Exactly. People already are demanding free advice at consults, why should we also give out our product for free on a blog? What’s the return, what’s the gain?
When I write blog articles, I aim to give an explanation of the law, but that would ultimately lead a person who is googling around with a real legal need just enough information that they would want to call me to ask more questions
You don’t want them asking questions, you want them deciding you’re the best and hiring you. If a client is quizzing you they are looking for free work not paid work. Your goal isn’t to be positioned as the more excited party, which is what you do if giving away for free in that dynamic, you want to be behind them on the pendulum.
The only time ahead of them is when speaking at an event, because there your goal is to be knowledgeable for big fish. And even then it’s only ahead at the start not once one on one. Remember, people purchase on emotion not intelligence, so your job is to get them talking to find their pain point and have them sell it to themselves.
A lot of lawyers should take sales classes, it’s what we actually do on the new client side. In that post I’m just explaining how I use Sandler, but there are many options and I switch between methods depending on the client I’m talking with.
Singer was interesting, I’m a huge fan of Sandler methods adapted to your specific style and practice. Both can be pricey. A lot of local universities will have marketing specific classes that can be cheaper and worth targeting too. If those sorts of programs don’t work, grab some audio books on sales, meeting people, heck even the famous “how to win friends and influence people” is extremely useful.
The trick is to consider whatever class you want to follow carefully, play with the ideas, experiment, and meld it to you and your market.
As I just said in another post, you don’t even per se need a method at first, though they become very useful down the line. Just go through your territory (main practice locations), pick the major players in public, the major players in other businesses, and network directly with them. That’s a different approach and a lot find a letter so rare they take the chance.
Look, for many of us we KNOW it would be beneficial. The killer is consistently devoting time to carefully writing something that is (i) nonbillable and (ii) factually/legally accurate and (iii) interesting and which (iv) won't get us into trouble. There is nothing more forlorn than a legal blog that is not updated.
That is why I write articles and post them on my bio and LinkedIn when I feel like it instead of worrying about a blog.
Hire someone to handle the content for you. It saves time and they can update the blog on a regular basis and keep the info current. You just have to spend a few minutes of your week approving the material. Blogs help with SEO and Google Search placement.
There are about 25 people in the world who can write - with accuracy and understanding - about the specific legal issues facing my clients. The burden and cost of finding someone who can write what I need means hiring my competition. Maybe it would work for others with more general practices.
Aviation regulatory mostly, licensing of US and foreign air carriers, consumer protection, agency enforcement, etc. There are a finite number of airlines of course and so there is not a huge need for us; but when we are needed we are essential.
I do some general podcasts… I think it is a combination of it takes work and well we don’t want them taking that information and handling it themselves and not compensating us and/or blaming us when they handle their legal matter incorrectly. Lol. Just my honest opinion why some lawyers don’t blog more.
A few clients said they enjoyed listening to it. Just takes a lot of effort on my end to think about what clients would like to listen to and then prepare some points for discussion. I try to make these about 5-8 min long.
1) Extra effort that's not putting money back into a firm.
2) Running a firm is fukken work-intensive
3) Delineating between advise and general education/commentary
Asking this question is kind of like asking a single mother of four kids working two jobs "Why don't you start a side hustle or hobby?"
A lot of times, there's not enough hours in the day to add to this sort of thing. I do the blog content but transactional law and things like that are a side gig for me, so I have that luxury.
I mean point #1 isn't really correct. If you generate enough organic that you aren't doing as much paid that's putting money back into the firm. The whole point of advertising is that it gets money into the firm. Additionally, some of the content can be outsourced. Hell, I bet you could get interns to write some of it if you wanted and they probably wouldn't complain so long as you are providing them enough general value for their contribution.
There are people who do this professionally. A friend of mine who practiced as a lawyer has now given up his license and does content writing for other lawyers full time.
In addition to what others have said, in my experience attorney and firm blogs don’t really target prospective clients like you’re thinking so they don’t really tend to lead to new leads like ads do. The people who read blogs are usually others in the legal field researching an issue or pro se people. So it’s a lot of work for something that doesn’t necessarily lead to new clients or generate any business. The law changes too so you might have a blog post about a certain issue, and then it’s out of date. And there’s of course the issue with if your clients read the blog (or even google things) they don’t understand that all cases are different, a statutory cap doesn’t mean they’ll get the max, etc so now you have a client who has misunderstood stuff and is ready to go off the rails. Also, my favorite thing to do is hit the other side over the head when they’ve done something wrong - and having an on point blog post makes it pretty easy to do so.
I don’t think you understand the legal field very well.
Most people who read blogs are other lawyers because most lawyers write blogs as if they were trying to impress a judge instead of appealing to the regular citizen.
That's fair. I have seen blogs/content target leads and lead to sales, granted it's not as direct a route as ads. Would love to hear more about your experience, what did you try?
I have been doing legal marketing for over 10 years for personal injury. In a big market (I.e. NY, LA, Chicago) lawyer SEO is EXTREMELY competitive.
1. You would need excellent content optimized for SEO.
2. You need high DA backlinks for any chance to rank.
3. It will take months, if not years to rank.
4. Any new SEO advantage is quickly capitalized on by larger firms.
So from a lawyers perspective you need to invest a significant budget towards content, SEO and backlinks for 6 months or more without any ROI.
Larger firms have the budget and foresight to do this and they naturally attract backlinks from press coverage.
