2024 is the year to get serious about your legal content marketing. Content is the foundation of your online presence, and in our hyper-connected world, content that connects you with your potential clients can increase awareness and generate new business.
Here are five key legal content marketing trends that you can’t afford to ignore in 2019.
Content Marketing Plans Will Continue to Be Essential
It’s one thing to say “I’m going to blog more this year;” it’s another thing to actually do it. It’s critical to create a plan that identifies your content marketing goals and establishes a framework that will help you achieve them. Issues that your content marketing plan should address include ideation, scheduling, distribution, and the various formats you are going to use (blogs, infographics, white papers, etc…).
Less Click Bait, More Original and Relevant Content
The content that you create needs to be original and relevant to your potential clients. It’s one thing to get ideas form high-ranking and successful blogs – it’s completely another to take content, tweak it, and slap it up on your website. Adding duplicate content to your website has no SEO value. In fact, according to Google, duplicate content can result in a penalty if the search engine determines that you engaged in deceptive practices that are intended to manipulate search engine results.
Voice Search Will Become Even More Important
With the proliferation of virtual assistants in our smartphones and smart speakers like Google Home and the Amazon Echo, more and more people are using voice search to find the goods and services they need. As a result, while keyword research will remain important, you also need to consider how a potential client may verbally ask a question to which your content should be responsive. At a minimum, some of your content should answer common questions that your clients may ask. Think “what are the penalties for a first-time DUI?” or “what is the difference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy?”
More Long-Form Content
Just five years ago, the digital marketing experts were advising that the ideal blog length was anywhere from 350 or 500 words. Google has been rewarding long-form content with higher search rankings for several years now, going against the common advice that your readers have short attention spans and you should make your content bite-sized. A study conducted by SerpIQ determined that pages that rank within the first ten results (the first page of Google all had more than 2000 words of content.
The takeaway is clear: longer-form content ranks better than shorter content. That being said, don’t give up on your 500-word blogs – sites that are regularly updated with content tend to do better that those that stay static.
A Focus on Micro-Moment Marketing
Google’s own content marketing team, Think with Google, has recently been focusing on “micro-moments” and how businesses, including law firms, can connect with consumers during them. According to Google’s team,
“Micro-moments occur when people reflexively turn to a device—increasingly a smartphone—to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something. They are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped. In these moments, consumers’ expectations are higher than ever. The powerful computers we carry in our pockets have trained us to expect brands to immediately deliver exactly what we are looking for when we are looking. We want things right, and we want things right away.”
The idea behind micro-moment marketing is that consumers are constantly inundated by content and that we have reached peak content saturation. In other words, consumers cannot consume more content than they the currently are. Micro-moment marketing involves recognizing the fact that you only have a few seconds to connect with your potential client. You have a few seconds – if that – to let a potential client know who you are, what you do, and how you can help. In terms of actionable content marketing advice, this means ensuring that the first bit of your content the potential client sees is clear, concise, responsive to their question, and actionable.
Call Lexicon Legal Content Today to Put Your Legal Content Marketing on Autopilot this Year
Blogging for lawyers isn’t easy. Consistently creating compelling, engaging, and original content that’s relevant to your potential clients is extremely time-consuming and nearly impossible for busy practicing attorneys. Outsourcing your content creation is the obvious solution, but it’s critical that you find the right partner. At Lexicon Legal Content, the overwhelming majority of our law blog writers are law school graduates, and all content is attorney-reviewed before it gets delivered to the client. To make 2020 year the year you finally get a handle on your firm’s content marketing, call us today at 877-486-8123 or send us an email through our online contact form.
