Creating great content that is relevant and engaging to your audience, and helps you meet your business objectives, requires preparation and planning.
The following steps will ensure your content writing is thought-out and set up for success.
Optimize your website
Before you publish content on your website, make sure it’s ready to present. That means making sure your website and every piece of content you publish is Search Engine Optimized. That includes:
- No broken or outdated links
- No duplicate title tags or meta descriptions
- Been optimized for mobile and speed
Do your keyword research
To ensure your content is showing up in search engine results pages, it must include the keywords people are searching for and are interested in. How do you know what keywords to use? By conducting keyword research.
You already have a good understanding of who your clients are and what matters to them. By combining that knowledge with good keyword research, your content becomes more relevant and search engine optimized. Here’s a quick three-step process to get you started:
- Think about common conversations you have with clients and prospects. What are the types of questions they ask you? Make a list of common themes based on those discussions. Ideally, you’ll have 4-6 themes, which will become your content categories.
- Brainstorm some specific Google search queries you imagine your clients and prospects might search for, for each theme or category. Aim for five or so keywords for each theme.
- Put these keywords into Google and make note of the results. Pay particular attention to the “additional searches related to” list on the bottom of the page to build out your keyword lists even further.
Now you can use those keyword lists, alongside your understanding of your audience, to generate specific content ideas.
If you want to take things a step further, you can use a search engine optimization (SEO) tool for additional keyword research. These tools will give you more comprehensive lists of keywords and phrases. Advanced SEO tools can help you understand how often people are searching for them, where they’re searching for them, and more.
Analyze your competition
Alongside your keyword research, it’s a good idea to analyze what content other law firms in your location and practice area are creating and how they’re performing. Follow these steps for a basic competitive analysis:
- When entering your keywords into Google Search, scan the results and make note of any competing firms that appear on page 1.
- Click through any relevant results, and make note of the following:
- How long the content is
- What headings are used
- Any media (images, graphics, video) used
You can use this information as a baseline when creating your content. For example, if the competition is achieving a top rank for a desired keyword with a 500-word blog post with one subheading and no images, you should be able to do better than them with an 800-word article with two subheadings and a graphic.
Conduct a content audit
If you’re just starting to build your firm’s website, you may not have much content to review. But if you’ve built content previously, now is the time to review it.
The purpose of a content audit is to help you determine if your existing content is meeting your needs and those of your audience. If it is, great. If it’s NOT, you’ll need to decide whether you should update that content or delete it.
You can manually scan all the pages on your website or use an SEO Crawler to help you streamline the process. But the outcome of your audit should be a list of all pages and content. How much detail you put into your audit is up to you, but it should be enough to help you decide whether to keep or delete each page of your site. At the very least, include the following:
- Content type (usually page or post)
- URL
- Page title
You might want to go into further detail and list the keywords each piece of content is targeting, what headings are used, the meta description, when it was published, etc. Ultimately you want enough information to help you make the following decisions:
- Is the content relevant to your audience, current, and search-optimized? Keep it.
- Is it relevant, but outdated and/or not optimized? Update it.
- Is it not relevant? Delete it.
Finally, compare your content audit to the keyword research you’ve already done and identify any gaps. If there are high-priority topics and keywords that you don’t have content for, prioritize creating that content next.
Develop a formal content strategy
Creating your law firm’s content strategy might seem like the most daunting task on this list. There’s a lot that goes into it, from the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to track to the specific topics you’ll create content around. But it doesn’t need to be overwhelming. If you’ve already tackled the other steps on this list, you’re well on your way. Here are the six things that form the backbone of your content strategy:
1. Your goals
Your content goals should align with your website goals, as discussed in a previous blog. You can have more than one content goal, but be sure to prioritize them. For example, your primary goal might be to drive more traffic to your law firm’s website, and your secondary goal might be to convert web traffic to leads.
2. Your KPIs
If you want to increase your firm’s website traffic, you’ll want to measure how many unique visitors come to your website. Also, you’ll want to measure how many leads you capture via the website.
3. Your audience
You should know the challenges your target audience is facing, and why they come to you for help. As part of your strategy, include demographic specifics (age, income, location) as well. You can build specific buyer personas (Avatars) if you like. But be sure to focus on who your legal clients are, the pain points they’re experiencing, and how you can help them.
4. Your preferred content types
With your audience in mind, think about what types of content they’ll most likely want to engage with. Do they like to read about other people who have experienced similar legal issues as them? How much patience do they have to read long-form content with more than 1200 words? Would they prefer video or visually-rich content?
5. Your publishing channels
We’re focusing on your website in this guide, but you can publish and promote your law firm website content on social media, YouTube, and other blogs. Consider which channels your audience uses most and publish your content accordingly.
6. Your reporting framework
You’ve chosen what KPIs to measure, but you also need to report on them. Determine the tools you need (such as Google Analytics) to capture that data. Then, determine how often you want to report, and leave room in your publishing schedule to revise and update content that is not performing.
Develop a content plan
With your overall strategy in place, you need a plan to carry it out.
- Know who’s doing what: Depending on your firm size, you might be planning and executing your content plan yourself. Or you may be able to assign tasks, such as content creation or reporting, to different team members. You can also identify any tools and external resources (more on those shortly) you need. Either way, be clear on what each contributor is responsible for.
- A content framework: Take your keyword research and start planning specific content ideas under each category. You might have three or four general topic categories. Under each content category, you should have several specific content ideas. You can further organize these by their stage in the buying journey.
- A publishing schedule: Also called a content calendar or editorial calendar, your schedule tells you what content to publish and when. Understanding your audience also helps inform how much content they’ll be willing to consume. This will help inform you on how much content you should create. Also, consider specific dates or times of the year for which you should publish specific content (tax time) or ramp content creation up (back to school) or down (Christmas holidays). And remember to prioritize filling any content gaps identified during your content audit.
Develop a content creation process or workflow
There’s one more thing to consider before you get into content creation: Creating a repeatable, sustainable process that you can use each time you create a new piece of content.
Your process should include the following:
- A clear content brief: Often a process in itself, the brief should include the keywords you’re targeting with this specific piece of content and what other content is competing for the same keywords. Perhaps most importantly, you should have an outline of the content. You can include additional detail, like a search engine optimized URL, page title, and meta description.
- Brief review and approval: Determine who needs to review the brief, including any subject matter experts who would know the topic best. Also, determine who will give the creator the final go-ahead.
- Content creation: Assign the work to a writer or content creator. Be sure to give a concrete deadline.
- Content editing: Assign an editor (or editors) who can review the work for technical accuracy as well as grammar, spelling, and SEO.
- Image/graphic sourcing: Determine who is going to find or create any images or media that accompanies your content.
- Content approval: Final sign-off of the content including images.
- Uploading and publishing: Add the content to your website content management system and schedule the go-live date.
- Promotion: Get the word out about your new content via email, social media, and other channels.
You can iterate and improve this process over time to continue making your content creation process as efficient as possible.
Conclusion
Writing content is one of the basic pillars of modern marketing. Without great content your audience will struggle to find your, trust you, or hire you. I provide services that will create a stunning website with great user experience as well as provide SEO & copywriting services that can meet your goals and build the foundation for your marketing success. Click Here to see our portfolio and schedule your discovery call.