Search Engine Journal often mentions the value of a “content refresh,” particularly regarding SEO.
The concept is that rather than let an old piece of content die out, you can breathe new life into it to generate more traffic and leads well into the future.
The same concept applies to law firm content marketing. Only the approach may be a bit different.
Creating, optimizing, and refreshing legal content comes with unique challenges, but a content refresh can be highly effective.
Here’s how to optimize your legal content the right way to attract more leads for your law firm.
When To Refresh Your Law Firm Content
People use Google to find valuable, up-to-date content to satisfy their search.
If the content on your website is out of date, they are likely to search for another source.
In the legal field, the freshness and accuracy of your content is especially important.
Here are a few signs it’s time to refresh your legal content:
- Few backlinks – Your content isn’t generating new backlinks from other websites, as indicated by SEO tools (like Ahrefs).
- Broken links – Old articles or pages link out to pages (either on your website or elsewhere) that are no longer live and return a 404 error.
- Decreased organic traffic – Your organic traffic to your page(s) or post(s) is decreasing, based on your Google Analytics data.
- Poor social engagement – When shared on social media, your content is getting a low number of likes, comments, and shares.
- Outdated sources – You are referencing laws, studies, or articles that are no longer valid or are at least five years old.
- Not evergreen – Your articles aren’t “evergreen” and need to be updated regularly to stay relevant.
- Change in approach – Your law firm has changed its approach, services, or philosophy, which is not yet reflected in your content.
- Keyword ranking drop – Your existing web pages or articles are no longer ranking high (at position three or above) for your target keywords and need to be re-optimized.
- Out of trend – You’ve posted about “trends” that are out of date and need to be updated with new content or removed completely.
Refresh Legal Content For More Leads
If you have encountered any of the issues above, it’s likely time to refresh your law firm’s marketing content.
Freshening your content is a great way to benefit from your existing content, improve your SEO, and attract more law firm leads.
Here are a few ways to refresh your legal content and earn more leads for your firm.
1. Audit Your Website Content
Your law firm’s website and blog play a significant role in communicating value to prospective clients, attracting online traffic, and converting visitors into leads.
With this in mind, auditing your law firm’s website’s content is the best place to start.
First, set up and log into Google Search Console and open the Search results report.
Check the boxes for Total clicks, Total impressions, Average CTR, and Average position.
Then, toggle to “Pages” to see a list of URLs on your website generating clicks, impressions, and keyword rankings.
From this report, you can see which pages are performing best and which are underperforming.
URLs at position six or below are likely good candidates for a refresh.
You can export this report and start keeping track of the pages or posts you update.
In terms of SEO, a few improvements could include:
- Updating the page title (title tag) to include the focus keyword.
- Including the focus keyword for the page in the meta description.
- Adding your primary and secondary keywords throughout the body content.
- Updating any outdated or broken links.
- Adding new, fresh content to the page.
- Adding images, videos, or other types of media.
These improvements might lead to an increase in SEO performance (rankings) for these pages or articles.
Just be sure to monitor impressions, clicks, rankings, and CTR in Google Search Console.
2. Conduct A Content Gap Analysis
A “content gap analysis” is a fancy phrase for seeing the content your competitors have that your website doesn’t have. It is a good way to find new content opportunities or improve upon existing content.
The legal field can be highly competitive, so taking stock of what your competitors are doing well and using that to inform your strategy can make all the difference.
Log into Semrush.com or your chosen SEO tool to conduct a “Content gap” analysis.
Most tools will ask you to enter your domain plus the domains of your closest competitors (we recommend selecting your closest service area/geo-specific competitors).
Then, the report will reveal the shared or “untapped” keywords between your site and your competitors’ websites.
You will then see what your competitors are ranking for that your website is not.
With this report in hand, you can reveal the URLs from Google Search Console (see Step 1) and determine whether the keywords you have identified should be mapped to any of these pages.
If so, you can continue to make those SEO improvements.
If you don’t have any pages or posts that fit the “untapped” keywords, these could be good topics for new pages or posts.
