Like “big data” and “the internet of things,” search engine optimization (SEO) is one of those buzz phrases a lot of people throw around but few people truly understand. Yet as an attorney concerned with improving your website and getting the most out of your legal content writing, SEO is an important tactic to understand.

Your law firm will benefit from search engine optimization if you embrace these two main concepts:

 Basic SEO best practices

 Keyword research

But before you can dive into those topics, you need to get a better picture of SEO.

What Is SEO?

When you want to find something on the web, you go to a search engine and type in your topic. The aim of SEO is for your site to come up first in the list of results that are spit back by a search engine. This is where legal content writing and SEO get tied together.

Think of SEO as the bait and your website as a hook. To get people to come to your site, you need to provide the right bait. Once you get them there, you can entice them to stay with your intriguing website content.

Basic SEO Best Practices

Search engines are forever refining their algorithms, or the formula they use to come up with search results. That means recommendations for SEO are always changing. It’s important to stay abreast of these changes so your legal writing and SEO achieve what you’re hoping for.

Here are three important SEO guidelines your legal content writing should follow:

1. Use well-researched keywords in your content.

2. Keep your social media accounts active to show you have a vital, interactive site.

3. Post high-quality content that shows you have spent time and effort keeping your site up to date.

When you do these three things, you will send a signal to Google and other search engines that your site is worth linking to.

Legal Content Keyword Research

You probably already have an excellent legal blog and a thriving Twitter account for your law firm. But how do you find the right keywords?

Keywords are the terms people use to look things up online. You want to include a location and your services in the keywords you target, and you want to include many different combinations. So, for instance, if your firm does divorce law in Boston, the keywords you want to target might include “Boston divorce lawyer” or “divorce attorney in Massachusetts.”

These keywords then must be integrated into the content on your site, such as using them in a blog post or on your homepage.

Get Help with Legal Content Writing and SEO

This may all seem a bit overwhelming if you have no background in SEO and you are already swamped by your duties at your law firm, which is why many lawyers bring in an outsider skilled in SEO. Contact Lawyers Writing for Lawyers today to get the help you need.