If you have studied SEO in any way, you will undoubtedly have come across many articles and tutorials that mention content. Content could be considered the beating heart of SEO as it is content more than anything that Google uses within its algorithm to calculate where any single website page related to legal matters is going to rank in its search results.
It goes further than that, because merely having content present on your legal website or any online real estate that you have such as social media or a legal-themed blog, is not enough to improve rankings. In fact, there is content that can actually harm your rankings. What is needed is quality content that meets many of the criteria that Google is looking for when it crawls legal websites looking for content.
The way to ensure that your content meets the requisite quality standards to boost your rankings is via how it is written. You do not need to be at the level of a bestselling author, but rather someone who knows how good content related to legal matters should be written to satisfy both those who read it, and those who evaluate its relevance and ranking score aka Google and the other search engines.
To help you understand how your legal content can be written better, and specifically for SEO purposes, here are seven tips that have come from much of what SEO experts have discovered and the information that Google occasionally provides regarding rankings and how content affects them.
Tip #1: Before you press a single key to start writing any content you must do keyword research first. Knowing what keywords will get your legal website ranked means you have sight of what words and phrases to include in your content and which are the most likely to get ranked first.
Tip #2: Use headings throughout your content because it breaks it up and makes it easier to read so visitors should stay on the page longer. Headers can contain essential keywords which are identified as such by Google via Header Tags or ‘H’ Tags as they are usually called.
Tip #3: Although we are talking here about SEO, bizarrely we are going to recommend that you write first for those who will read your content, and second for Google’s purposes because the actions of your readers, such as how long they remain on a page, are critical to Google determining your website rankings.
Tip #4: Do not stuff any of your content with keywords. Google has long ago worked out how to identify content that has been written to try and hoodwink it into ranking a page for specific legal keywords by including it numerous times. Include keywords, but in a quantity that seems natural rather than contrived.
Tip #5: One of Google’s favourite features amongst its users is featured snippets, which are the answers to questions people type into its search bar. So, create content that is optimised to be used as a featured snippet, especially answers to frequently asked legal questions.
Tip #6: Although many in SEO are obsessed with links to a website, Google also recognises when links go out from a website and use them to establish relevance. This means you should interlink within your legal website between different items of content and link out from your content to high-authority legal websites.
Tip #7: Arguably, you should spend longer on creating great titles for your legal content than you should write it. An awesome title not only attracts visitors to your legal website, but the keywords within it can also give Google enough reason to rank that content higher in its rankings than it would if the title were poor.