Learn Why the Best Legal Content Writer With SEO Experience Could Help Your Personal Injury Law Firm

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an important part of personal injury law firm marketing that most lawyers do not know about.  In fact, many personal injury lawyers who think they can write their own law firm blog posts fail to embrace proper SEO techniques.  This means many of the blog posts that personal injury lawyers attempt to write are really wasted efforts.  This is unfortunate because it means that lawyers are taking their time away from working on their client’s cases to do something that will not improve their law practice.  This is why it is important to hire the best legal content writer with SEO experience to improve you law firm’s Google search page rankings.

Having a personal injury legal content writer with SEO experience is just one fo the 7 important traits for finding the best legal content writer.  We also believe there are three other important traits that personal injury law firms and lawyers should look for to get a top legal content writer.  The important traits and three bonus traits are following:

1. At least five years of experience, preferable ten or more;
2. JD recipient and holding a valid law license;
3. SEO knowledge;
4. Practiced or practicing as a lawyer, bonus for plaintiff and defendant’s work;
5. Proven track record of results;
6. Punctual and on time;
7. Set-it and forget-it type of worker;
8. Strong communication skills and responsive;
9. Fair revision and refund policy; and
10. Understands medicine and anatomy in order to explain personal injuries.

We have already discuss why our personal injury legal content writer has significant experience under the first element.  We also shared that our law firm blog writer has a JD and a law license in New Jersey and New York.  But not only a law license, but also the requisite “Character and Fitness” to practice law in these states.  Our legal content writer is also on the “Character and Fitness” committee which means he is the one vetting and evaluating the morals, ethics, and fitness of bar applicants!  Needless to say, the first two elements for the best legal content writer are easily met.

Now we are discussing the third and important factor, trait, or element of the best legal content writer.  That is SEO experience and how it is critical for a law firm blog writer.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the concept of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic through “organic” search engine results.  There are two broad types of search engine results which are paid results or organic results.  Paid results are obviously ads that a website owner pays to a search engine like Google to be at the top of the search engine results.  Whereas organic results are the search engine results with naturally occur based on the SEO of a website.  These organic search engine results appear on the first page of Google based on the quality of the content, the form it is presented, the relevancy and authority of the website, and the frequency at which the website is updated.  

But those are just some of the basic, foundational elements of SEO.  The best legal content writer with SEO experience knows much more than just these elements.  This is important because it can really help a law firm website and legal blog grow higher in organic search page results.  Particularly for personal injury law firms in very competitive markets, SEO is a must.

What is the Point of SEO?

The point of SEO is to simply help your website stand out in search engine results. Indeed, while Google is the largest and most used search engine, it is not the only search engine.  Bing and Yahoo! also have popular search engines that are well-used.  But, Google is still the king of interest searches.  Following the Google SEO factors and best practices also translates well into helping appear high on Bing and Yahoo! search engine results.  The goal of SEO is to simply help a website or webpage tell search engines that the content is relevant, important, and helpful to an internet searcher’s query.  Using these best SEO practices is like a Rosetta Stone between humans and the Google search algorithm.

SEO is important because it is the set of factors that the search engines are looking for to determine how content on the internet can help a searcher.  Search engines are just machines.  They need to scour the internet and find, evaluate, and present websites that might fit into search results.  Search engines do this by looking through all available content to “crawl and index” the content before a person searches for it.  The content is then categorize and when someone searches for relevant content, the search engine can pull it up.

Google Webmaster Main Points for SEO

The exact algorithm for Google SEO is not shared.  Nor are the SEO factors for Bing or Yahoo! shared.  Part of the reason is because search engines do not want people to know the exact formula to manipulate it.  Another reason is that Google is constantly working to refine and improve its search engine factors.  It is estimated that Google could improve, modify, or tweak factors how it searches for content weekly if not daily.  This is important because it helps Google continue to improve its search engine which only makes it the superior search engine to use (at least we think so!).  

Rather, Google wants website owners to follow general, best practices.  Google releases what are known as webmaster guidelines or best SEO practices to follow.  These are aimed at keeping people from using SEO practices that “trick” the search engine and people into clicking into your website.  Rather, the SEO practices are aimed to help people come find your content naturally.  Some of the best Google webmaster guideline advice is the following:

• Write content for people, not for search engines.  Unnatural results can be identified by the search engine and marked in a negative light.  This means the results could come up less on search engine results.
• No trickery and do not deceive search engine users OR users coming to your website.  If your website is using methods which get people to accidentally click on different things they do not intend to, or if you website advertises one thing but presents something completely different, Google will likely give you a demerit.
• Focus on the crux of your website for its niche.  General websites have a lot of competition out there and can easily get pushed to the bottom of search engine results.  Rather, focus on your narrow niche and grow from there.