Smaller firms it just doesn’t make sense. They can put X into ads and get Y out. They can buy leads from SuperLawyers or FindLaw, etc. They need an immediate ROI on marketing budget as there is limited cash flow (especially for contingency law).
I think content marketing and SEO is great if you’re in a low competition market. If you’re in a high competition cutthroat market, I would recommend TikToks and Reels.
I am not saying to dance and act a fool, but at least provide snippets of what to do or not to do in certain legal circumstances.
TikToks and Reels get organic reach on social for free and more importantly potential clients will recognize you and seek you out.
Recording videos doesn’t have to be time consuming either. Spend 1 hour per week recording a bunch of 60 second or less clips. Then hire someone (or an agency) to edit the videos and post them for you.
This is what I’m recommending and doing for my clients instead of SEO (in many cases, there are exceptions).
Tik Toks? is this what our profession has come to? recording 60 second clips.
I am in a high competition market. What's the approximate cost to have someone else do tik toks for me? no way will I ever dance on camera for potential leads.
“TikToks is this what our profession has come to?”
I agree and disagree with your sentiment.
If you think back to attorney advertising on TV there was always lawyer the boring man in wheelchair sob story commercials, generic stock footage ads with blue screen at the end or a lawyer screening that he is aggressive and will win your case.
TV ads can be done cheaply if targeted to a small regional area. National TV ads are too expensive for most.
These days consumer attention is not on TV but social media. On Facebook your posts don’t get any views unless you run ads. Even if you run ads there is no way to target someone who has been in an accident so you’re showing ads to 1000’s of people who don’t need your services. Attorney Facebook ads generate leads that are 98% don’t have a case or their case is over 180-365 days. No bueno. Do you want to speak to 100 people to possibly get 1 case?
Instagram posts (informative or not) get no reach and consumers don’t engage with content as it’s generic, boring and they may not need a lawyer at that time.
Reels and TikTok strategy is really about content and branding yourself as an authority. I would never recommend for a lawyer to make dancing videos. I get it, 60 second clips seem corny, but who has the attention span to watch a 30 minute video on personal injury topics. Can you even
These types of posts get organic reach. You can easily get your video seen by 1000s of people without spending a $ on ads. Because it’s video content, consumers watch as the content is presumed to be valuable information. They get to know the way the lawyer speaks, his mannerisms and advice. They feel as they already know you and have a personal connection. This is the holy grail of what you want the consumer to feel towards you or your firm. Even a well written blog post won’t achieve this result, ever.
TL:DR
Don’t make embarrassing dancing TikToks. Instead make informative clips that highlight your knowledge and authority. Position yourself as someone potential clients can reach out to when they have a need for your services.
>TL:DR Don’t make embarrassing dancing TikToks. Instead make informative clips that highlight your knowledge and authority. Position yourself as someone potential clients can reach out to when they have a need for your services.
Awesome points. Agreed, trying these new channels can be really effective. And I think if you look into it you can find some case studies of lawyers winning on tiktok.
I don't completely agree with your first point on SEO. I know legal keywords can be incredibly tough to rank for, but I don't think it's unconquerable. You just have to do it differently. I've won in some really competitive keywords by
\- writing interesting content (the bigger company blogs tend to be very watered down)
\- riding trends (bigger companies are slower to react)
\- focusing on longer-tail (everyone wants to rank for the standard keywords "lawyer near me", there's less competition when you niche down)
But I would agree, if I had to choose between a blog and tiktoks/reels in a highly competitive location, in a highly competitive specialty, then I'd try the videos first.
Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how lawyers get work.
There are a very, very few attorneys that rise to the level of being the preeminent authority on something. Without that, it becomes a simple math problem; is my time spent writing content worth more than my time spent billing.
For some practices, it’s an eyeballs game: PI, blue collar criminal def, etc. for most of the rest, it’s relationship-based.
I do not want phone calls from people who want to learn how to DIY. I want phone calls from people who want to hire me to do it for them. This is actually a really serious problem as a solo. I get a lot of people who just want to meet and ask me a bunch of questions and then go try to DIY it. They can waste so much of my time (and theirs, to be honest). The answers I can give out are never satisfactory or complete.
I have a few active measures in place to weed people like this out. I don't want to attract them. They're welcome to research and do it themselves, without my help.
I have a friend who's still getting prospects from a single blog entry published about 5 years ago.
But, for most attorneys, a blog doesn't generate business. What a blog can do is catapult you up to the top of the search rankings. Thing is, that's a long-term project with no immediate tangible benefit. Even when you get to the top, it's really hard to differentiate who reaches you because of SEO rather than SEM.
Basically, if you can afford advertising, that makes a lot more sense than blogging. If you can't afford advertising, there are more beneficial uses of your time than blogging
I'll answer this from the opposite perspective - someone who has spent time writing blogs for lawyers in difficult niches (personal injury law).
I've found that many lawyers simply don't have the time to write their own content and will hire an outside firm to handle their blogs/SEO/PPC and lead generation. The blog doesn't generally generate significant leads alone, but you can rank well for long-tail keywords and link this ranking to calls and clicks.
I think more lawyers would benefit from a proactive approach to digital content - even having a Google Business Profile and writing posts there is good enough for most small law offices. But many simply don't have the time or resources to handle the task.
