It’s unfortunate, but the majority of the people you interact with on a daily basis don’t think you’re human. They think you’re a creature from some far away, incomprehensible, planet filled with lawyers that speak their own language and don’t understand the problems of real people. Deep down inside, you probably already know this to some degree. But, it doesn’t have to be this way. You are human, and you can show potential clients that you really do care. How? Through a blog.

Beware SEO Services

One thing you’ll figure out very quickly is that, when you start a blog, everyone suddenly becomes an SEO expert. You’ll get inundated with emails promising to help you rank #1 in Google. What does that mean? It means that, when someone types in the term “lawyers” or “help finding a lawyer” or “I need a lawyer” or something similar, they’ll find you in the number one spot on Google’s search engine.

Sounds good right? Not so fast. Everyone and their brother wants that number one spot, and there’s only one spot available for every given search term. So, what many SEO experts will “offer” you is the number one spot for a particular keyword in a particular geographic area.

For example, if you’re a divorce attorney, they will promise you the number 1 spot in Google for the keyword “divorce attorney” or “divorce lawyer,” so that when someone types in the search term “divorce attorney,” your firm shows up in the search engine first, ahead of everyone else.

This is obviously a good thing, but it’s not something that any SEO expert can promise. Why? Because they don’t own Google. Google owns Google, and only Google can promise you that spot, and it doesn’t really make promises like that to anyone.

So, when you read anything that promises to help you rank in Google, stay away. Delete the email, junk it, forget about it. It’ll save you a lot of time, money, and frustration. Even if they could promise to get you the number one spot, all SEO experts who make promises like this always use some form of prohibited marketing (prohibited by Google’s TOS). Eventually, you’ll get caught by one of Google’s very sophisticated algorithms, and your firm’s website will be filtered out of the search results or outright banned (depending on the tactics used by the SEO agency).

Get Reading To Write

Now, not all SEO firms are dishonest or try to manipulate the search engines. Some of them focus on actual marketing – this is where you want to live. The most common forms of marketing online include pay-per-click and content marketing.

Pay-per-click, known as “PPC” is sort of like online classified ads. If you fire up Google’s search engine, and perform a search, you’ll notice that the right-hand side of the browser window is populated by little advertisements. These are pay-per-click ads.

You set up an ad group, write ads, and then pay only when people click on them. It’s a sure-fire way to get traffic, but it’s also very expensive and dominated by established advertisers in almost every niche.

If you’re just starting out, you need a less expensive method of getting quality leads (yes, clients, but every marketer you meet will call them “leads”). That method is content marketing.

And, this personal injury attorney is a great example of how to do content marketing. Look at their blog. In some posts, they use video. In others they use images. It’s a multimedia blog post. It’s informative. It provides useful information, statistics, reviews, case law, and practical advice.

These kinds of posts are highly sharable, and that’s what you need to write to get noticed by other bloggers, journalists, and your peers. You’re after high-quality leads, not just a high quantity of leads.

So, you need quality content that will attract links to your blog. Links mean more traffic through both direct clickthrough traffic (people clicking the link and following it to your site) and SEO signals sent to Google that will give you good placement in the search engine for various keywords related to your site.

Try To Sound Natural

When you do hire third-party SEO companies to manage your PPC or content marketing, make sure they are writing your stuff naturally. “Naturally” means that it looks like a human being wrote it to a real audience, because a human being should be writing it for a specific audience. A lot of SEO content out there looks like it was generated by a computer algorithm (because it was) or looks like keywords were “stuffed” into the body of the article, making it sound unnatural.

Think like a client. If you came upon your article, would you tell others about it? Would you share it on your Facebook wall? If not, it’s a bad article. And, bad articles, like bad marketing, won’t do anything to get you new clients.