web writing

The job of regularly updating your website with news, thoughts and useful information is a time consuming craft that requires a good deal of thinking. But it can bring great advantages that are worth considering.

Showcasing your expertise

If you work in a sector that is knowledge intensive, your team has knowhow and information that is certainly valuable to someone out there.

Web content is about giving extra use to that knowledge. You can publish part of it in a web page so that it can be found by people that might need it.

You are openly showing to the world that you know what you are talking about (your field of expertise) and that you are willing to share that knowledge as part of your service.

One of the dangers of being an expert is that, sometimes, you ignore that you know too much about a topic. This is why we believe effective content is a partnership between subject matter experts and content publishing experts. They will make sure that the content you write is accessible for people and algorithms.

Using content to learn & explore new territories 📍

In the current volatile and changing world, the capacity to learn new things is essential to stay afloat in business.

For example, let’s imagine you are a real estate lawyer and you would like to explore how upcoming technologies (Virtual Reality or Blockchain) are going to change the real estate regulatory environment. You know nothing about those topics but web writing as a process can help you critically explore them. Writing as a process makes you ask the right questions and maybe find some answers.

Writing is also a great excuse to get in touch with other subject matter experts in the field you would like to learn about. I find writing a blog post, is often a good argument to start a conversation with an expert I don’t personally know. Maybe asking him a question, a written contribution or a quote.

Leading with content

Many business and other institutional actors have lost touch with their customers. People are lost and they need leaders they can trust.

This is your opportunity to shine and be different from your competitors. You know what the problems of your clients are and web content can be a great tool to reconnect with them.

In order to reinforce that trust, show more of your real opinions in an authentic way. A content strategy can be a great process to listen to people around you, rethink your core values and show what you think is fair, what is pertinent to do right now.

When you start creating content that is aligned with your core values, you are going to start to attract the people that connect with those values at the emotional level. Your ideal clients and collaborators start to pop up🍄. Your can use that momentum to hire new people, invite them to your events and start building community with them.

Don’t know where to start? Seize the opportunity 🙋‍♀️

I hope I gave you some solid arguments to decide to invest in web content. It can become a business asset to make you gain competitive advantage and elevate your business game.

We love helping teams at the initial phase of a content strategy.

Apply for a discovery session. Let’s have a conversation on how you can start tapping into the business value of web content.

I want to convince you that if you are a law firm with at least 10 lawyers in your team, you need to be doing SEO right now💎.

I’m not going to give you a definition of SEO because there are many out there ( you should check SEO gurus like ahrefs, yoast, moz, screaming frog) .

For me, doing SEO is like dancing with Google🕺🏼: You are creating content and helping Google achieve it’s mission. If you do that, Google is going to treat you well and give you rewards🎁.

What is Google’s mission? At it’s core, they have to understand language. Their job is to figure out what people are searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how they spell or combine the words in their query.

The E in SEO stands for Experience

Originally SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. For me doing SEO is less about search “Engine” and more about search “Experience”. That places the focus less on pleasing the machine and more on pleasing the human who is searching for information. The closest your piece of content is to you user’s human needs and their context, the higher your chances are of getting good results.

Doing SEO is using “digital” to accomplish part of your mission as a lawyer

According to the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers, one of their key roles is advising clients as to their legal rights and obligations, and as to the working of the legal system. Yes! One big part of the mission of the lawyer is to clarify information, to give information.. and now guess where are people looking for information today🤔? It’s Bing, DuckDuck, Yandex, and of course the big Google.

I was yesterday talking to an “artist” friend of mine who did not know if she had to declare their income coming from an airbnb listing to the tax authorities in Belgium. She clearly had a legal question but she was lost and did not know who she was supposed to ask. I said, why don’t you “Google it”? She said she did, but she got different pages saying different things about it. No page in the search results was tailored enough with an answer adapted to her life situation. This could be a content creation opportunity for law firms.

Let’s face it. It’s year 2021, if not you, somebody else is going to be doing it, somebody else is going to try to disrupt your market. The risk of not doing this as a lawyer is that there is an increasing number of actors with commercial interests (startups) that are not registered in a Bar, they don’t have same ethical standards as lawyers do, and they are writing content on the web solving legal issues. I know from direct sources that Bar registered lawyers are very worried about their market being disrupted by actors outside the Bar. I would advice them to stop worrying and start using digital to accomplish their mission as a lawyer.

Doing SEO as a lawyer who writes for the web

Web is a different medium. When you write your texts for the web you need to plan them, write them and display them in a different way.

Doing SEO is breaking up long texts and writing only what your user needs. Think about “micro questions” or “micro moments”, somebody out there has a burning legal question:

Is it legal to make vaccines a workplace obligation?

Think about my friend Ana who is an unemployed artist and does not know if she has to pay taxes for her Airbnb listing.

I know this is difficult because you have been trained to write differently but try to write a post that answers only that. And remove superfluous words or ideas that do not serve that purpose.

I am going to show you a bad example, but not to blame the author. On the contrary, I recognize the great work this law firm is doing with their content:

I think this article in french is a bad example for SEO, what they say is comprehensive and probably right in their analysis, but looks more like a report or memo: there are too many questions answered in this post. basically you need to break this article in 5 or 6 mini articles that answer smaller questions.

Doing SEO strengthen some good muscles💪

User centric muscles

It forces you to question if your service is good and to change adapt it to what your users need at each moment. More on this in this article

Mind clarity & information organization muscles

SEO forces you to think about having a clear mission for your website’s content and, as a side effect, also your law firm mission.

But you also need to have a structured website, with good schema markup language that makes sense to robots who are trying to understand what your website is about.

Collaboration muscles

Another good “thing” coming from SEO is that is will improve your collaboration skills. You need to go out there and connect with other legal actors that have websites in your semantic area. You need to find ways so that they link to your site. Those are “back links” and they will improve your SEO results.

I hope I managed to give you some good reasons on why should start being a much more SEOrious lawyer.

Get in touch with us if you would like to start creating SEO optimized content for your website ➡️ Sign up to our newsletter and you will get an email every month on things around the legal transformation of the legal sector.