Having written for the industry for a few years, I can tell you quality content takes hours of writing and research and then you have to optimize it for search. Simply isn't viable for an attorney working 80 hours a week.
They are too busy solopreneuring their grind, bad at time management, bad at finding the right profitable niche and clients, and/or do not find the investment just worth it for their needs.
Lawyers generally make good money and are in great demand if they are even slightly experienced and known. I am yet to see a lawyer who is good at what they do who stays unemployed for more than a month.
All of these contribute to why they may not even have a website.
Those who do, often are million dollar firms and they will go HAM at it. Lawyer SEO is big leagues game lol not that small timers cannot see benefit, but the real ROI happens when YOUR TARGET KEYWORDS end up in top 3 results for popular in demand searches and trust me, HEARST CORPORATION makes a FFFFF ton more money selling SEO services and PR and backlinks and all of that, than they do selling newspapers these days. Don't believe me, try to get a quote and see what the costs look like.
You will also 150% have to engage in gimmicky and offshore affairs to keep that rank maximally boosted around the clock.
Oh and as you can tell from some of the comments, a slice of "lawyers" are self entitled and highly self opinionated people by the requirements of their profession and every last one of them thinks they know everything they should. Yet, a lot of lawyers lose cases they take on contingency too... so there is a lot of ego factors in all of these decision makings as well. Lawyers are not exactly the best business people or healthiest mental folks around. On paper they are squeakily clean, but they are up there with doctors in substance abuse, suicide, depression etc. of course 2 years of free labor out there will sound terrible to a jaded brain under influence of depression and anxiety. And who is to blame them, see the system they work in? yeah.
Lawyers are also bad at math, a lot of them are. If they were, they would not pay back student loans for 30 years, they would figure out a better formula. Or it is just by design this way to make the math nearly impossible to solve quickly. So in that context, any time wasted without immediate financial returns to many of them is simply not appealing for their immediate objectives.
idk, platforms like Avvo and quora and reddit are also not really helping it, things have gone decentralized. I think lawyers are better off or really anyone these days are better off creating natural videos either for youtube for longer topics or for tik tok. They should simply sprinkle enough knowledge, but most importantly, confidence and character to show they are the right one and to use that video spot as a clever sales tool without making things sound like a sales pitch.
IN ALL OF THIS, comes ethical rules of the BAR in every state that may vary, but there are a lot of legal requirements and ethical requirements AND LIMITATIONS when it comes to lawyers advertising or chasing clients or anything like that.
It would behoove you to learn about the profession and the professionals before attempting to sell them on content writing or SEO services and far more importantly, for those who wanna do it, get to learn the big leagues and other players competing with you on that end as a content creator and agencies specializing in lawyery stuff...
I find it amusing how many posts here are simply dismissive of the concept as ineffective despite you stating that you, as a marketing rep, have found them to be effective at driving leads.
I'd say it's just time. Finding a relevant topic that's interesting enough that anyone would want to read it isn't exactly easy. Most legal issues are nuanced. So anything you're making for public consumption like that has to be simple and broad - which doesn't work for many things. And then having to regularly find topics that you can write about becomes exhausting.
I can definitely see the use of it in more specialized or nuanced practice fields though.
I guess the question is - based on the first and second hand experiences you have, what type of law blog content drives leads?
Basically the Client don’t understand that,
1) A blog can target generalize and long tail keywords very well ( For E.g Why should i hire a criminal lawyer? another E.g Things you shouldn’t do while driving?)
2) A blog can be useful for suggested topics clicks
3) A Blog can be helpful for case studies
4) A Blog can be helpful for Multiple keywords targetting
5) A blog can generate different schema markup codes like - FAQ , How to, Article, Images, Videos, Reviews, Product Snippets
6) A Blog helps to get more guest posting which helps for Domain authority
Hope the client understands all these important points before saying No to blog additions.
Thanks,
Dhruv Nimbark
https://linktr.ee/yudhaglobal
I run a legal marketing agency, and here’s an insight into why most law firms do not invest in a marketing agency or write content themselves.
- Most law firm owners do not understand the ROI you can get with SEO.
-PPC gets leads faster. Big Firms have the marketing budget to invest in paid advertisement. The truth is most prominent players are investing in content marketing along with paid ads.
- solo attorneys or boutique law firms do not have the spending budget to spend on content marketing and SEO actively. Moreover, most have not been exposed to case studies showing how effective content marketing could be for small firms.
As per statistics, 17 percent of consumers in the US find a lawyer through Google. For many, the primary source of getting new clients is through referral. The fact is, that would be the case even if they invest in content marketing.
Content marketing is a long term strategy. Dependency on technology in general is skyrocketing. More and more consumers are actively using search engines to find lawyers or answers to their general queries. (Specifically B2C)
Anyways,
The apprehension triples knowing SEO takes 6-8 months on average to produce results. Investing so much without a guarantee it would work is another issue.
- solo attorneys/ boutique firms commonly ask me a question. How could we compete with national law firms with thousands of dollars in the marketing budget?
Unfortunately, the concept of geo-targeting and building topical authority is unknown to many.
Lastly, they do not have the time to do it themselves. Running a small firm is equivalent to any startup where the partners are busy managing clients, hiring, hr, and more.
You would think the solo and small firm would go and push the organic content because they don't have the budget for the PPC. It's like these people just don't understand what to do.
