Blogging stands out as the top channel for drawing new clients in and securing cases for your law firm. It delivers the highest return on investment compared to other approaches, thanks to its unique ability to generate compounding growth over time.
With a blog, you’re discoverable whenever potential clients search for legal help. Unlike pushy ads (think interruptive marketing), when someone finds your blog through Google, they’re already primed and ready to connect with you.
Why is Blogging Important for Lawyers
Having a blog offers an attorney the best way to attract new clients and sign new cases. It allows you to show your clients that you’re a skilled and competent lawyer while at the same time promoting your services to prospective clients.
As with SEO services, it has one of the highest return on investment because of compounding growth.
Blogging accomplishes this while increasing the visibility of your law firm’s website, making it much easier for people that are in need of legal services to find your law firm. The best part is that it is free!
Blogging for lawyers is a powerful law firm marketing strategy that attracts more clients. A successful blog will answer your prospective clients’ questions, establish you as a thought leader, and attract more traffic to your law firm’s website.As per the 2021 American Bar Association report, 46% of respondents claimed to retain clients because of their blogs. Yet only 27% of law firms maintain a blog.
Unlike traditional advertising were the viewer is not always ready or looking for your services, similar to when someone sees your law firm’s ad on a billboard, TV or social media, it may or may not be relevant to them
However, when someone performs a search on Google after having a car accident for “how long should my back be sore after a car accident”. Once they click on a law firm’s page that ranks for that search term, they become a quality lead and have a high probability for converting into a client.
Why does your law firm need a blog?
A blog builds trust and authority for your law firm while boosting your website’s SEO, generating leads, and keeping clients connected to your brand. It’s a proven way to grow your practice.
Blog Posts Bring in Cases
Blogging helps your firm win more cases. Attorneys can share useful content—like answers to common client questions—saving time and addressing what prospective and current clients want to know. For example, a personal injury lawyer working on contingency can use blogs to tackle top concerns and attract serious inquiries.
How to Start a Law Firm Blog
The biggest hurdle for lawyers is finding time to start. Once you commit, here’s what to do:
- Pick a platform: Host it on your website or use a site like WordPress.com or Medium.com.
- Choose topics: Focus on your practice areas—broad like “personal injury” or narrow like “car accidents.”
- Know your audience: Answer what potential clients search for.
- Post regularly: Stick to a schedule to keep readers and search engines coming back.
- Share it: Promote your blog online to reach new clients.
What Makes a Law Blog Successful
A successful blog needs focus. Here’s what it takes:
- A strategy tied to your firm’s goals.
- A list of topics that match your strategy.
- A consistent posting plan.
- SEO-friendly content to rank on Google.
- A way to spread your posts online.
The Verdict Digital Marketing team uses these same steps to help our clients beat their competition.
The Verdict Digital Marketing team uses these same steps to help our clients beat their competition. Now it’s time to discuss the game plan using the same principles we have covered.
What Should You Write About?
Deciding what topics your law firm should write about may seem overwhelming at first, but I’m going to show you a number of ways I use to generate content ideas for my law firm clients.
One common mistake we see with law firm blogs is they lack a content strategy and many times lawyers that DIY think that their blog is a place to discuss internal company news.
If you want to use your blog to generate new client leads, it is not!
Company news is better left for use on email newsletter or social media posts.
If you decide to publish news-related content on your site, be sure its marked noindexed (meaning it won’t show up in search engines)
If your unsure one way to decide if something is worth posting and is newsworthy would be to ask yourself, would journalists want to do a story on it if you pitched them.
You want your law firm’s content to focus on your main practice areas, not your internal news.
Publishing blog posts consistently on a central topic will help your website rank for relevant keywords and variations.
Let’s cover a few of the ways you can generate good topics that are worth blogging about on your firm’s blog.
Ask Existing and Potential Clients
I’m routinely asked many of the same lawyer seo related questions, so I’m sure you experience this as well. What are your potential clients’ pain points? By listening to your clients you can develop topic ideas that will resonate with people you are trying to attract.
What do you do with these common questions your clients ask?
Jot them down and write content answering them. If you get asked these questions all the time, chances are people are probably searching online for it often as well.
