When writing content for your law firm’s blog, you must strike a balance between actionable advice and empathy. Your readers are potential clients, so it’s important to make a good first impression with your content. But how do you write excellent content that draws in customers while also keeping SEO techniques in mind?
What is People-First Content?
People-first content is created with people in mind. It’s made to be helpful, engaging, and authentic. When creating people-first content, you’re creating it to solve a problem or answer a question. You’re not creating content specifically to rank high for certain keywords.
By writing content for your audience, you can showcase your law firm’s personality. To evaluate whether or not you’re creating people-first content, Google recommends asking yourself the following questions:
- If you have an existing audience, would they find the content valuable if they came directly to your site to read it?
- Does the information you provide help someone achieve their goal?
- Does the content you’re writing demonstrate your knowledge and expertise?
By choosing to write people-first content, you’re actively avoiding search engine-first content. However, it’s important to know what search engine-first content looks like as well. Search engine-first content usually includes keyword stuffing and may feel inorganic to read. If you’re writing for search engines first, you might:
- Regenerate content from another source without adding your own perspective or additional value
- Use automation or AI to produce a large amount of content in a short period
- Produce content in various different fields, hoping that something sticks
To avoid search engine-first content and write for the people, check out these tips and tricks.
Improve Page Experience
Page experience is an extremely vital part of content. If you’re writing people-first content that is extremely helpful, it won’t matter if your page doesn’t work. Your website needs to be fast, readable, and accessible. If it isn’t, people will click away fast and find another attorney with a better, easier-to-read website.
To ensure that your page experience is top-notch, you should consistently view your own content from desktop and mobile devices. Many people read from their phones, so your website needs to be optimized for both.
There are many tools out there that can help you monitor page experience. Search Console, a free Google tool, is a great way to check out these vitals.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Keywords are one of the tools used to make content show up in search results. However, keyword stuffing can be detrimental. When writing people-first content, you should create content to answer a question. This can help to avoid over-saturating your content with a certain keyword.
Writing with a keyword in mind is totally fine as long as you aren’t using that keyword unnaturally or in abundance. The oversaturation of a keyword can have the opposite effect. Keyword stuffing will not only not help you rank, but it also makes your content clunky, hard to read, and ineffective.
Try writing your next blog without thinking about a specific keyword. Once you’re finished, create a title that clearly states what the blog or page is about. Then, choose your keyword from the title. You’ll often find that when writing naturally, you’ll meet SEO keyword requirements without going overboard.
Then, if you miss something important (like the keyword in the first paragraph), you can go back and add it. When adding in your keyword, make sure that it fits naturally. By using a plug-in like Yoast SEO, you can easily track how frequently you’ve used your keyword and whether or not you’ve gone overboard.
Follow E-E-A-T Guidelines
In December of 2022, Google made huge updates to its Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) for search. The update included one major change, updating E-A-T to E-E-A-T.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The addition of experience solidified the importance of relevant and helpful content written by the right people.
To showcase these pillars on your website and through your content, you should do the following:
- Ensure that your site is easy to use, useful, and professional
- Reduce promotional content like ads
- Make it easy to find author qualifications and certifications
- Make it easy for readers to contact you
- Update your site consistently
- Avoid errors as much as possible
Read Your Content Before Posting
One of the most important steps that you can take when creating people-first content is to re-read it before uploading it to your website. Humans make mistakes. It’s easy to catch those mistakes by reading your work back. You’ll also be able to tell if you’ve overdone it with the keywords.
If you find the content boring, it may be time to re-write with people-first guidelines in mind. Remember to answer questions, provide actionable advice, and add value to anything you’re citing from another website.
Let Site Social SEO Write People-First Content for Your Law Firm
Let’s face it, writing content is a full-time job. For lawyers, it can be difficult to set aside the time to write high-quality content. With help from Site Social SEO, you won’t have to worry about topic ideation, scheduling, writing, or uploading. We’ll take care of everything, so you can focus on what you do best.
To learn more about Site Social SEO and how we can help you with your content strategy, call us at 407-712-0494 or by emailing hello@sitesocialseo.com.