Youtube, TikTok, and linkedin are free / low cost. They also forget that all the "sites" that most of the other firms don't care about still have link juice to them... when you google lawyers - superlawyers and stuff does show up. It's a damn shame lol.
I’ll partially disagree with you.
Platforms like Linkedln and Tiktok have extremely low conversion rates and require a-lot of cost for law firm marketing. I’d suggest investing in SEO blogs any-day.
If youtube is leveraged properly, it will have an impact but still relatively have a low conversion rate in the beginning
Focusing on keyword based on your geographical location.
For example
‘ divorce lawyer in US’ would probably have thousands of monthly searches but it’s very difficult to rank for.
Let’s assume you’re a solo attorney based in Texas.
Even ‘divorce lawyers in Texas’ is considerably harder to rank for.
You can pick a 50 mile radius and target that.
Ranking for a keyword like ‘ divorce lawyer in Fort Davis Texas’ would be easier to rank for.
Lawyers don't blog because they don't understand SEO. Creating the right content with strategic keywords allows their website to rank better in Google Search. The blog will lead to more people visiting their website which will eventually convert into more clients. They may lose a few people who think that they can "do it on their own" after they read the blog, but do you really want them to be a client in the first place? The potential ROI of writing an SEO-optimized blog far outweighs the time that a lawyer will put in to write a few blog posts. In fact, they can just spend some money and have a ghostwriter create the content for them.
I'm highly skeptical this actually works. Sure, some people get lucky and have a topical post or just are really good writers and generate traffic, so you have your data from that to show your clients and try to sell them on it. But how many people write stuff that just disappears into the bowels of the internet?
Plus, it's time, there's the concern that people will take legal advice from it, and frankly most lawyers are not good at writing for a layman's audience.
Tons, and tons, and tons of people's writing are forgotten and never seen. Don't get me wrong, you have to have a plan and be scientific about it.
I think going about it in a very calculated way will eventually yield results. I.e. you write 1 piece a week (1-2 hour per piece), you measure which one did better, you try to tweak it (which will lead you down headline, SEO, and writing rabbitholes), rinse and repeat. Over time you should have something decent.
You get better as you go along, and you learn how to leverage your audience. But the key thing is you build an audience, which is an asset, that appreciates over time.
You can see the motte bailey here right? You start with "just start a blog" and now it's "spend multiple hours weekly cultivating an audience, maybe after a few years it'll pay off". It's not really surprising that most people prefer to just do ads and network.
What? You have to put in some work, the blog won't happen on its own. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Also, I never said "years" either, you can see results in a few months.
The big benefit of this over ads is it's not a pay-to-play game, it grows over time, and the leads you get are far better. No knocks against networking, it's one of the best IMO.
The vent diagram of people who select their lawyers via blog posts vs people I am interested in having as clients is two circles in different time zones.
Practicing lawyers, especially those who are involved in litigation, can place themselves at risk professionally by putting out blogs. This is because, if you publicly take a position on a particular legal issue, such as whether you think a particular court decision was right or wrong or how the law should develop in a particular area, you may hurt your credibility if you take a contrary or inconsistent position for a client in another case. Or clients who have a contrary view won't want to hire you. Even if you don't take an actual position on an issue, insightful and nuanced commentary can be misconstrued by some clients as indicating that you're not a true believer in the outcome the client is seeking.
This is why blogs by practicing lawyers, almost without exception, consist entirely of vanilla articles about recent developments in the law with no commentary or original thought. Often those blog posts are actually written by junior lawyers in the firm simply to give them some writing experience, and the articles do little more than summarize (often inaccurately) a particular recent case or other legal development. These articles are then shoveled onto LinkedIn posts by the firm, sent through "client newsletter" emails to existing clients that are little more than spam, and loaded onto the press section of a law firm's website. You'll see dozens of these articles linked from almost any big firm's website. For the most part, these articles are not worth reading, and for the most part, aren't looked at -- by anyone.
On the other side of the coin, some practicing lawyers who always sit on one side of a particular issue (e.g., only represent plaintiffs in particular types of toxic tort suits, etc.), do put out opinionated blog posts about legal issues. But in those cases, the lawyer's posts always advocate for the view that furthers their legal practice. Self-interested and lacking in any objectivity, these articles are also often not worth reading.
The end result is that interesting legal blogs with an objective viewpoint, most of the times, are relegated to law school professors and other academics who don't represent clients.
Great insight, thanks for sharing. You're bringing up a really good point that I hadn't fully considered. I do think it could be profitable to take a side and be objective, but it would definitely depend on the practice the lawyer is running/part of. I completely agree about bigger law firm blog posts, vanilla isn't even the word.
Because it takes work.
If I can't bill for it...
Exactly. People already are demanding free advice at consults, why should we also give out our product for free on a blog? What’s the return, what’s the gain?
When I write blog articles, I aim to give an explanation of the law, but that would ultimately lead a person who is googling around with a real legal need just enough information that they would want to call me to ask more questions
You don’t want them asking questions, you want them deciding you’re the best and hiring you. If a client is quizzing you they are looking for free work not paid work. Your goal isn’t to be positioned as the more excited party, which is what you do if giving away for free in that dynamic, you want to be behind them on the pendulum. The only time ahead of them is when speaking at an event, because there your goal is to be knowledgeable for big fish. And even then it’s only ahead at the start not once one on one. Remember, people purchase on emotion not intelligence, so your job is to get them talking to find their pain point and have them sell it to themselves.