Ask your fellow attorneys or intake staff for the questions they hear all the time from clients. These make great blog topics, and here’s why they work:
- They’re real concerns people want solved. When you write content answering these questions, it mirrors how you’d respond on a call or in person. That genuine tone builds trust—key for anyone looking for a lawyer.
- It positions you as an expert. There’s a unique power in seeing your answer in writing. When a potential client reads your article tackling their exact question, it hits harder than a conversation. Being published adds weight to your words, like an author’s name on a book boosts their credibility.
Perform Keyword Research to Determine SEO Value
Performing keyword research is an enormous help when trying to discover new blog ideas if you run out of client questions. Not only will you discover topics, you will gain additional insight into which topics people search for the most and associated keywords, ranking difficulty and volume for each. This benefit will help you make the most of your time when writing.
Keyword research can be intimidating as there is no “best way” of performing it. Knowing how to interpret the data for each keyword and applying it to each client’s unique situations makes it part science and part art form. This makes SEO Keyword research quite complex and time consuming to get it done correctly.
Understanding how people think and having the technical skillset to extract and interpret the data from the keyword tools in unique ways takes time and years to master.
Remember, some keyword research is better than none at all. If your looking for a quick way to come up with topics for free, you can use SEMRush Keyword Magic or Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator.
SEMRush Free Keyword Generator
You can use the Keyword Generator to quickly come up with keywords and gather additional metrics to help you understand how hard it might be to rank for that keyword and how many people search for it each month.
Find Blog Topics with SEMrush’s Keyword Generator
SEMrush’s Free Keyword Generator helps you brainstorm keywords fast and gives you key data—like monthly search volume and ranking difficulty—to pick the best ones for your law firm’s blog. Here’s how to use it:
- Go to the Tool: Visit SEMrush.com, sign up for a free account (no credit card needed), and find the Keyword Generator under the free tools section.
- Enter a Seed Keyword: Type in a broad term related to your practice, like “personal injury lawyer” or “divorce attorney,” then hit “Generate.”
- Review the List: You’ll get a batch of related keywords—questions, phrases, or terms people search. Look at “Volume” (how many searches per month) and “Keyword Difficulty” (how hard it is to rank).
- Pick Winners: Choose keywords with decent volume (e.g., 100+ searches/month) and lower difficulty (under 50% if possible) that match your expertise—like “how much does a DUI lawyer cost.”
- Plan Your Content: Use these keywords as blog titles or topics, answering the exact questions clients are asking online.
This quick process shows you what people search for and how to rank, so your blog targets real client needs and gets found on Google.
SEMRush will return a long list of keywords for you to analyze and decide how you can include them in your written content. If you really want to target potential clients, be sure to use long-tail keywords as they are also less competitive as well.
There is also a questions tab that you can click on that will provide you with a list of questions that contain your search term in them. This can be helpful when looking for some different ways to use a keyword within a topic.
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You can split these topics into two separate blog articles. Trying to cram both into one post might seem efficient, but it’s not always smart. If people search for these topics with different goals, combining them could tank your rankings for both. Instead, break them into distinct content hubs to boost your results.
How to Write Good Content for a Law Firm Blog
Once you’ve selected your topics, it’s time to start writing. Writing for your blog and the web in general is not like writing a college report is an entirely different skill set.
Let me share some tips for writing quality content that will rank better on Google as well as making it easier for people to read.
Consider Creating a Main topic (pillar content) and cluster with sub topics
Let’s look at an example:
- The pillar content for a legal blog would be an article about personal injury. It will be a comprehensive article that covers the essential information about the personal injury such as type of injuries that occur, auto, motorcycle, bicycle, workplace, etc.
- And the cluster content topics can be about the types of car accident injuries (back and spine, head, whiplash, etc.)
Select a Content Format & Use an Outline
Creating an outline is a great way to ensure that you cover the topics you had in mind while visualizing the layout of your blog. Once you have your outline, you need to think about how you want to present this information. One of the best blog formats I recommend for law firms to you when writing content are guides.
Guides work very well because they allow you to cover a complex topic in depth (with the help of your outline) and allow you to discuss the various stages a person may experience depending on their particular case.
For example, a guide covering everything to know about the divorce process, from filing the divorce petition, through negotiating a settlement and final judgment would be extremely helpful.
