7 Blogging Mistakes Lawyers Must Avoid
If you ask digital marketing experts what they regard as the essential elements of a campaign that would work for a local law firm, the vast majority will state “having a blog”. Blogs have been around for some time and there are millions of them online, however, even the merest of research will tell you that many of the people who own or manage those blogs are making fundamental mistakes.
For lawyers who want their website to rank well and who wish to use a blog as a means of achieving that, it would undoubtedly be frustrating to have done all the necessary work to build and establish a blog, only to find that the results achieved in terms of rankings were negligible. For that reason, we thought it would help by highlighting the seven biggest mistakes lawyers make regarding blogs so that you avoid the same errors.
Writing For Yourself, Not Your Audience
One of the biggest mistakes lawyers make when writing blog posts is they do so to satisfy themselves rather than thinking about those who will be reading them. There is little point in writing something that only you will relate to, enjoy, and find an interest in, if no one who visits your blog will.
Not Identifying Your Target Audience
Worse than not writing for your audience’s benefit, is not having an audience at all. Before you start a blog you must identify your target audience in terms of locality, demographics, and, crucially, what their needs are. Thereafter, everything you publish on your blog should have all of these audience traits in mind.
Creating Overly Formal Content
Whilst writing essays and assessments brimming with legalese may have satisfied your law professor, it will do little to retain your blog audience’s attention, most of whom will not have studied law. As such, seek to simplify legal jargon and set it at a level that can be understood by anyone who reads it.
Not Having A Core Subject In Each Post
Each blog post you write should be based on a specific subject. This allows you to optimise the post for SEO, but more than that, it helps readers stay focussed on the content and thus understand it fully. The alternative is to write without any aim, and thus go off on several tangents which does not serve your readers.
Not Having A Clear Structure For Posts
Research shows that online users like consistency, and that is why each post you publish should have a structure. That structure relates to the way you set out the content using sub-headers, whether you include a summary every time, and if and where you place a call to action in each post you publish.
Not Optimising Posts For SEO
If you want your blog posts to genuinely help you get ranked higher on Google, then some basic SEO on each one is essential. Here, we are referring to keyword research and optimising for them within titles, meta-descriptions, tags, and content, for example.
Using Only Text And Not Other Media
Long gone are the days when blogs were purely text-based. Now you can include other media in your blog such as infographics, photos, audio, and video. The caveats are ensuring they are high quality, and relevant, and that their file sizes are minimised to ensure fast page load speeds.