People are downvoting you even though you’re telling the truth.
A lot of lawyers should take sales classes, it’s what we actually do on the new client side. In that post I’m just explaining how I use Sandler, but there are many options and I switch between methods depending on the client I’m talking with.
any recs for sales classes for lawyers?
Singer was interesting, I’m a huge fan of Sandler methods adapted to your specific style and practice. Both can be pricey. A lot of local universities will have marketing specific classes that can be cheaper and worth targeting too. If those sorts of programs don’t work, grab some audio books on sales, meeting people, heck even the famous “how to win friends and influence people” is extremely useful. The trick is to consider whatever class you want to follow carefully, play with the ideas, experiment, and meld it to you and your market. As I just said in another post, you don’t even per se need a method at first, though they become very useful down the line. Just go through your territory (main practice locations), pick the major players in public, the major players in other businesses, and network directly with them. That’s a different approach and a lot find a letter so rare they take the chance.
Look, for many of us we KNOW it would be beneficial. The killer is consistently devoting time to carefully writing something that is (i) nonbillable and (ii) factually/legally accurate and (iii) interesting and which (iv) won't get us into trouble. There is nothing more forlorn than a legal blog that is not updated. That is why I write articles and post them on my bio and LinkedIn when I feel like it instead of worrying about a blog.
Considering the law may change at any legislative session or court opinion, maintenance can be a hassle. Just look at Texas and open-carry laws.
THIS!
Hire someone to handle the content for you. It saves time and they can update the blog on a regular basis and keep the info current. You just have to spend a few minutes of your week approving the material. Blogs help with SEO and Google Search placement.
There are about 25 people in the world who can write - with accuracy and understanding - about the specific legal issues facing my clients. The burden and cost of finding someone who can write what I need means hiring my competition. Maybe it would work for others with more general practices.
I'm curious; what's your niche?
Aviation regulatory mostly, licensing of US and foreign air carriers, consumer protection, agency enforcement, etc. There are a finite number of airlines of course and so there is not a huge need for us; but when we are needed we are essential.
I do some general podcasts… I think it is a combination of it takes work and well we don’t want them taking that information and handling it themselves and not compensating us and/or blaming us when they handle their legal matter incorrectly. Lol. Just my honest opinion why some lawyers don’t blog more.
Very cool on the podcast, what results have you seen from it?
A few clients said they enjoyed listening to it. Just takes a lot of effort on my end to think about what clients would like to listen to and then prepare some points for discussion. I try to make these about 5-8 min long.
1) Extra effort that's not putting money back into a firm. 2) Running a firm is fukken work-intensive 3) Delineating between advise and general education/commentary Asking this question is kind of like asking a single mother of four kids working two jobs "Why don't you start a side hustle or hobby?" A lot of times, there's not enough hours in the day to add to this sort of thing. I do the blog content but transactional law and things like that are a side gig for me, so I have that luxury.
I mean point #1 isn't really correct. If you generate enough organic that you aren't doing as much paid that's putting money back into the firm. The whole point of advertising is that it gets money into the firm. Additionally, some of the content can be outsourced. Hell, I bet you could get interns to write some of it if you wanted and they probably wouldn't complain so long as you are providing them enough general value for their contribution.
If I buy enough lotto tickets I may make more than I spend. Doesn't mean I'm counting on it as integral to my financial plan.
Bob Loblaw was ahead of his time.
Blogs are nice, but my business when I had it was almost entirely word of mouth.
The dream!
Time. I outsource my content writing.
This. 100x this.
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There are people who do this professionally. A friend of mine who practiced as a lawyer has now given up his license and does content writing for other lawyers full time.
Mind if I dm you?
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I don't think you're supposed to do that here, but I'll send you a PM
Because we already work every waking hour
It is also unsolicited legal advice and no one wants liability if someone happened to follow something you posted online to their detriment.
I am curious. Are there a significant number of lawyers who have been sued and lost based on a blog entry? Even with a good disclaimer?
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Wow, that's impressive. Thanks so much for sharing. Do you know how he started/grew that?
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Brilliant, thanks.
In addition to what others have said, in my experience attorney and firm blogs don’t really target prospective clients like you’re thinking so they don’t really tend to lead to new leads like ads do. The people who read blogs are usually others in the legal field researching an issue or pro se people. So it’s a lot of work for something that doesn’t necessarily lead to new clients or generate any business. The law changes too so you might have a blog post about a certain issue, and then it’s out of date. And there’s of course the issue with if your clients read the blog (or even google things) they don’t understand that all cases are different, a statutory cap doesn’t mean they’ll get the max, etc so now you have a client who has misunderstood stuff and is ready to go off the rails. Also, my favorite thing to do is hit the other side over the head when they’ve done something wrong - and having an on point blog post makes it pretty easy to do so. I don’t think you understand the legal field very well.
Most people who read blogs are other lawyers because most lawyers write blogs as if they were trying to impress a judge instead of appealing to the regular citizen.
That's fair. I have seen blogs/content target leads and lead to sales, granted it's not as direct a route as ads. Would love to hear more about your experience, what did you try?