Another would be a personal injury guide that covers everything from the moment a person gets injured through the settlement phase would be another good one to help people.
Guides like these allow you to write great long-form content that can rank for hundreds of keywords.
Another type that works well for legal topics are Lists. Especially if you are covering topics/questions that have “types”. For example, topics that cover the types of injuries from a car accident or workplace injuries or types of DUI offenses, etc.
They are also great for discussing the types of compensation a person can recover such as, medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, etc.
Follow your outline: It should include relevant subtitles with the specific ideas you’ll cover in each one.
Keep Headings Concise
The way you format your content on your website is very important. You’ll want to use headings to break up paragraphs and ideas. It also breaks up big blocks of text making it easier for the reader to comprehend.
Headings provide powerful SEO signals that Google uses to evaluate what your content is about and the depth of the topics it covers. It’s important to include your primary keywords in your H tags without spamming them out.
Your headings need to be in a top down format such as starting with a H1 then your H2’s. You do not want to have an H3 heading unless it has a parent-level H2 heading
Tell Stories & Provide Examples To Create Unique Content
It’s hard to create unique content when every law firm is covering the same topic and we all know how much Google likes unique content.
The easiest way to make your content unique is to share your own experiences. Telling your own stories using information from former cases you’ve worked on can help describe things to people. Of course you should do this without violating any confidentiality.
Stories a number of benefits that will improve your content:
- They’re unique
- People love & remember stories
- They make your content more interesting increasing time on site
Use Short Paragraphs
Writing content like you would for a college paper or a legal document does not work for writing website content. People have short attention spans. In order to keep website visitors interested, you should keep your paragraphs short, no more than 3-5 lines before adding in a paragraph break.
This is very different from the type of things you’re probably used to writing but trust us; it’s better to break things up.
Walls of text are intimidating and turn visitors off. Online searchers don’t like to read long blocks of text on a website. So don’t create any additional obstacles to prevent them from reading content that they might find valuable for them.
Use Images, Bulleted Lists, Tables & Video to Make Your Content Interesting
There are a number of elements that can help break up your website text while providing visual images to help visitors comprehend it better.
Add Images: Images provide a great way to not only break up the content, but provide a visual aid to emotionally connect your readers to your content. Most times content producers misuse images by just grabbing any old image off of Getty Images or Pixabay and throwing them up on their websites blog.
While not everybody has their own graphics team, as a best practice, be sure to select an image for your content that is meaningful and provides an impact on your readers.
Bulleted Lists: Using elements such as bullets can help highlight important parts of your content. Like we mentioned in the earlier example, you can easily use a list when discussing the types of injuries or cities with the most car accidents.
Create Tables: Tables provide a great way to show information in a fashion that shows data high to low or for quick comparison. An example would be a table of the most dangerous roads or number of accidents by state. Formatting as a table makes these stats easier to read and digest then if they were in a text format.
Embed Videos: Not every visitor had the time to read through your article. Some may prefer to listen to you speak about the topic instead. Embedding videos also give you the chance to show your expertise by discussing the topic in person.
Internally Link to Your Other Content
Internally linking your blogs out to other useful content on your website can not only help readers find additional useful content, but can keep them on your site longer.
For example, you could link to an article that covers a topic more in depth such as a type of DUI or injury you’ve written about.
Here are some other tips for creating internal linking:
- Adding internal links from older articles to the new one – very important for SEO.
- Link your blog posts to relevant service pages. For instance, if your blog covers car accident injuries, point readers to your car accident service page—not a criminal defense page or something off-topic.
When you link between pages on your blog can boost their ability to rank higher for search queries. This also lets Google know which pages are most important on your website.
Optimize your content for your primary keyword
Knowing what your primary and secondary keywords for your areas of practice are is a crucial element for ranking your content on Google. Including these keywords in addition to other semantic keywords related to your topic will greatly improve the SEO rankings of your content.
Use Semantically Similar Keywords
When writing content, it’s important to include keywords and phrases that Google would expect to see in content related to that subject. What I mean is if you’re writing about personal injury, Google expects to see certain “entities” in your content so that it can make associations as part of their algorithm. Words like, accident, injuries, settlement, lawyer, injury, etc. should be included in your content to help Google understand what your content is about and make the connection between your content and other entities to help determine a searcher’s intent.
