Are Law Firm Blogs a Good Marketing Tool?

Law Firm Blogs is an effective way for law firms to establish strong reputations, build networks of influential peers, and ultimately attract new clients.

Many businesses – small and large – have adopted blogging as a more popular marketing strategy. Law firms have also adopted this tactic in order to reach out to their clients on a more personal and casual level.

Along with marketing their practice using various social media channels, many lawyers have hopped on the blogging train in an effort to outline to clients the successes of their firm, present helpful information regarding their area of practice or provide updates and recent news regarding the legal focus of their firm.

Unfortunately, a number of law firm blogs out there are not properly organized, updated or even well-written. Well developed Law Firm Blogs, however, can be a very effective way to market your firm’s legal services and get more clients to explore the firm’s ideas from a different angle.

For lawyers considering developing a Law Firm Blog, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions:

• Do you have enough time to develop a blog?
• Will you be able to update it frequently?
• What are your goals with the blog?
• What will be the primary focus of your blog?

You should be blogging to market your legal services. You should twitter for your firm. You have to got to get your business on Facebook. That’s what people are telling you right?  But as with a lot of online strategies that are supposed to be the next big thing,  sometimes the details on exactly how they can help are less forthcoming.  Enter Stoney DeGeyter. De Geyter recently wrote an article on Search Engine Guide “How a Little Blogging Can Make a Big Difference for the Small Business.”  In the article, he discusses not the next big thing, but the last big thing: blogging. The impetus for the article was a recent post on Wired.com  about the “death of the blog” with the title “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.” De Geyter takes the post on Wired as an opportunity to oppose the view that blogs are dying and reinforces why they are valuable, with a particular emphasis on how they are useful to small business.

Taking DeGeyter’s article a step further we can look at how blogs can help in the legal marketing space. Here are three of his six reasons why blogs are still valuable that seem particularly applicable to law firm marketing.

DeGeyter’s first argument in favor of blogs is that they drive traffic. People still read blogs and find them through search engines.  DeGeyter encourages using keywords in your blog posts that you want to rank for in the search engines. In the case of a lawyer, websites include your area of practice and the geographic area in which you are located. For example, if you practice accident law in Mississippi and use accident lawyers in Mississippi in a blog post you may rank for that term or a similar term. Use these words in titles and the post URL if possible. Having a blog helps people searching for your special “niche” to find you quickly.

His next point was discussed in our previous post which covered educational marketing. That point is a blog allows you to promote your business by sharing knowledge about your practice area to bring in potential customers and establish loyalty. For example, if you are a family law attorney in California, it might be beneficial to write about your experience as a divorce attorney in Newport Beach and provide a list of the five most important things people should know before deciding on to use mediation to handle their divorce.

Next up on DeGeyter’s list is the argument that blogs help build links.  In other words, if you write a great a post that shares useful knowledge as suggested above, there is a good chance that other people will provide a link back to your blog just as we have linked back to DeGeyter’s post here. And this ties in again with the first argument that blogs can drive traffic because more links back to you on other websites and blogs can bring in traffic as well as help with search engine visibility.

All in all, I think DeGeyter’s defense of blogs is a pretty convincing one because his post doesn’t just tell you what to do it also gives the why and the how.

…..Will YOU start your Law Firm Blog?