SEO

Why Content Marketing For Law Firms Doesn’t Have To Be Boring

Published

2 years ago

October 9, 2022

Why Content Marketing For Law Firms Doesn’t Have To Be Boring

Content marking is essential to any business’s strategy to acquire new customers and build authority for the brand.

The hard part is that creating exciting and engaging content for fields in a more serious line of work can be challenging.

But, figuring out the best way to resonate and potentially inspire potential clients to reach out doesn’t need to be an arduous process.

Instead, you can take some simple steps to better your content marketing strategy.

It’s time for content marketers to reinvent the way they look at creating content for a ‘boring’ niche.

Rethinking Content Marketing For A ‘Boring’ Niche

Content marketing presents numerous opportunities to think outside the box and engage with a target audience.

While many aspects of digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) can be highly technical, web content provides a space to get creative and speak to your audience on a deeper level.

Unfortunately, this is a missed opportunity for many marketers who aim to focus on the technical gains of content marketing.

In other words, sometimes they miss the point: that content is meant to reach and resonate with your client’s audience.

The ultimate goal is to help your client make more money by creating content that brings people back to their website and entices them to contact the law firm.

The stereotype is that marketing for a “boring” niche often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Marketers expect “boring,” so they produce “boring.” This doesn’t serve your business or your clients well.

Now is the time for marketers and SEO pros to shift their perspectives on content marketing for legal firms and open their eyes to how creative content can help their clients.

Legal Content Marketing For Relational (And Technical) Gains

If you go into content marketing only thinking about the technical benefits, you only see one piece of the puzzle.

High-quality, creative, authentic, and conversion-friendly content opens the door to links and rankings and can serve your clients in many other (arguably, more important) ways.

Effective content marketing can:

Position your client as an authority in their niche.
Increase brand awareness.
Generate leads.
Drive traffic and circulation.
Encourage partnerships with other brands.
Secure speaking engagements and networking opportunities.
Drive free publicity.
Improve their social media presence.
Identify a new market.

Being mindful of these possibilities frames content marketing in a new, relatable way.

Moreover, it opens up opportunities that marketers may have been initially blind to in their strategy.

Moving Beyond The Usual KPIs

Content marketing isn’t solely about the algorithm. Instead, it’s about forming new relationships (professional, technical, or otherwise) with your clients.

That could mean creating content that:

Speaks directly to your client’s audience, increasing brand loyalty.
Secures them a spot at a prominent speaking event.
Opens up a new market for them in a typically crowded niche.

Focusing on KPIs will only get you so far. Instead, think outside the usual framework of content marketing, and you will tap into the creativity that shapes content built for relational and technical gains.

3 Ways To Get Creative With Your Legal Content Marketing

No more boring blog posts. There are many more creative ways to drive brand awareness, generate links, and land more opportunities for your legal clients.

Below are three innovative strategies for creating authentic and conversion-happy content for law firms.

1. Appeal To Each Step Of The Customer Journey

Know your audience. Rather than casting a wide net when creating content, the best route is to create pieces that relate to each step of the customer journey.

It’s crucial to research the demographics of the existing client base and followers among their online platforms and listings.

Breaking down the demographics, looking at reviews, and finding the content that was performing highly can give insight into how you address clients at each step of the customer journey.

The customer journey consists of several stages: the Discovery, Nurture, Purchase, and Retention phases. And the approach you use in your content will differ for each phase.

Ideally, you’ll be creating content that resonates with your client’s audience every step of the way.

Discovery Phase

Otherwise known as the “information gathering” phase, potential customers in this phase notice what grabs their attention and are actively looking for more information.

This can be an opportunity to create engaging, thought-provoking, or emotional content.

This content should meet the user’s intent and encourage them to take notice.

For example, if your client practices family law, you may want to create content like “3 Ways To Tell That Your Partner Is Considering A Divorce” or “To Adopt Or Not To Adopt: 3 Families Share Their Stories.”

These examples are eye-catching and niche-related but don’t overwhelm the reader with information too much information in the title.

In other words, it lets them know you understand their struggles and can speak their language.

Then, this content can be circulated in ads, social media, or online forums to get it in front of the right people.

Nurture Phase

People in the Nurture phase have already interacted with your client’s brand in some way but may not be ready to make a purchase.

Perhaps it’s not the right time, the budget isn’t there, or they need more information.

This reveals more opportunities for engagement.

This is an excellent time to conduct market research to determine what your client’s audience struggles with most and what the deciding factors are in their buying process.

Often, you’ll have to contact these people via an email list or lead generation tool. You may choose to run a remarketing ad or an email campaign.

Create content that nurtures their feelings of relatability with the brand.

Addressing the fears around cost, trustworthiness, expertise, or other concerns you uncover in your research through the content you produce can have a lasting impact.

Purchase Phase

Your leads are ready to buy, so how do you get them there? It may take a bit of coaxing.

This is where marketers generally lay on the charm – and by charm, I mean a call to action. Think about the next step the potential customer should take.