If they are relevant to your business, consider adding them to your content calendar or blogging strategy.
3. Crawl For External Links
The SEO tool Screaming Frog allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs for free on your website to identify existing on-page or technical SEO issues.
It can also help you find existing and broken external links.
Broken links lead to a poor user experience because they direct users to pages that no longer exist.
By using Screaming Frog to examine the 404 errors, you can find opportunities to update these links and direct users to live pages.
Further, if you spot-check many of the external links on your site, you may find links to outdated sources, such as old legal journals, laws, case studies, etc.
These should all be updated to link to relevant and up-to-date information on reputable websites.
4. Build Links To Your Legal Blog
Backlinks are important for SEO because they direct authority (and, often, referral traffic) to your website.
Unfortunately, many law firms forget to up their link-building efforts once their content goes live.
If you have great content on your website that has gone unnoticed, it may be time to give it a boost with backlinks.
This can be done through a variety of methods, including:
- Reaching out via Help a Reporter Out to offer legal expertise and request links back to your website.
- Contacting legal professionals in your network to ask them to link back to your articles or pages.
- Adding “linkable assets” like ebooks and PDFs to your content to encourage other publishers to link back to you.
- Submitting guest articles to reputable legal publications to feature your content and (ideally) earn a backlink.
Backlinks can work wonders in increasing the authority and reputation of your website.
Look into more law firm link-building methods to improve your firm’s SEO.
5. Turn Case Studies Into Articles
Many law firms have awesome case studies, either living deep in a folder or nestled in a page on their website.
But these case studies may be missing the chance to drive additional traffic.
You can refresh this existing content by turning your case studies into longer articles.
This gives you the chance to optimize for search terms (if applicable) and win over potential clients.
For example, if you are a class action lawsuit lawyer who recently helped clients win a crib recall case, you could write a longer article about the case, the danger of crib recalls, how to file a crib recall lawsuit, and more – as this topic (“crib recall”) has over 300,00 organic searches per month.
This helps drive additional traffic and offers more context to potential clients about what you do and how you can help them.
Further, you can drop in real quotes from real clients to help build trust with your audience.
6. Repurpose Old Content Into Social Soundbites
Legal content can takes time to write and digest, especially longer articles.
And social media is a space for often short attention spans and a desire for quick, punchy content.
Now, you can refresh your content for social media without putting much work into your content marketing at all.
Here’s an example:
- You have a blog article titled “How to File for Divorce in California” that is the best performing article on your website.
- You copy some valuable text from your article and paste it over a stock image (you can do this using tools like Canva.com).
- You share this graphic on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
- You’ve now taken a single piece of content and have turned it into four marketing assets.
Even better, you can anticipate repurposing your content every time you create a new piece of content.
For example, a Facebook Live video can become a YouTube video upload, which you can embed into a blog article and then share to your email list.
We all know how much work goes into marketing a law firm.
Make content marketing easier by using existing content to your advantage, repurposing it, and using it to attract new leads.
How A Content Refresh Earns Law Firm Leads
Now, we have talked a lot about how to refresh old content, but how does this translate into new leads?
Well, each piece of content is a new opportunity to attract additional traffic.
And engaging, fresh content improves your conversion rate and, therefore, your chances of turning a passive reader into a potential client.
Improving the keyword rankings on old articles can help you drive more organic traffic, which can direct users to your contact forms.
More content on social media can direct users to your profile and then to your inbox or phone number.
Further, refreshing your content on a regular basis helps you get creative.
You can embed different content types, ebooks, contact forms, media, and more to entice users to take action and contact your business.
Reap The Benefits Of A Content Refresh
Great content is critical for having an SEO-friendly law firm website.
Of course, trends change and old articles become outdated, so refresh regularly.
Whether it’s your website or social media content, there are nearly limitless opportunities to improve old content.
Optimizing for keywords, adding media, repurposing old into new, and reusing your case studies are all ways to make old or outdated content work for you.
Plus, this gives you more chances to turn users into law firm leads.
So, if you want new business in the door, a content refresh may be the next best step for your law firm.
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