A blog has several benefits including increasing your website SEO, showing your personality, highlighting your expertise, and commenting on timely stories. But to many business owners and attorneys, blogging is an overwhelming concept of time, content, and technical details. Blogging is not a cumbersome process. Rest assured that if you have a detailed editorial calendar and a set a bit of time each week, you will come to love blogging and the process will be a breeze. Most importantly the blogs you write will give you a great peice of content to share on social media and drive traffic back to your website (building SEO).
A few important points to make blogging as easy and beneficial as possible:
- Editorial Calendar: I can not stress enough the importance of an editorial calendar. Planning in advance means that when you take time to write you don’t stare at a blank screen.
- Topic: Select a unique topic that is closely related to your core business areas. It can be news related, answer a specific question or pain point you solve,
- Title: Make sure your headline is well written with at least one of your keywords and the topic of your blog.
- Have one opening paragraph, three supporting and then a close. You can include a list, video, or instructions for a how-to – but make sure you are clear and specific. Talk in questions of pain and then how you help solve problems for your ideal clients.
- Length – you want a minimum of 350 words (500 preferred). Some will tell you that you need a minimum of 1,000. Remember, while the longer the better for Google you don’t want to bore your readers! I always like to get the most important information in the front of the blog.
- Make sure that whatever you are writing about you are solving a problem and relating it to your ideal client. Cite research, client examples, and your own professional experience to reach your audience.
- Do not use industry jargon EXCEPT when you can link a word to a FAQ or glossary page on your website. Your ideal client doesn’t want to hear about your technical expertise, it is all about their problems and how you are the ideal person to solve them.
- Build know, like and trust – this means you need to be authentic, be likeable, show some empathy, display your expertise in a kind and caring manner, and prove to them through your writing you will help them.
- Edit and proof yourself and then have someone else look at it for errors.
- Add in pictures. Every blog post should have a featured image picture so it displays well on social media.
- Take time for the technical SEO stuff. Make sure the blog is linked in a few places, has the right keywords naturally dropped in, you mark off categories and tags, and write in a custom meta description.
- Share away. Have a strategy to share the post across your social media channels (but not all on the same day!).
Blogging can really help your SEO and boost your credibility with your ideal clients. Take the time to hit on these key points so when individuals are searching for answers in your core practice areas your content is there to help them.