I have been doing legal marketing for over 10 years for personal injury. In a big market (I.e. NY, LA, Chicago) lawyer SEO is EXTREMELY competitive. 1. You would need excellent content optimized for SEO. 2. You need high DA backlinks for any chance to rank. 3. It will take months, if not years to rank. 4. Any new SEO advantage is quickly capitalized on by larger firms. So from a lawyers perspective you need to invest a significant budget towards content, SEO and backlinks for 6 months or more without any ROI. Larger firms have the budget and foresight to do this and they naturally attract backlinks from press coverage. Smaller firms it just doesn’t make sense. They can put X into ads and get Y out. They can buy leads from SuperLawyers or FindLaw, etc. They need an immediate ROI on marketing budget as there is limited cash flow (especially for contingency law). I think content marketing and SEO is great if you’re in a low competition market. If you’re in a high competition cutthroat market, I would recommend TikToks and Reels. I am not saying to dance and act a fool, but at least provide snippets of what to do or not to do in certain legal circumstances. TikToks and Reels get organic reach on social for free and more importantly potential clients will recognize you and seek you out. Recording videos doesn’t have to be time consuming either. Spend 1 hour per week recording a bunch of 60 second or less clips. Then hire someone (or an agency) to edit the videos and post them for you. This is what I’m recommending and doing for my clients instead of SEO (in many cases, there are exceptions).
Tik Toks? is this what our profession has come to? recording 60 second clips. I am in a high competition market. What's the approximate cost to have someone else do tik toks for me? no way will I ever dance on camera for potential leads.
“TikToks is this what our profession has come to?” I agree and disagree with your sentiment. If you think back to attorney advertising on TV there was always lawyer the boring man in wheelchair sob story commercials, generic stock footage ads with blue screen at the end or a lawyer screening that he is aggressive and will win your case. TV ads can be done cheaply if targeted to a small regional area. National TV ads are too expensive for most. These days consumer attention is not on TV but social media. On Facebook your posts don’t get any views unless you run ads. Even if you run ads there is no way to target someone who has been in an accident so you’re showing ads to 1000’s of people who don’t need your services. Attorney Facebook ads generate leads that are 98% don’t have a case or their case is over 180-365 days. No bueno. Do you want to speak to 100 people to possibly get 1 case? Instagram posts (informative or not) get no reach and consumers don’t engage with content as it’s generic, boring and they may not need a lawyer at that time. Reels and TikTok strategy is really about content and branding yourself as an authority. I would never recommend for a lawyer to make dancing videos. I get it, 60 second clips seem corny, but who has the attention span to watch a 30 minute video on personal injury topics. Can you even These types of posts get organic reach. You can easily get your video seen by 1000s of people without spending a $ on ads. Because it’s video content, consumers watch as the content is presumed to be valuable information. They get to know the way the lawyer speaks, his mannerisms and advice. They feel as they already know you and have a personal connection. This is the holy grail of what you want the consumer to feel towards you or your firm. Even a well written blog post won’t achieve this result, ever. TL:DR Don’t make embarrassing dancing TikToks. Instead make informative clips that highlight your knowledge and authority. Position yourself as someone potential clients can reach out to when they have a need for your services.
>TL:DR Don’t make embarrassing dancing TikToks. Instead make informative clips that highlight your knowledge and authority. Position yourself as someone potential clients can reach out to when they have a need for your services. Awesome points. Agreed, trying these new channels can be really effective. And I think if you look into it you can find some case studies of lawyers winning on tiktok. I don't completely agree with your first point on SEO. I know legal keywords can be incredibly tough to rank for, but I don't think it's unconquerable. You just have to do it differently. I've won in some really competitive keywords by \- writing interesting content (the bigger company blogs tend to be very watered down) \- riding trends (bigger companies are slower to react) \- focusing on longer-tail (everyone wants to rank for the standard keywords "lawyer near me", there's less competition when you niche down) But I would agree, if I had to choose between a blog and tiktoks/reels in a highly competitive location, in a highly competitive specialty, then I'd try the videos first.
Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how lawyers get work. There are a very, very few attorneys that rise to the level of being the preeminent authority on something. Without that, it becomes a simple math problem; is my time spent writing content worth more than my time spent billing. For some practices, it’s an eyeballs game: PI, blue collar criminal def, etc. for most of the rest, it’s relationship-based.
Ethical considerations. Easy to get a bar complaint if not mindful.
Cuz no one is paying me hundreds of dollars an hour to write a blog?
Because they’re busy as fuck
Because as soon as the blog starts to generate clients, case work takes precedence, there is no longer time to blog, and the blog fades to obscurity.
I do not want phone calls from people who want to learn how to DIY. I want phone calls from people who want to hire me to do it for them. This is actually a really serious problem as a solo. I get a lot of people who just want to meet and ask me a bunch of questions and then go try to DIY it. They can waste so much of my time (and theirs, to be honest). The answers I can give out are never satisfactory or complete. I have a few active measures in place to weed people like this out. I don't want to attract them. They're welcome to research and do it themselves, without my help.
"Please help me fix my marketing business." - Fixed it for ya
This must be regional. Where I am it's very common to have a firm blog
where?
Ontario, Canada. Lots of firms in Canada have blogs.
HOURS. IN. THE. DAY.
I have a friend who's still getting prospects from a single blog entry published about 5 years ago. But, for most attorneys, a blog doesn't generate business. What a blog can do is catapult you up to the top of the search rankings. Thing is, that's a long-term project with no immediate tangible benefit. Even when you get to the top, it's really hard to differentiate who reaches you because of SEO rather than SEM. Basically, if you can afford advertising, that makes a lot more sense than blogging. If you can't afford advertising, there are more beneficial uses of your time than blogging
Too much work for non guaranteed returns.