Here are some of Google webmaster guidelines’ things to avoid:

• Do not use automatically generated content.  There are WordPress plugins that will automatically pull articles and blogs from other websites to your own website if the plugin finds it relevant to what you want on your website.  This is great if you can manage all that content and comment on it or improve it.  But if you are just rotely sharing that content, Google will see that and it will hurt your website.
• No back linking or other link schemes.  If Google sees that your website is trying to trick the search engine, you could be demerited.  This includes law firm blogs that try to get links from a backlink source.
• Having pages with little original content or no content.  This includes just making pages with no text to get people to click on it, or copy-and-pasting content from other websites to your own website.
• Using hidden text and links.  Never, ever do this.  It has no purpose on a website other than to trick users.  
• Using pages with irrelevant keywords to get users to come and find the page.

Content is Critical for SEO: Our Best Legal Content Writer with SEO Experience Explains

As you can see in Google webmaster guidelines, one important part of SEO is content.  In the best practices, having relevant content for people and not search engines is imperative.  This includes content that is helpful to searchers.  For personal injury victims, this is including blog posts about auto accidents, trucking accidents, medical malpractice, slip and falls, and other types of personal injuries.  This could be explaining the law, whether that be decisional common law, statutory law, regulations, or other bodies of law.  This could also be explaining how liability works in your state, or how damages are calculated.  

Many times you may need to even explain why some people may be victims of negligence and not even realize it.  This is common with medical malpractice victims.  This is why a medical malpractice legal content writer might become the most important person on your marketing team.

On the other side of the coin, you can see that Google webmaster guidelines also says that bad practices include tricking users.  Google wants websites to be writing content to help users and not to trick search engines into making your website the top of the search results.  Having little or no content is a big issue.  Especially having no original content.  This is why the best legal content writer with SEO experience will be able not draft unique and original content for your website that is not copy-and-pasted from anywhere else.

General SEO Factors that Personal Injury Lawyers Should Know About

There are so many SEO factors that it would take a dissertation to explain it all.  But we will, just not right now.  In the future we will break down SEO factors and why they can help personal injury lawyers and law firm blogs.  But for the purposes of this post and demonstrating how the best legal content writer will have SEO experience, here are some of the most crucial factors.

Content Quality – This is almost always the number one factor on any SEO website or Google webmaster guidelines, advice, article, or other informative post.  This is because content is always king.  You can play any other SEO games with behind-the-scenes techniques, but content will always drive search engines to websites.  Even websites with other poor SEO principles will still get on the first few pages of Google as opposed to websites that have no content but use other strong SEO techniques.  Remember, the main point of searching online is to find information.  If your law firm blog posts has good information, it will be a good hit for a search engine user.  That is what Google wants.  So hire a personal injury content writer to do it.

Content Search and Keyword Research – Again, this relates to content and is very important.  Doing your research on what people are searching is critical to getting good search engine ranking.  A great example I always tell personal injury law firms is that people do not know what premises liability is or what it means.  No one is searching premises liability.  In fact, some non-personal injury lawyers will not know what premises liability is or the types of cases.  Instead of having keywords “premises liability” on your practice area pages or law firm blog, you should have “slip and fall liability.”  This is because injured victims are searching for slip and fall or trip and fall lawyers, not premises liability lawyers.  This is important because if you have to prioritize on the types of pages, you should first focus on slip and fall liability, then trip and fall liability, and then premises liability as an umbrella.  But yes, you should include premises liability because you also want to make sure you have a referral market stream from other personal injury lawyers!

Content Usage of Keywords – See a pattern?  Content, content, content.  Once you know your keywords, using these keywords through your practice area pages, law firm blog, and other website pages is crucial to getting the results you want.  This helps both searchers and search engines find your content through use of “buzzwords.”  The best legal content writer with SEO experience knows how to use these keywords like a judge would want buzzwords in a motion.

Hire the Best Legal Content Writer with SEO Experience for Your Personal Injury Law Firm

SEO has many important tricks and tips.  But the most important is the simplest: Have good content.  It really is that simple.  If you have solid content which is even marginally optimized, your law firm website and law firm blog has a better chance of appearing on search engine results than websites which do not have good content but other strong SEO techniques.  

Content is king.  This is why having a personal injury legal content writer is important if not imperative for your law firm website.  Ask our our experienced legal content writer with a JD, law license, and SEO experience can help market your personal injury law firm practice.