When it comes to creating killer content for your law firm website, I have good news and bad news. Actually, it’s the same news, and it really is both good and bad:
The days of “optimizing” your site by publishing massive amounts of mediocre, keyword-stuffed content are over.
It’s bad news, especially if you have spent years publishing keyword-stuffed content, because that content may now be hurting your search engine rankings—and because you’ll have to devote a bit more effort to producing quality material for your site in order to fix it.
However, it’s also good news because you now have an opportunity to create web content that truly reflects the high standards of your law firm.
SEO and Keyword Stuffing
Marketing experts sometimes jokingly define search engine optimization (SEO) as “the art of trying to guess what Google is going to do.” Since Google is always updating and changing its algorithms, SEO best practices also change regularly. Many of us came from the “old school” of SEO, that taught us to fill websites and blogs with lots of relevant keywords that would improve our page rank—a technique derogatorily known as “keyword stuffing.”
However, according to WordStream, Google now views keyword stuffing as a “black-hat tactic,” a cheap technique intended to hijack Google’s ranking and jump to the top of the search engine results without creating quality content. Google’s search bots are getting better at detecting and penalizing this type of content, while at the same time identifying and promoting genuinely well-crafted articles and web text. Therefore, keyword stuffing will no longer get your website any better visibility on the web; in fact, it might even hurt you in the long run.
What Does Work: Quality over Quantity
How can you make your website stand out in this new world of SEO? In the long run, you’ll do better to focus on quality content on fewer pages, rather than many pages of mediocre material. If you don’t have time to do the following yourself, consider hiring a copywriter to help you:
• Keep using relevant keywords, but use them naturally and sparingly.
• Clean up any existing “keyword-stuffed” content. Some articles can be edited to remove unnecessary keywords and make the writing smoother. If the article is all “fluff” and no substance, consider removing it, since it’s not doing you any favors.
• Write for clients and sales prospects, not for search engines. Google algorithms are getting better and better about identifying and indexing well-written content, so stop worrying so much whether the search engines can see it.
If you just focus on quality content, the search engines will find you, eventually. Remember that, at the end of the day, good SEO doesn’t get you sales and revenue—your clients do. So meet the needs of your clients, and watch your business grow.
