.
Dashboards can display a wealth of different metrics, so you can prioritise what is most important to the success of your firm.
These might include:
- YoY Summary and Previous Period Summary: Reporting on both 'all users' and 'organic users.'
- Active Users
- New Users
- Total Conversions
- Conversion Event Breakdown
- User Conversion Rate
- Percentage of Engaged Users
- Average Engagement Time
- Service Rankings (e.g., Personal Injury)
- Subservice Rankings (e.g., Accidents at Work)
- Rankings Distribution
- Benchmark Rankings vs. Current Rankings
- Sources and Engagement
- Best and Worst
- Rankers
- Climbers
- Performing Pages (traffic, conversions, engagement time)
If you want to take your engagement with lawyers a step further to motivate them even more, you can also create custom dashboards for each individual.
Here, every lawyer can see the articles they’ve produced alongside key performance metrics in a simple, visual format.
For example:
- My articles
- New Users, Engagement, Conversions
Whether your lawyers are already on board and are open to adding a little bit of competition, or if they need an extra boost, gamifying content production can also be an effective motivator.
Consider implementing a leaderboard displaying metrics such as:
- Top traffic this month
- Generated most intakes this month
As well as earning bragging rights, lawyers could be incentivised to produce the most, high-quality content by receiving a voucher paid for by the marketing budget (everyone loves an Amazon voucher).
The point is you want to keep the process as light-hearted and enjoyable as possible, rather than making it an additional burden on top of your lawyers’ caseloads.
Just ensure you don’t lose the sophisticated, authoritative tone that should come with any piece of legal marketing content.
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