To the untrained ear, “search engine optimization” sounds like a computer coding skill, when in fact it is a writing skill. SEO has more to do with knowing your audience than it does with knowing html. These are three important elements of a law firm web page that will help its SEO performance. All lawyers are good at writing, but writing for an audience of people who may or may not need your legal advice or representation is a highly specialized skill. It makes sense to entrust your law firm’s blog to professional writers of legal blog content, so you can focus on doing what you do best.

Concise, Informative Meta Titles

The meta title is the clickable headline that appears in your web page’ listing on a search engine result’s page. If your meta title is longer than 155 characters, Google’s bots will edit it to something shorter. (If you have ever seen the New Yorker article about the edits that Google’s bots made to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, you will understand why you don’t want the bots editing your work.) The ideal meta title tells readers what they will be able to accomplish by visiting your page, such as “Don’t let insurance companies fool you into giving up your right to compensation after a car accident” or “How to get divorced in California for less than $1,000.”

Person-Focused Content

Don’t tie yourself in knots trying to fit as many different keywords as you can into 500 words of content, and Heaven forfend, don’t repeat the same keyword five times in the same blog post just to show off to Google. It isn’t 1995, and Google’s bots will not appreciate your retro style. Instead, focus on readability, and your keywords will follow. To provide additional value to readers, answer the question in the search query that leads to your web page. Ideally, you should make your content tell a story, perhaps with a summary of the answer to the user’s question in the first paragraph. This way, you will appeal to the readers who need an answer immediately in the middle of a drive or a work meeting, as well as the ones who are reading entire blog posts for entertainment.

Eye-Catching Headlines

The headline is the first thing readers see when they navigate to your page, so choose a headline that makes people want to keep reading. Cynics might call it clickbait, but you do not need to resort to gimmicks. Just make the headline sound more like the title of something someone will want to read and less like a long tail keyword generated by analytics software. “7 Steps to a Cheap Divorce” is a better headline than “Summary Dissolution of Marriage Modesto, California.” People who were searching for a cheap divorce did not know that there were seven steps, but they do after reading your headline, and they want to keep reading to find out what those steps are.

The Best Law Firm Blog Is the One That Gets Regular Updates

You can get an additional SEO boost by regularly updating your blog. You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create blog posts that start with effective titles and tell stories that keep readers scrolling all the way to the end.