The Real Reason Your Law Blog isn’t Working

Tell me if you’ve heard this one: produce great content on your law blog, search engines will love you and promote you to the top of search rankings, and clients will be knocking down your door. This is how we have been lead to believe that the process will work:

1. You produce a series of well-written, targeted posts on a consumer topic, say, Minnesota probate law.
2. Because you have worked hard to craft a well-optimized post that us full of useful information, bloggers and other website owners will link to it from their sites.
3. Search engines will interpret these links as a signal of value to their users and promote your site high in the search engine results.
4. John Doe in Minneapolis is looking for information on Minnesota probate law and sees your site at the top of search results.
5. John Doe clicks on your link, reads your informative article, and decides to hire you for help with his Minnesota probate issue.

We’ve heard this line so often that few stop to think about whether this process is realistic.  I believe that the failure to question these assumptions is one of the reasons most law blogs do not bring in new clients from search.  It’s not necessarily because the content is no good.  It’s because there is a breakdown in the system that Google (and some legal marketers) blindly adhere to.  These assumptions simply don’t hold true in many cases.

If you stick to this template and do nothing else to help your content along, only one of these steps (number 1) is in your control.  Before you get to step 5, you need three key ingredients:

1. A Linking Community – You need community of bloggers, website owners, or social media users that link to the content that you are writing about;
2. Google Indexing – You need Google to crawl and index both your page and the pages linking to the content; and
3. A Searcher in Purchasing Mode – A person who is actually looking for the content and is likely to hire based on an internet search.

Before you leap headfirst into the legal blogosphere, think critically about whether you have these necessary ingredients.  The second ingredient (Google indexing) usually happens naturally, especially if you use a sitemap and are listed in a directory or two.  This means that you need to focus on the other two, specifically:

• Is there a community of bloggers, site owners, and social media users who are so interested in your topic that they will spend their valuable time linking to your site?
• Are there enough potential clients in your geographic area that are looking for blogs on that topic and make a purchasing decision based on what they find?

The answer may be “yes” in both cases.  But it could be “no.” If your goal is to bring in new clients through search, you need to know this answer up-front.  Otherwise, you could be wasting time that could be directed to more productive marketing efforts that do not rely heavily on search marketing.

I will follow up with separate posts that will tell you how to answer each of these two questions.  To keep up to speed, sign up for my newsletter or subscribe to my feed.