For example, include internal links they can click on to navigate to your service or contact pages. It’s also crucial that your client is available to receive questions at this time since this can be the last step before they commit.

You should also provide more in-depth, brand-neutral information. Testimonials or case studies make people feel your client’s brand is the best fit for them.

You may want to circulate content that differentiates your client from their competitors. You can do this through strategic guest posting on:

Well-positioned blog posts on other sites.
Facebook groups.
Forums.
Other places where potential clients may be interacting with the brand.

Retention Phase

So, your legal client has closed a new client – now what?

In the legal field, it may seem like once a lawyer-and-client relationship ends, it’s all over.

However, there’s always a chance that this client may need help with legal issues in the future – or could refer a friend or relative their way.

These contacts should be available via an email list or CMS for follow-up contact. That way, they can send content that maintains brand awareness and loyalty to their clients.

One option is to send an email once the engagement has ended.

This can be to thank them for their business, ask for a review, and prompt them to follow your client on social media. Then, you can run a continuous email campaign of legal tips, events, promotions, and more.

2. Create Timely, Relatable Content

We’ve all seen the trending and “click bait” articles on social media.

As annoying as they may seem, there is a lesson to be learned that can be applied to content marketing.

Users like content that is engaging, inspires an emotional response, or is controversial.

They also like to stay up-to-date on what’s going on, and by creating timely, engaging content, you can accomplish this without creating clickbait. Here’s how:

Staying On Top Of The Trends

The best way to get content in front of the right eyes is by creating timely and relatable content.

Is there a current event that’s making its rounds on social media? Offer a lawyer’s perspective of the issue.

Celebrities going through a divorce? Outline the top 10 benefits of having a prenup.

By making timely content or responding to current trends, you can be confident about creating fast circulation and shareability.

Content with a human element will ensure that it will resonate with the audience and inspire them to engage.

The right content will get them to click, think, and share. Or give your client a call.

3. Sharing Applied vs. Passive Knowledge

The way users engage with content is constantly changing.

People are increasingly looking for content that entertains them, gets them thinking, or makes them feel warm and fuzzy.

The legal niche is especially guilty of creating passive content that informs its audience about a topic. While this can be good for SEO, it’s not particularly good for conversions.

Creating content based on applied knowledge is different. It usually:

Inspires.
Teaches.
Understands.
Helps.

For instance, a blog post titled “3 Things That Happen When You Get A DUI” serves to inform.

However, a better piece of content for inspiring users to convert may be “Got A DUI? Here’s What You Need To Know.”

This content may outline what the user should do for a DUI case, such as hiring an attorney or tips for overcoming the embarrassment of a DUI.

Pieces like this can help accomplish several goals at once. This can encourage potential clients to trust the law firm and see them as empathetic while informing them of the steps they need to take.

The Power Is In Their Hands

This kind of content is excellent for honing in on a particular audience rather than simply meeting the search queries of those looking for more information about DUIs.

There is also potential to incorporate interesting tools, charts, and infographics to increase engagement. Incorporating visually appealing graphics can help break up content and better engage the reader.

What’s important here is not to overwhelm readers with too much information at once. If you find a piece has too much info, feel free to break it into a series of posts.

When you offer practical knowledge, you give readers autonomy and put the freedom of choice in their hands.

In addition, they will trust you as the expert because you provide valuable information but won’t feel pressured by a hard sell.

Final Takeaways

Law firms have much to gain from content marketing, such as attracting new clients, getting more website traffic, and building themselves as an authority for legal advice in their communities.

By thinking about the customer journey and shifting to creating content that will resonate with their target audience, content marketers can turn around the way legal firms engage with clients.

Producing high-quality, well-researched, interesting content will help firms meet their goals and create valuable pieces to promote across multiple platforms.

When marketers shift to timely topics and content that people can relate to, they will see better results that will interest people and help their SEO presence.

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WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

Published

4 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.

Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic

The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.

Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.

Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:

“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “

The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”

Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:

“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”

That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.

A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:

“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”

Facing Reality Is Productive

Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:

Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay

WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.

Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.

Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.

The live webinar featured:

Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.

WordPress Market Share Stagnation

The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.

Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.

Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.

Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.

CMS YoY Growth

Webflow: 25.00%
Shopify: 15.61%
Wix: 10.71%
Squarespace: 9.04%
Duda: 8.89%
WordPress: 1.85%

Why Stagnation Is A Problem

An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.

It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:

“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”

Perception Of Innovation

One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.

It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:

“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”

Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.

“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”

Is Improved Marketing A Solution

One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.

Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:

“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”

This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.

They said:

“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”

Future Of WordPress

This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.

The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.

Watch the webinar:

Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?

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SEO

Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Published

24 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.

It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:

Improve your site’s crawl efficiency

Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).

AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.

AVIF Versus WebP

AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.

Is AVIF Supported?

AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.

I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.

Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google

According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

Read Google’s announcement:

Supporting AVIF in Google Search

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SEO

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2024

Max

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.

This is what Eli had to say:

“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.

This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.

What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?

Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.

Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.

Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)

“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”

Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion

Read the discussion on LinkedIn:

Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO

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