Most people now know that stuffing keywords into web pages to achieve higher rankings in Google is about as effective as spitting into the ocean.  The practice of Keyword stuffing is likely to see your law firm’s website drop in rankings, due to the penalties Google will impose. Although Keywords still matter, it is vital that legal marketing professionals understand how they are important in 2015, or to put it another way, ‘What Google is looking for when it considers what is great content’.

 What is Googles’ Job?

When writing digital content, one of the easiest ways to improve your ranking on Google is to remember what Google, as a company, needs to provide its clients (individuals searching the web), in order to stay at the top of its game.  Google is just a business providing a service after all, and if its consumers get dissatisfied with the job it is doing, they will go somewhere else. Always keep in mind when creating content that Google’s primary task is to provide anyone in the world with the most relevant, up to date, high quality content available on the internet when they run a search through its engine. And that is pretty much it. But remember, in order to do this, it has to wade through billions of documents, in hundreds of languages, in a matter of seconds, to retrieve what the user is searching for. According to this fantastic article in the SEO Journal, “with the Hummingbird update, Google has basically rethought how they want to analyze pages and implemented some new technology to do it. Instead of focusing on the keywords themselves, the search engines are now looking at the ideas represented by the keywords. In other words, it’s not the keywords that the page is ranking for but the topic.   Remember, Google has access to billions and billions of pages of content. And they have the computing power to analyze that content in order to understand what makes one page better than another. If you want to rank for “snow skis,” but your content fails to say much about things that skiers find important (other than they type of ski they use), you’re going to miss the mark. By a long shot.”

How To Ensure You Are Covering Your Legal Topic Thoroughly in Your Content Marketing

The answer to that question is easy, and it is always the same.  Write for the reader, not the robots. This about what your law clients need to know about a certain issue.  For example, if you are writing a blog on directors’ duties, it is better to concentrate on the scope of the topic and include terms and discuss terms such as ‘conflicts of interests’ and ‘acting in good faith’.

How we Can Help with Legal Websites and Blogs

At The Legal Copywriting Company, we have a dedicated team of legally qualified writers who know exactly how to write for both the search engines and legal clients.  To find out more, please call us on 01 767 600544.  We would love to hear more about your law practice.