Law Firm Website Content: A Simple Guide for 2024

Your website is the virtual extension of your law firm. It’s not just a business card that potential clients pick up and toss away once they get your contact information. With the right law firm website content and strategic marketing, your law firm website can fulfil all of these goals: brand building, lead generation, and client success.

Let’s learn how to use content to your advantage.

How Content Works for Law Firm Websites

Prospective clients come to your website for a purpose, be it to learn more about legal matters, get to know your legal team, book a consultation, or hire you outright.

Website content provides your visitors with the information they need to hit these objectives. Using a solid content strategy will also help raise brand awareness, establish your authority, and increase your law firm’s online reach. 

Types of Law Firm Content

Here’s a quick overview of the different law firm website content types:

• Essential page content: This is a content type that every company needs on their website — not just law firms. We’re talking about content for your “About Us” page, “Contact Us” page, homepage, and the like. 
• Blog content: Blog posts provide website visitors with in-depth and actionable information. As a law firm, legal blogging will build the trust of your target audience, prove your expertise, and gain recurring traffic to your new website. 
• Gated content: This refers to highly valuable content assets that can only be accessed by registered users, like eBooks, industry reports, and online courses. Offering gated content is a great way for law firms to convert website visitors into email subscribers or paying clients. 
• Landing page content: A landing page is where visitors arrive or “land” when coming to your website. Landing pages feature streamlined, cohesive content designed to encourage visitors to take action, like booking a consultation, using a contact form, or downloading a resource. 
• User-generated content: As the name suggests, user-generated content is created and posted by users. UGC, like client testimonials and reviews, can be used to prove your credibility, showcase your previous wins, and build the trust of new prospects. 
• Your legal team bios: Attorney bios are a specific content type that highlights the strengths, experience, accomplishments, and background of your legal team. Since bios incorporate different content elements, from legal portraits to Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons, they require special care and attention to detail to be effective. 

Understanding the different content types for law firms is the first step toward a successful content strategy. Next up, let’s talk about proven tactics that will help you create engaging pieces your potential clients (and search engines) will love. 

6 Best Practices for Creating Law Firm Website Content

Remember the following best practices to make the most out of your content:

1. Focus on Your Target Audience

The difference between low-quality and high-quality content is one word: value. 

It doesn’t matter if you have Hemingway-level writers in your team. Your law firm’s content marketing efforts won’t succeed if readers don’t get any meaningful value that aligns with their needs. 

That’s why the first rule of content marketing is to always write for your audience. Understand who they are, their goals, and the challenges they face. 

There are several ways to do this: 

• Run surveys
• Automate feedback forms
• Collect feedback via email
• Read industry reports
• Research keywords to analyze the demand for content topics
• Observe legal forums 
• Check your audience data via Google Analytics

Another effective way to conduct audience research is to investigate social media groups and online communities. Reddit, for example, has dozens of groups or “subreddits” discussing specific legal topics. Just use the built-in search bar to discover relevant subreddits and check out the information your target audience is looking for.

Create “customer personas” to keep everyone in your content team on the same page. These are fictional profiles that reflect your client archetypes, including details like their goals, spending power, employment, and personal background. 

Ask yourself, who needs my legal services? What’s their experience with legal issues, and how do they handle the decision-making process when hiring lawyers? 

After answering these questions, bring it all together using a tool like Make My Persona by HubSpot. Just be sure to tailor their goals to the legal services you provide. 

The more detailed your customer personas, the better. 

Feel free to create multiple customer personas to represent every client type that reaches out to your firm. 

2. Create Content Strategically to Drive Business Goals 

While it’s true that website content should be written for your audience, every piece should also contribute to a business goal. This can be to get new clients, increase online traffic, promote an event, drive up newsletter subscriptions, and so on. 

Different goals require different content strategies. For example, if your goal is to generate more leads, focus on creating and optimizing landing page copy that promotes your legal services. 

Lawyer lead generation also covers other types of content like banner advertising copy and gated content, like eBooks and podcast recordings. Diversifying your lead generation content arsenal will help you fine-tune your strategy based on what your prospects like. 

Not sure which content types to use based on your business goals?