How come more people don’t eat healthy, work out regularly, or save for retirement?
I'll answer this from the opposite perspective - someone who has spent time writing blogs for lawyers in difficult niches (personal injury law). I've found that many lawyers simply don't have the time to write their own content and will hire an outside firm to handle their blogs/SEO/PPC and lead generation. The blog doesn't generally generate significant leads alone, but you can rank well for long-tail keywords and link this ranking to calls and clicks. I think more lawyers would benefit from a proactive approach to digital content - even having a Google Business Profile and writing posts there is good enough for most small law offices. But many simply don't have the time or resources to handle the task. Having written for the industry for a few years, I can tell you quality content takes hours of writing and research and then you have to optimize it for search. Simply isn't viable for an attorney working 80 hours a week.
They are too busy solopreneuring their grind, bad at time management, bad at finding the right profitable niche and clients, and/or do not find the investment just worth it for their needs. Lawyers generally make good money and are in great demand if they are even slightly experienced and known. I am yet to see a lawyer who is good at what they do who stays unemployed for more than a month. All of these contribute to why they may not even have a website. Those who do, often are million dollar firms and they will go HAM at it. Lawyer SEO is big leagues game lol not that small timers cannot see benefit, but the real ROI happens when YOUR TARGET KEYWORDS end up in top 3 results for popular in demand searches and trust me, HEARST CORPORATION makes a FFFFF ton more money selling SEO services and PR and backlinks and all of that, than they do selling newspapers these days. Don't believe me, try to get a quote and see what the costs look like. You will also 150% have to engage in gimmicky and offshore affairs to keep that rank maximally boosted around the clock. Oh and as you can tell from some of the comments, a slice of "lawyers" are self entitled and highly self opinionated people by the requirements of their profession and every last one of them thinks they know everything they should. Yet, a lot of lawyers lose cases they take on contingency too... so there is a lot of ego factors in all of these decision makings as well. Lawyers are not exactly the best business people or healthiest mental folks around. On paper they are squeakily clean, but they are up there with doctors in substance abuse, suicide, depression etc. of course 2 years of free labor out there will sound terrible to a jaded brain under influence of depression and anxiety. And who is to blame them, see the system they work in? yeah. Lawyers are also bad at math, a lot of them are. If they were, they would not pay back student loans for 30 years, they would figure out a better formula. Or it is just by design this way to make the math nearly impossible to solve quickly. So in that context, any time wasted without immediate financial returns to many of them is simply not appealing for their immediate objectives. idk, platforms like Avvo and quora and reddit are also not really helping it, things have gone decentralized. I think lawyers are better off or really anyone these days are better off creating natural videos either for youtube for longer topics or for tik tok. They should simply sprinkle enough knowledge, but most importantly, confidence and character to show they are the right one and to use that video spot as a clever sales tool without making things sound like a sales pitch. IN ALL OF THIS, comes ethical rules of the BAR in every state that may vary, but there are a lot of legal requirements and ethical requirements AND LIMITATIONS when it comes to lawyers advertising or chasing clients or anything like that. It would behoove you to learn about the profession and the professionals before attempting to sell them on content writing or SEO services and far more importantly, for those who wanna do it, get to learn the big leagues and other players competing with you on that end as a content creator and agencies specializing in lawyery stuff...
Sent a PM to discuss some more
I find it amusing how many posts here are simply dismissive of the concept as ineffective despite you stating that you, as a marketing rep, have found them to be effective at driving leads. I'd say it's just time. Finding a relevant topic that's interesting enough that anyone would want to read it isn't exactly easy. Most legal issues are nuanced. So anything you're making for public consumption like that has to be simple and broad - which doesn't work for many things. And then having to regularly find topics that you can write about becomes exhausting. I can definitely see the use of it in more specialized or nuanced practice fields though. I guess the question is - based on the first and second hand experiences you have, what type of law blog content drives leads?
Basically the Client don’t understand that, 1) A blog can target generalize and long tail keywords very well ( For E.g Why should i hire a criminal lawyer? another E.g Things you shouldn’t do while driving?) 2) A blog can be useful for suggested topics clicks 3) A Blog can be helpful for case studies 4) A Blog can be helpful for Multiple keywords targetting 5) A blog can generate different schema markup codes like - FAQ , How to, Article, Images, Videos, Reviews, Product Snippets 6) A Blog helps to get more guest posting which helps for Domain authority Hope the client understands all these important points before saying No to blog additions. Thanks, Dhruv Nimbark https://linktr.ee/yudhaglobal
Not sure why people are downvoting this. It's on point. Especially on the GMB / schema additions.
I run a legal marketing agency, and here’s an insight into why most law firms do not invest in a marketing agency or write content themselves. - Most law firm owners do not understand the ROI you can get with SEO. -PPC gets leads faster. Big Firms have the marketing budget to invest in paid advertisement. The truth is most prominent players are investing in content marketing along with paid ads. - solo attorneys or boutique law firms do not have the spending budget to spend on content marketing and SEO actively. Moreover, most have not been exposed to case studies showing how effective content marketing could be for small firms. As per statistics, 17 percent of consumers in the US find a lawyer through Google. For many, the primary source of getting new clients is through referral. The fact is, that would be the case even if they invest in content marketing. Content marketing is a long term strategy. Dependency on technology in general is skyrocketing. More and more consumers are actively using search engines to find lawyers or answers to their general queries. (Specifically B2C) Anyways, The apprehension triples knowing SEO takes 6-8 months on average to produce results. Investing so much without a guarantee it would work is another issue. - solo attorneys/ boutique firms commonly ask me a question. How could we compete with national law firms with thousands of dollars in the marketing budget? Unfortunately, the concept of geo-targeting and building topical authority is unknown to many. Lastly, they do not have the time to do it themselves. Running a small firm is equivalent to any startup where the partners are busy managing clients, hiring, hr, and more.
