Creating written content for your law firm’s website is one of the best ways to position yourself as a thought leader in your field while also improving your website’s search engine rankings. However, many attorneys with their own practices struggle to determine the kind of content they should create, or the topics they should cover.

Here are a few tips to help you get writing so you can get regular content added to your law blog and showcase your expertise.

  • Have a goal in mind: What are you hoping to accomplish with your content? This will influence the kind of content you develop. Perhaps you want to inform clients about certain legal processes or issues. Maybe you want to position yourself as being on the cutting edge of the news, and will focus on newsworthy events or cases in your field. Whatever your goal, you can use it as a guiding beacon for your content.
  • Understand your audience: You should understand exactly who will be most likely to be reading your blog. This will make it much easier for you to develop content your audience identifies with. Consider the demographics of your target audience and the types of cases you most frequently take on.
  • Record ideas: If you don’t have your ideas organized enough to write down yet, you could try speaking them out loud into a recorder. Spend some time on your own talking about your ideas out loud with your phone recording. This could help you work through some of the ideas you have. You could also record a conversation or interview you have with a colleague and use that as the basis for written content in the future.
  • Don’t worry about editing at first: When you do start writing, focus just on writing—worry about editing the content later. Editing while writing can interrupt the flow of ideas and make it difficult for you to craft interesting content that reads well. If you go back and try to change minute mistakes or make small edits, you could find it easy to lose track of your ideas and your general train of thought.
  • Don’t focus too much on length: If you want, you can shoot for an ideal word count. But in general, worry less about the length of the article than quality of the content. If it only takes 300 words for you to get the idea across in an effective way, great. If you want to go with a more longform article that gives a deep dive into a particular topic, that’s great too. Just make sure that whatever length you’re delivering, it’s well organized, and delivers useful information that will connect with your target audience.
  • Read other law blogs: Consider reading some other law blogs to get a sense of what other firms in your market are writing about and what their audiences like to read. If you’re starting from scratch with content creation, this can be a good way to get some inspiration.

Get started with your content creation to build your online audience and boost your search rankings!