Take a look at the table below for ideas:

Content Marketing Goal	Content Types
Lead Generation	Gated content (lead magnets), practice area pages, “contact us” page, advertising copy, and attorney bios
SEO	Blog posts, guest posts (published on another website), location-specific content, and original data
Social Media Marketing	Interviews, short-form videos, infographics, and inspirational quotes
Lead Nurturing	Blog posts, newsletters, online courses, and checklists
Conversion Rate Optimization	Testimonials, reviews, gated content, practice area landing pages, and case studies

3. Craft Content With SEO in Mind 

Regardless of your business goals, it’s important to create law firm website content with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. 

SEO is an essential content marketing strategy that increases your content’s visibility on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Once you reach Google’s first page, you’ll get recurring organic traffic — AKA people who use search engines to solve their problems. 

To optimize your content for search engines, start by performing keyword research. 

In SEO, keywords are terms or phrases included in search engine queries, like “family law attorney Phoenix,” “New York criminal defense lawyer,” and “animal bite lawyer Houston.” It’s up to you to perform keyword research and identify the terms that your target audience uses. For this, you need tools like Semrush, Ubersuggest, and other Ahrefs alternatives.

When conducting keyword research, it’s important to look for low-competition keywords with a reasonable monthly search volume. To do this efficiently, target “long-tail keywords” tied to your practice areas and service locations. 

Not only are long-tail keywords less competitive than broad keywords, but they also let you target a narrower audience with a specific search intent. Some examples are “NY personal injury lawyer,” “car accident attorney in Miami,” and “best trucking accident attorney Pennsylvania.” 

With keyword research off your checklist, it’s time to weave them into your content creation process. Here are a few things to keep in mind: 

• Mention target keywords in key content elements. This includes the page title, headings, subheadings, image “alt text” tags, main content body, and page URL. 
• Monitor optimization with on-page SEO tools. Use Clearscope, Rank Math, or Surfer to track your content optimization efforts. 
• Add internal links between related posts. Craft individual articles for related keywords and connect them via internal links. 

Lastly, remember that SEO is an ever-changing landscape. What works today may no longer be effective once Google rolls out the next algorithm update. 

Speaking of Google algorithms, a current SEO guideline is to publish helpful content. This means creating “people-first” content that puts the needs of your target audience before technical SEO practices, like keyword optimization and link building. 

As a rule of thumb, focus on the value your content offers that readers won’t find anywhere else. 

4. Dissect Your Competitors

One of the best ways to research content ideas that perform well in the legal niche is to analyze your competitors. This lets you skip hours of content research and discover strategies that are proven to work. 

A straightforward approach is to visually observe the top pages on SERPs. Simply run a Google search with your target keyword and borrow ideas from the top results. 

Look at how your competitors structure their posts. Pay attention to the article’s title, length, subheadings, keywords, and tone. 

If you like to go in-depth, use SEO tools like Semrush, Serpstat, and Ahrefs. These tools reveal important competitor data, like their top pages and most popular keywords. 

Don’t forget that you’re only borrowing your competitor’s ideas. 

You’re not supposed to produce replicas of their content — you need to make something better. That said, always be on the lookout for opportunities to one-up your competitor, like using more recent data, adding more charts, covering more subtopics, etc. 

5. Don’t Compromise Quality For Quantity

While it’s important to regularly publish posts on your legal website, content quantity should never come at the expense of quality. 

Law firms and legal services are considered “Your Money or Your Life” (or YMYL) niches. From an SEO perspective, that means you should be extremely careful with the accuracy, reliability, safety, and quality aspects of your content. Otherwise, your law firm website’s visibility might get heavily penalized by Google. 

How do you make sure that every piece of content meets YMYL standards? 

Just remember E-E-A-T — short for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust.

• Experience: Is the content based on your legal experience or just information from freely available sources?
• Expertise: Is your content produced by certified, legal experts? 
• Authority: Will your content boost your firm’s image as a reliable source of legal information?
• Trust: Does your content only include 100% accurate and honest information? 

Adding E-E-A-T to your content formula will put you on the right track. To absolutely nail your content’s quality and YMYL adherence, you also need to focus on other factors, such as grammatical correctness, originality, readability, and flow. 

6. Get Content Promotion Channels Up and Running

There’s an unthinkable amount of content published on the internet across industries. 