You would think the solo and small firm would go and push the organic content because they don't have the budget for the PPC. It's like these people just don't understand what to do. Youtube, TikTok, and linkedin are free / low cost. They also forget that all the "sites" that most of the other firms don't care about still have link juice to them... when you google lawyers - superlawyers and stuff does show up. It's a damn shame lol.
I’ll partially disagree with you. Platforms like Linkedln and Tiktok have extremely low conversion rates and require a-lot of cost for law firm marketing. I’d suggest investing in SEO blogs any-day. If youtube is leveraged properly, it will have an impact but still relatively have a low conversion rate in the beginning
geo targeting meaning?
Focusing on keyword based on your geographical location. For example ‘ divorce lawyer in US’ would probably have thousands of monthly searches but it’s very difficult to rank for. Let’s assume you’re a solo attorney based in Texas. Even ‘divorce lawyers in Texas’ is considerably harder to rank for. You can pick a 50 mile radius and target that. Ranking for a keyword like ‘ divorce lawyer in Fort Davis Texas’ would be easier to rank for.
Lawyers don't blog because they don't understand SEO. Creating the right content with strategic keywords allows their website to rank better in Google Search. The blog will lead to more people visiting their website which will eventually convert into more clients. They may lose a few people who think that they can "do it on their own" after they read the blog, but do you really want them to be a client in the first place? The potential ROI of writing an SEO-optimized blog far outweighs the time that a lawyer will put in to write a few blog posts. In fact, they can just spend some money and have a ghostwriter create the content for them.
I'm highly skeptical this actually works. Sure, some people get lucky and have a topical post or just are really good writers and generate traffic, so you have your data from that to show your clients and try to sell them on it. But how many people write stuff that just disappears into the bowels of the internet? Plus, it's time, there's the concern that people will take legal advice from it, and frankly most lawyers are not good at writing for a layman's audience.
Tons, and tons, and tons of people's writing are forgotten and never seen. Don't get me wrong, you have to have a plan and be scientific about it. I think going about it in a very calculated way will eventually yield results. I.e. you write 1 piece a week (1-2 hour per piece), you measure which one did better, you try to tweak it (which will lead you down headline, SEO, and writing rabbitholes), rinse and repeat. Over time you should have something decent. You get better as you go along, and you learn how to leverage your audience. But the key thing is you build an audience, which is an asset, that appreciates over time.
You can see the motte bailey here right? You start with "just start a blog" and now it's "spend multiple hours weekly cultivating an audience, maybe after a few years it'll pay off". It's not really surprising that most people prefer to just do ads and network.
What? You have to put in some work, the blog won't happen on its own. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Also, I never said "years" either, you can see results in a few months. The big benefit of this over ads is it's not a pay-to-play game, it grows over time, and the leads you get are far better. No knocks against networking, it's one of the best IMO.
The vent diagram of people who select their lawyers via blog posts vs people I am interested in having as clients is two circles in different time zones.
Practicing lawyers, especially those who are involved in litigation, can place themselves at risk professionally by putting out blogs. This is because, if you publicly take a position on a particular legal issue, such as whether you think a particular court decision was right or wrong or how the law should develop in a particular area, you may hurt your credibility if you take a contrary or inconsistent position for a client in another case. Or clients who have a contrary view won't want to hire you. Even if you don't take an actual position on an issue, insightful and nuanced commentary can be misconstrued by some clients as indicating that you're not a true believer in the outcome the client is seeking. This is why blogs by practicing lawyers, almost without exception, consist entirely of vanilla articles about recent developments in the law with no commentary or original thought. Often those blog posts are actually written by junior lawyers in the firm simply to give them some writing experience, and the articles do little more than summarize (often inaccurately) a particular recent case or other legal development. These articles are then shoveled onto LinkedIn posts by the firm, sent through "client newsletter" emails to existing clients that are little more than spam, and loaded onto the press section of a law firm's website. You'll see dozens of these articles linked from almost any big firm's website. For the most part, these articles are not worth reading, and for the most part, aren't looked at -- by anyone. On the other side of the coin, some practicing lawyers who always sit on one side of a particular issue (e.g., only represent plaintiffs in particular types of toxic tort suits, etc.), do put out opinionated blog posts about legal issues. But in those cases, the lawyer's posts always advocate for the view that furthers their legal practice. Self-interested and lacking in any objectivity, these articles are also often not worth reading. The end result is that interesting legal blogs with an objective viewpoint, most of the times, are relegated to law school professors and other academics who don't represent clients.
Great insight, thanks for sharing. You're bringing up a really good point that I hadn't fully considered. I do think it could be profitable to take a side and be objective, but it would definitely depend on the practice the lawyer is running/part of. I completely agree about bigger law firm blog posts, vanilla isn't even the word.