The Importance of Integrating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Planning
Recent data shows that searches account for 68% of all trackable website traffic. The goal of SEO is to improve the content of your website so that it appears high on organic search engine results pages (SERPs) and contributes to the development of your brand’s domain authority.
Theoretically, the higher your content appears in a SERP, the more probable it is that new potential clients will click on the links to your website, allowing them the chance to become paying clients.
But because search algorithms are constantly changing, you must keep updating your SEO strategy to ensure it meets Google’s most current standards. That means focusing solely on SEO factors while developing your content strategy will not be the most effective or economical long-term option.
On the other hand, content marketing involves creating high-quality content that engages your target audience. It offers valuable information on your law firm, product, or service.
A solid content strategy can build credibility and generate trust in your field. Naturally, all the creative work you put into making content won’t pay off if prospects can’t find it when they search.
Here are a few steps you’ll need to take to ensure that your law firm’s SEO and content marketing plans will work well together:
- Know your target audience.
By learning about your ideal prospect’s problems, needs, and interests, you can ensure that the right persons will find your content once they search online.
- Do keyword research.
Choosing the appropriate keywords to include in your content can help you appear high in search results and attract more of the target market.
- Create more informative content.
If you make content relevant to your customers, you will increase interest, rankings, and overall authority. Even more important, it can help you distinguish yourself from your rivals.
Can content marketing help with SEO? Remember that you don’t have to choose between SEO and content marketing. Instead of seeing SEO and content as separate things, the key is to look at them as part of a whole. This way, SEO and content can work next to each other to drive more engagement and sales.
Here at Advantage Attorney, we help lawyers market themselves through SEO effectively and affordably. We can help you develop a good legal content marketing plan to bring new clients and your target audience to your law firm.
Our area of specialization is placing attorneys and small law firms into the Google Local Pack. Call us right now for further details.
Content Marketing: What is It?
According to the definition of content marketing, it is “a strategic marketing approach centered on developing and delivering useful, relevant, as well as consistent content to capture and maintain a well-defined target audience-and, eventually, to generate profitable client action.”
It’s an avenue to share important information with your target audience and get results that matter. Law firms can utilize content to build their clients’ loyalty by showing they are a leader in the legal field and by giving valuable answers to their client’s questions.
Even a small business can experience both long-term and immediate financial success with a content marketing strategy if done well.
The goal of every business and marketing plan should be clear. Legal firms can then use content at every sales and marketing funnel stage. Especially in the beginning, when you want to get people interested, you can use different online channels to build your online presence.
Content is distributed through a range of platforms and will vary according to your business goals, whether they are to:
- Educate
- Inform
Content marketing is good for the whole legal industry and is often the basis for several digital strategies, such as:
- Email marketing
- Search marketing
- Social media
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): What is It?
SEO, which stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” is a marketing strategy for getting more and better website traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This kind of traffic is also referred as “free traffic” or “organic traffic”.
Digital marketing can do this in many ways- some of which are technical. For example, improving metadata using the correct tags, making strategic sitemaps, and fixing broken links, only to mention a few.
In addition, one of the cornerstones of SEO is optimizing your website content for the most important keywords. As a result, your law firm will rank higher organically for the same keywords, which is a benefit of content marketing for SEO.
How Can Content Marketing Help With SEO?
The marketing team at your law firm may have composed the most exciting and interesting legal content ever made. But what good is it if none of the billion searches – that happen every day – find it?
As easy as it may sound, increasing website traffic is accomplished by optimizing content with important keywords that potential clients are using to do searches on search engines, namely Google. Since Google accounts for 94% of all search engine traffic, law firms will profit if they follow their SEO guidelines.
That will make it easier for people to find your law firm when they search for the keywords you want to rank for. Google crawls such content and ranks it based on how relevant, useful, and high-quality it is. Google will give points for good content.
Putting content marketing at the top of your SEO plan will provide you with new and useful legal content that uses your most important keywords. Content marketing will enhance your law firm website instead of over-optimizing your existing content, which hurts your search ranking in the long run.
Google likes website content that is new and updated. When you publish new legal content, it gets indexed quickly and helps your Google ranking. SEO rankings go up when more content added is set up strategically based on the most important keywords.
Quick Fact: Valuable Content Provides Backlinks
Content marketing helps law firms engage and helpfully distribute their sought-after organic keywords through their websites, which also increases backlinks. Such will ultimately lead to an improvement in your firm’s domain authority (DA).
From Google’s perspective, domain authority is the same as a law firm’s reputation. The higher the DA, calculated on a scale of 1-100, the more trustworthy and pertinent Google considers the website and its content to be.
Producing excellent legal content and high-quality backlinks is the secret to raising your score and ultimately getting rewarded by showing up on the top page of Google SERPs.
Other websites will link back to your website if its content is worthwhile. Sometimes you need a little additional support to market your content and get some backlinks. This might be through outreach activities, social media amplification, or digital PR.
Once more, you can only accomplish this if you have a content marketing plan that enables you to create worthwhile, compelling legal content worthy of backlinks.
Four Powerful SEO Content Marketing Strategies
To achieve a successful digital marketing strategy, law firms should follow four easy procedures.
1. Establish objectives.
Prioritize identifying and establishing the right law firm SEO and content marketing goals. Make sure they are easily measurable and both are moving toward the same objectives (for example, to increase traffic and conversion rates).
2. Keyword research.
Know your target audience and what they are going through. Starting your keyword research will help you create relevant content for queries that your target audience may be asking.
You can determine the keywords you need to rank for and have a better understanding of their journey as a result. SEMrush, Moz, and Keyword Planner are excellent digital-marketing tools for researching search traffic, competition, and average bid prices.
These tools will provide you with a starting point or subject when producing law firm content.
3. Optimize your content.
Consider the interest, search volume, and keywords when making SEO content. And, ensure it is mobile-friendly. Make that all on-page SEO factors, like internal links, title tags, headers, meta descriptions, keyword optimization, alt tags, and content quality, are effectively implemented. By doing this, the result will guarantee the material a higher search engine ranking.
4. Amplify
Lastly, promote your law firm content through digital PR and social media. Consider using guest posting or outreach content to turn your content marketing effort into high-quality backlinks if you really want to go the additional mile.
It’s crucial for law firm marketers to combine content marketing and SEO into one cohesive strategy. That will increase the number of conversions and leads generated from organic website traffic, thus improving ROI.
Law Firm Content Marketing in Upland, California
Rather than relying on traditional content marketing measures such as SEO and social listening, your content strategy should be based on data that provide a comprehensive picture of your audience’s content preferences.
In addition to enhancing your SEO strategy and goals, using the appropriate data in the right ways to attract, retain the attention of, and convert your potential customer can also boost your ROI (return on investment).
Advantage Attorney will help you create a content marketing plan that enables you to cultivate meaningful relationships with your target audience and boost your industry reputation, even if you will never be able to control the search engine ranking factors.
You’ll receive the following services and more when you sign up for our full-service marketing plans and cloud solutions.
- Create an optimized alt tag for every image
- Inventory and map current content
- Optimize headings and conduct a content audit
- Optimize meta-description for each page
- Optimize page titles and resolve duplicate content
- Prioritize content by keyword deficiency plan
Keep up with the pack and don’t be left behind. Contact Advantage Attorney now and start growing your law firm with trustworthy cloud computing solutions and effective lawyer marketing.