If you want to cut through the noise and pull visitors to your website, you need to be relentless in your content promotions. This is a must-have component in every law firm marketing strategy. And, for law firms, the content promotion channels usually include the following: 

• Social media channels: Spread your content on Facebook, X (formerly “Twitter”), LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and other social networks. 
• Newsletters: Regularly promote your content to existing leads in your email list. 
• Influencer marketing: Collaborate with social media influencers, experts, and thought leaders in the legal industry to promote your firm. 
• Online business directories: Get listed on platforms like Google Business Profile to promote your website. 
• Content syndication: Re-publish your content on websites like Medium and Flipboard. 
• Online communities: Talk about your law firm and share your content in online forums and communities, like Reddit, Quora, and TheLaw.com. 
• Guest blogging: Publish original content on other authoritative websites to extend your online presence. 
• Paid advertising: Pay to promote your website and content through various advertising formats, including banner ads, native ads, and in-text ads.

The list goes on when it comes to content promotion channels for law firms — each is advanced enough to warrant its own full-length guides. 

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of in-depth guides that discuss effective content marketing strategies for law firms. Of course, there are also digital marketing agencies that provide law firms with the manpower, tools, and other essential resources they need to launch successful content marketing campaigns.

8 Must Have Content Pages for Your Law Firm Website

Ready to start creating great content? 

Make sure you put the following content pages at the top of your list: 

1. Homepage

For lawyers, the purpose of your homepage is to impress, build confidence, and encourage action. 

Your homepage should have a clear navigation menu, visible CTAs, essential business information, and a compelling value proposition. In addition, you may include the following elements to boost your credibility in the eyes of new visitors: 

• Client testimonials
• Accreditations
• Overview of legal services
• Brief introduction of your attorneys
• Media coverage logos

2. Practice Area Landing Pages

A practice area landing page is a dedicated page that focuses on a specific problem that your product or service fixes. 

Think of it this way: your landing page should talk about the questions and problems that your potential clients face. And when it’s time to truly take action, that’s when your law firm will swoop in with a compelling CTA that guides them to the right action. 

You can read about the fundamentals of effective landing page design here.

3. Attorney Bios

Attorney bios feature your firm’s most valuable assets. They usually contain legal portraits, some background information, a few client testimonials, and a list of each lawyer’s career achievements — all to build your prospect’s confidence. 

Since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here, the best strategy is to conduct research and borrow inspiration from attorney bio examples. 

4. Contact Page

A contact page is exactly what it sounds like — a page for users who want to reach out to your firm. Contact pages generally don’t require a lot of content, but they rely on smart law firm website design. 

For example, a lot of law firms use easy-to-use contact forms to simplify the process. Most websites also include alternative communication options, such as phone numbers, social media links, and email addresses. 

5. About Page

Your law firm’s “About” page should double down on the reasons why potential clients should hire you. You can highlight your firm’s awards, total sum recovered, most noteworthy cases, media mentions, and more. 

While you’re allowed to go all-out on self-promotion, your about page should still be of value to your audience. This may come in the form of links to useful articles, free consultation offers, and so on.

6. Client Testimonials

You need to remember two things when presenting client testimonials on your website. 

First, it must be believable, so be sure to include the client’s name and review website. And second, it must share details of your client’s positive user experience. 

7. Case Studies and Success Stories

Publishing case studies and client success stories is a surefire way to establish your law firm’s credibility. You can also use these content assets to produce and share original data, which will naturally generate backlinks and improve your website’s SEO over time. 

Case studies may also be offered as gated content, getting your lead generation efforts to a running start. 

8. Blog Posts, Resources, and FAQs

With the essential pages above ready, the bulk of your content writing time will go to blog posts, FAQs, and a variety of other informative content resources. Keep covering relevant topics that your target audience cares about to grow your traffic, build your authority, and further expand your law firm website’s reach. 

Hire Expert Legal Content Services 

Managing a law firm is not a walk in the park — and neither is running an effective, goal-driven content marketing campaign.

With a little guidance and resources, anyone is capable of getting some results with their content marketing efforts. But if you’re serious about content marketing and need measurable results fast, your best bet is to hire a professional agency with proven results. Want to learn more about our legal content marketing services? Contact us today and get a free quote!