9 tips on blogging for law firms and building authority

Blogging just might be the number one tactic for law firm Internet marketing. Here are just a few of the reasons that blogging is absolutely essential for any law firm that wants to get search engine or social media traffic.

1. Having a blog shows visitors that you are passionate and are authoritative on your subject matter. Years ago companies made blogs and threw up short little weak posts. These days you do need to take your blog more seriously and add content at least once a week.
2. Search engine optimization just doesn’t work without fresh content. A blog is the perfect place to add new content broken down into categories. Having a great blog will drive tons of longtail keyword searching visitors to your website.
3. You will also get more links by having a blog. Having lots of content on a blog gives people a real reason to want to link to you. Once you get over 100 posts it will be considered a real resource worthy of linking to.
4. You can connect your blog to your social media platforms either automatically or manually. By sharing your blog content on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google plus, you will be significantly improving your social media strategy. After all content is the heart of social media.
5. When you do a press release for your law firm you can make a shorter version of the release as a blog post. That way after the search engines dropped the post in terms of visibility the blog will provide the Evergreen version. Just make sure that you write unique content when making a live version of a press release.
6. Customer comments and engagement are significant part of modern search engine algorithms. So having people comment on your blog will help you in the search engines with full user generated content and by sending a social signal.
7. Having a blog allows you to share your content not only on your own social networks but with other influencers. When they see your real blog they are more likely to want to share your content. The sharing and liking of your content will help your search engine rankings and traffic in general.
8. By selecting experts within your firm to be the authorities, even if the content is ghostwritten for them, you can set up Google Plus AuthorRank. AuthorRank shows Google your bloggers are serious writers and generally trusted. Visitors will also see that your bloggers have the AuthorRank and will be more likely to trust you as well.
9. After writing 100 blog posts, you can for this content into a small printed book. By having a book you will gain additional trust and public relations opportunities. You may also get more speaking engagements.

Blogging is just too essential to ignore as a strategy for law firms moving forward. Just make sure that your blog is on yoursite.com/blog and not on yourfirm.blogspot.com etc. It is also a good idea to do a second blog as well on a separate URL for one specific practice area. By creating an entirely new blog website based around one topic you can generate an amazing amount of interest which will be highly shareable because it is not connected to the general marketing of your firm. If you have the resources you can create several of these additional separate URL blogs for each of your key experts. Having links from each of these sites back to your main website gives you additional links as well.

As Seth Godin says “content marketing is the only marketing left” and blogging is one of the ultimate forms of content marketing.

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