Episode 41 [Attorney SEO] – WEBINAR How To Best Create The Content For Your Law Firm Website?

Episode 41 [Attorney SEO] – WEBINAR How To Best Create The Content For Your Law Firm Website?

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs from Speakeasy Authority Marketing and I am going to talk to you about content, how do you get content for your site and how much is enough and where should the content come from and what’s the leverage way to do it that doesn’t eat up all your time, that’s what I’m going to cover in this recording.

So, content is very important. The only thing Google has to show to people searching is content. Content can be a video or an article on a website or a picture or an audio file or a slideshow but it’s really not anything more than that and that’s the whole heart of the web. Why do you search for the stuff on the web; because you’re looking for answers to questions you have, you’re looking for entertainment and you’re looking for content. That’s the medium for which everyone experiences the web. So, Google’s job is to match people searching to the absolute best quality websites depending on what they search for.

If someone’s searching for a Los Angeles divorce attorney, Google’s got to sift through all the sites that fall under this category and pick which site is the best. Which one should I show to my searchers and which one should I not? Which one should I show first, second, third, fourth, 10th, 500th, 10,000th or not at all? So, content is a big thing. By being an attorney within a practice area, not everyone’s the same. Let’s take divorce, for example, a 24-year old guy that was married for two years, no kids and no assets is going to be a very different customer from someone that’s 60 and that has owned a business for 15 years. One grown child and one child’s 16 years old, they’ve been married for a very long time, lots of assets, completely different people. They’re going to ask completely different questions. They’re going to searching Google for completely different things.

And if you don’t have content on your website that addresses either of those situations, then your site may not show up in the search results. Why? Because Google sees that your site doesn’t have relevant content. It may have generic boilerplate stuff on divorce, you know, divorce is a stressful or you should hire an attorney, that’s all great but it doesn’t have content with divorce with lots of assets vs. divorce with no assets, long term marriage and perpetual alimony vs. short-term marriage and all that stuff.

So, you want to have a lot of content on your site and you want to have very diverse content on your site not just boilerplate articles of your practice areas. You ideally want to have eventually hundreds of different articles covering every minute permutation of the area of law you practice. It doesn’t matter if it’s DUI, auto accidents, divorce, estate planning or bankruptcy. Whatever it is, people have got questions, people search tens of thousands of different things in Google and they don’t just search on Kentucky bankruptcy lawyer or a New York DWI lawyer. They search on all kinds of the strange things, self-employed? Can I keep my house in bankruptcy? They may search get pulled over, blew 0.13, will I go to jail? They may search on that.

You never know what they’re going to search on and I’ve seen directly by running a site that got over 400,000 Google searches in one year that people had typed in over 330,000 different things to make up those 400,000 searches. So, people can type in a lot of different things into Google and they do. They type in all kinds of crazy stuff again not just a few keywords.

All right, so how do you generate this content? Well, you can write it yourself which what attorney has time for that nowadays? You’re busy with cases and you’re busy with marketing and all that, it’s not even fun to write for most people, some it is and you got to think, “All right. What have I written about, what else can I write about? Okay, what can I say about this? How much is there to say?” So, that’s one route but it’s kind of a pain. You can have someone do it for you and write blogs for you. But the problem is unless they are a really good writer, you’re not going to like what they write, you’re going to feel like its unprofessional or it’s uninformed or at best. It’ll be some regurgitated articles that other attorneys have changed enough so that they’re unique but not enough so that they really capture your voice and again they may not follow the law and they may not be compliant.

So, really the best way is for you to get the content done yourself. Well, I’ve found another way to get this done, that’s a much more effortless way. The best way is to go real old school dictation but with a twist. What we do is we get on the phone with our attorneys once a month and we do a one hour Q&A recorded phone interview. This is great because the attorneys can relax and speak freely and answer questions, questions like “What are misconceptions people have about the estate planning process?”, or, “What mistakes do people make once they’ve been arrested for a crime that make their situation worse?” or “My wife won’t let me see the kids, will the court award me visitation or will there be a fight till the death because I’m the man?”, and that kind of stuff.

So, we cover that in a one hour interview and the comment at the end of the interview I hear most often is, “Wow, that’s a lot easier than I thought it would be”. The great thing is the average person speaks about a 150 words a minute, so an hour or long interview is about 7 or 8,000 words, which breaks down into about 15 to 20 articles. All, you’re going to do is do this once a month and it’s pretty painless. So it’s an hour to do the call and then maybe an hour editing it. Take out the ums and uhs and sentence fragments and things like that and then you’re ready to go. You break up the content of the articles and then put it up on your site. You’ll get a lot of content this way and you do this over a period of months. Now you’re going to build up dozens and then hundreds of articles and you can cover all the questions that people ask.

