Many attorneys (and business owners) don’t want to pay a professional writer to draft new website content.
We’re not going to tell you it’s best to hire out your writing, though as writers, we see the advantages.
Often law firms turn to their law students, paralegals, maybe a lawyer who takes an interest in writing. Then, a year often passes and the firm hasn’t produced as many new pages as it hoped. The written pages are all structured differently. Some pages may be long, look like they’re from Wikipedia and lack focus. We’ve been told focus doesn’t matter, that it’s all about SEO.
But shouldn’t good writing and SEO both matter, especially considering the money you are spending with your law firm website management firm? And if you’ve hit a roadblock on writing, how much SEO optimization is your website getting?
So we ask you to re-consider the professional writer. And if you still decide to handle your writing in-house, please consider the advice we offer our Boston legal marketing clients: provide the writers a rough outline and one or two standard paragraphs you want included in each page. Provide them a list of keywords to incorporate into the copy. Designate someone to review the copy and post it to the website. By taking these steps, you are developing a system for producing content faster and preserving your message. From there, the result depends on your writer’s talent, practice and ability to have an ongoing conversation with those in charge of the law firm’s marketing.
