8 minute read
How to Create Quality Content That Ranks
How to Create Quality Content That Ranks
Head of Account Management Dan Hodges from Conscious Solutions discusses practical ways your law firm can create quality content that ranks on the SERPs. Conscious Solutions has over 19 years’ experience in helping law firms to become more successful online.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to the process of making your website more visible to potential clients on search engines.
You might think that by adding a few keywords throughout your website will help you to rank on Google and other search engines’ search engine results pages (SERPs). The bad news is that it’s much more nuanced than this, but the importance of SEO for law firms cannot be underestimated.
The importance of keywords for SEO shouldn’t be ignored, but other factors are at play here too including a page’s meta title and description, ALT text on images, readability, video optimisation, social media, digital PR, links and more. A combination strategy is the best way to ensure your content is visible and valuable to clients.
In this article, we discuss the factors that determine whether your digital marketing consists of quality content that will also rank on search engines.
How can I get my content to rank?
1. Define your goals
As with any marketing strategy, the first step is to define your goals. Without clear goals, your SEO strategy could go awry. Do you want to bring more traffic and business to your firm immediately? If so, SEO might not be the best strategy for you, and paid advertising might be more beneficial.
Your firm should also decide whether you want to focus on repurposing old content or creating new content for the website as this will have an impact on the time and resources it will take to implement your SEO strategy. You should also identify what your priorities are for SEO. As an example, you may currently be generating enough work in one area, which would therefore mean that these pieces of content could wait a little longer than another area where you currently have little work.
2. Research your keywords
After you’ve identified which pages and pieces of content you want to optimise, it’s time to research your keywords. With our clients, we use Google Search Console and ahrefs to identify keywords that our clients are already ranking for, and keywords that we think we can compete for with content. Once we’ve researched the keywords that are relevant and realistic, we choose a primary keyword. If you don’t want to pay for a keyword finder, Answer the Public (https://answerthepublic. com/) is a popular free tool that provides a similar function or Moz Keyword Explorer (https://moz.com/explorer) which gives users 10 free queries a month.
3. Identify your primary keyword
It’s important to have one primary keyword throughout your content, however, this needs to be written in a natural way that still makes sense to your clients. Otherwise, your content might rank on Google but it won’t see the conversions your firm wants.
We’d recommend placing your primary keyword in the following places:
1. Meta title
2. Heading 1
3. Opening paragraph
4. Body text
5. Closing heading 2
6. URL
4. Determine the search intent
We’ve suggested places to put your keyword in the above section. But identifying the search intent of a keyword is a great way to determine how many times you need to use your keyword throughout your blog, social media post or piece of content. If you get stuck trying to figure out search intent, we’d recommend searching the keyword in Google to see what results come up and if they are relevant to the content you want to post. If not, it’s probably not the right word for this piece of content.
And how can I make quality content that improves my chances of ranking?
1. Make sure your content is readable
It’s no secret that the law is complex, technical and features a lot of jargon. But this shouldn’t translate into your website content. Readability is paramount for creating quality content, not just content that ranks. As mentioned above, your keyword placement should be natural and feel as though it flows throughout the text, but this isn’t the only factor to consider.
You also need to consider how your sentences and page are structured as people often want to scan the text on a page to find the bit that is of interest to them. Therefore, we’d recommend using lots of headings and sub-headings, and avoiding using long-winded sentences with no pauses to keep people engaged.
If you’re not sure how your content fares, have a look at a free readability tool like Yoast SEO or Grammarly for a friendly reminder of how your content reads. I’ve been told by Grammarly more than once that my content is “a bit bland”!
2. Add internal links
Internal links that go to other relevant blog posts or service pages on your website should be dotted throughout your content. This not only provides additional context for your potential client, but it helps to inform Google and other search engines about other pages that can also rank for this topic helping with indexing and crawling budget.
3. Make sure your blog is indexed
This leads us on nicely, to ensuring your blog posts are indexed. If you are seeing that you’ve done the keyword research, you’ve optimised your content throughout, but you are still seeing zero hits to your website, it could be because the page hasn’t been indexed yet.
To rectify the issue, go to Google Search Console (https:// search.google.com/search-console/about), copy your URL into the top search bar and request indexing. If your blog is written to a high standard, you should have no issues getting it indexed within a week. Internal linking, as mentioned earlier, can also help resolve this.
4. Consider digital PR and outreach
Digital PR and outreach links are great ways to increase brand awareness as well as having benefits to your domain authority and SEO strategy.
By obtaining good quality backlinks (other sites linking to your site), you can increase your website’s validity in the eyes of Google. If it’s not already, resharing your content and reaching out to news sites and bloggers will help your great quality content to rank.
5. Don’t forget about social media
Social media is a search engine too, so don’t forget to share or repurpose your content for social media too. Our best practices for getting content seen on social media includes:
• Using a relevant and engaging image
• Utilise hashtags throughout your captions
• Use relevant keywords in the caption and as hashtags but make sure the most important one is at the start of your caption
• Optimise for meta descriptions on Facebook, this is the first 18 characters of your caption
• Make sure your profile’s bio is filled out
6. Utilise video
Videos are also a great way to create content that ranks but is high quality. In general, videos can rank more easily than content because there are fewer videos out there – especially on the niche topics your firm will be discussing. The best way to use video is to ensure they are the prominent item on the page, but still include some text and description on your landing page, YouTube profile or social media for context, and to get those allimportant keywords included. We’d recommend using the steps in the first section to optimise this.
Adding video transcripts and closed captions can also be beneficial for SEO purposes as it makes them more scrapable, as well as promotes inclusivity and accessibility. But, the most important factor is to ensure the video is above the fold for it to show up in the SERPs.
7. Always include a call to action
It’s all well and good optimising your page and ranking on Google. But what should people do next? If this isn’t clear on your website, this could be why your website traffic isn’t converting. So, once you’ve created quality content that is optimised for SEO, make sure you add a clear call to action to the page. This could be a form, a download, another blog post or your firm’s contact details.
We’d recommend placing these at the end of the page or piece of content.
Does your firm need help with its search engine optimisation?
One of the great things about SEO is that success can be easily measured, and the strategy can be amended and developed at any time depending on the results you are seeing. If your firm isn’t sure where to get started with SEO, we’re here to help.
Conscious Solutions has over 19 years of experience in helping law firms to become more successful online. We specialise in website design, SEO, PPC, legal copywriting, social media, digital PR, branding and more.
Contact our team on 0117 325 0200 or sales@conscious.co.uk ■