In addition, the tone of an interview is a lot more interesting than just whetting out dry law facts which just comes across literally as conversational because it is a lot more interesting to read. We’ve heard from a lot of clients that their clients, the attorney’s clients, really enjoy the content, they find it accessible, it’s not boring, it’s not dry, it’s not intimidating, it’s just a real great way to get that information at a view and onto your website. It’s going to be unique, it’s going to be legal because you spoke it and you’re the one that knows about this stuff, it’s your practice area. I really know of no better way to get this stuff onto your website. One month’s not going to do it, you got to do it over a period of really a year in order to get a real substantial amount of content but that means like 200 plus articles.

What will happen as you do this is you’ll start to get a lot more Google searches because now you’ll have the answers to hundreds of thousands of different questions people could have and Google will say, “Oh, look at this site. It’s got answers to any search question that people have in this area. I’m going to show that site for questions related to this and to that and to this and to that and to the other”. So you’ll show up in hundreds more places than you otherwise would. It’s as if you had 500 signs pointing to your business and each sign answers a different specific question that people have about the law. What could be better than that, it’s a great way to build up your website.

The pace of 15 to 20 articles a month is more than enough to satisfy Google. You could go at a slower pace but again no way near this type of leverage to do it and the ease in which you could do it. So, it’s probably again the best way I know of to get content on your site. I’m going to give you a quick little trick at the end of this. So, here’s something you can do, it’s called re-purposing content. So, what we’ve done with a lot of these interviews is we’ve made them into a book. A one hour interview actually turns into a 40 or 50 page book and I won’t go into it deeply here but a book can really position you as the expert in people’s mind if you’ve authored one. What better way to author what you wanted to for years than to just speak it in one hour. So, we’ve got a Speak A Book process that does this.

Now, another thing we’ve done is we’ve taken the edited interview and we’ve had a person do a professional voice over of that same recorded content, that transcribed content, breaking it up question by question and answer by answer. Let’s say your name is John Smith and we did an interview on divorce and the voice over would come on and say this, “Is it true that the woman also gets custody of the kids in Alabama?” Attorney John Smith says, “Bla, bla, bla, bla”, and the answer is spoken based on the content. At the end, it says, “For more information on divorce cases, contact Attorney John Smith at bla, bla, bla, go to the website at Bla, bla, bla or send an email to bla, bla, bla”. So, we take that voice over audio and we put a still image over it. Now, it becomes a video and now that same content that you spoke can go on to your website as articles, can become videos on YouTube, can turn into a book that you’ve authored, it can go to lots of different places. This is called re-purposing content and this is the little bonus I’m giving you on this call that you can do with your content and get 3 times the mileage out of the same content that you otherwise would. I hope this is helpful to you. If you want help in getting any of this done and using our system to do it, contact speakeasymarketinginc.com or call 888 225 8594.

 

Richard Jacobs

About Richard Jacobs

My name is Richard Jacobs, and I've discovered quite a bit about the plight of solo practitioners and small, 2-5 attorney firms like yours these past 12 years.

I've come to understand the unique challenges in marketing ethically and effectively that attorneys face because I have:

  • Helped over 180 attorneys author their own practice area book and become the 'implied expert' in their practice area
  • Helped hundreds of attorneys successfully navigate Google's search algorithm changes, growing their websites from 2 potential clients calling a month to 4+ calls per DAY for some clients.
  • Interviewed and promoted over 507 attorneys nationwide, in practice areas such as:
  • DUI / DWI
  • Family Law
  • Criminal Defense
  • Bankruptcy
  • Auto Accidents
  • Social Security Disability
  • Slip & Falls (Premises Liability)
  • Real Estate
  • Estate Planning / Probate
  • Wage and Hour Claims
  • Expungements / Post Conviction Relief

Before you decide to invest in your marketing, it makes sense to first request your complimentary, custom, no obligation video website review.

Richard is the author of 6 books published on Amazon, Kindle and Audible.com

Richard is available for speaking engagements on direct marketing for attorneys and has recently spoken at the following legal conferences:

  • PILMMA (Personal Injury Lawyers Marketing & Management Association)
  • Las Vegas DUI Summit – Private event for DUI attorneys
  • New York Boutique Lawyers Association
  • Perry Marshall & Associates Marketing Academy (Marina Del Rey, CA)
  • National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)