Yes, I know this is a bit advanced SEO for most. You, as an expert on this particular legal subject, would think this should be easy to do, but it’s not as simple as you’d think to cover these entities enough in your content.
While there are a number of SEO tools that can aid you in adding these relevant entities (keywords and phrases) to your content, most of these SEO tools are paid tools. If you do invest in your lawyer SEO, the keywords or entities these tools help you detect can really improve how Google serves your content to its searcher and increase your pages rankings.
While this is a bit advanced SEO for most, if you cant grasp the concepts you can always hire an expert SEO for your law firm to help your content improve significantly.
The most powerful are tools like SurferSEO, InLinks, TextRazor and MarketMuse
Below are practical search examples for MarketMuse, InLinks, Surfer SEO, and TextRazor that you can add to your article. These examples show how each tool might be used to find keywords or entities for a law firm blog, assuming a topic like “car accident lawyer.” I’ve kept them straightforward and realistic, based on how each tool functions.
MarketMuse Search Example
- Scenario: You want to write a blog post about “car accident lawyer.”
- How to Use: Log into MarketMuse, go to the “Research” tool, and enter “car accident lawyer” as your focus topic.
- Result: MarketMuse might suggest related topics like “personal injury claims,” “car accident settlement process,” and “common car crash injuries,” along with a difficulty score (e.g., 45/100) and a target content score (e.g., 65). It could also list questions like “How much does a car accident lawyer cost?” to address in your post.
- Article Snippet: “Using MarketMuse, I typed ‘car accident lawyer’ into the Research tool and got a list of must-cover topics like ‘personal injury claims’ and a difficulty score of 45, showing it’s competitive but doable.”
InLinks Search Example
- Scenario: You need entities and content ideas for “car accident lawyer.”
- How to Use: Sign into InLinks, input “car accident lawyer” into the Content Planner, and let it analyze the entity behind the keyword.
- Result: InLinks might identify entities like “car accident,” “personal injury lawyer,” and “insurance company,” then suggest linking opportunities (e.g., to your “About” page) and schema markup for “LegalService.” It could also recommend a topic like “How insurance affects car accident claims.”
- Article Snippet: “With InLinks, I entered ‘car accident lawyer’ and found key entities like ‘insurance company’ and a suggestion to write about ‘How insurance affects car accident claims,’ complete with internal linking ideas.”
Surfer SEO Search Example
- Scenario: You’re optimizing a blog post for “car accident lawyer.”
- How to Use: Open Surfer SEO’s Keyword Research tool or Content Editor, type “car accident lawyer,” and run the analysis.
- Result: Surfer might return keywords like “car accident attorney near me” (500 searches/month, difficulty 30), suggest a word count of 1,200 based on top-ranking pages, and recommend using “settlement” 8-10 times. It also lists questions like “What does a car accident lawyer do?”
- Article Snippet: “In Surfer SEO, I searched ‘car accident lawyer’ and got keywords like ‘car accident attorney near me’ with 500 monthly searches, plus a tip to aim for 1,200 words and answer ‘What does a car accident lawyer do?'”
TextRazor Search Example
- Scenario: You want to extract entities from existing content about “car accident lawyer.”
- How to Use: Paste a competitor’s article (or your draft) into TextRazor’s demo tool or API, then analyze it.
- Result: TextRazor might pull entities like “car accident,” “lawyer,” “hospital,” and “insurance policy” from the text, showing their relevance scores (e.g., 0.95 for “car accident”). It could highlight missing entities like “court” to add.
- Article Snippet: “I fed a competitor’s ‘car accident lawyer’ post into TextRazor, and it extracted entities like ‘hospital’ and ‘insurance policy,’ flagging ‘court’ as a gap I could cover in my own article.”
Add a Call to Action
This final step is often ignored, but it’s critical for your content. Most people don’t read every word—they skim to find what they need. That’s why I suggested splitting up your text with clear headers. Still, readers often don’t know what to do next, so you have to guide them.
It might feel obvious that someone needing a lawyer should call, chat, or email you, but taking that step isn’t always simple for them—make it clear what they should do.
Make it easy for them to contact you if they want to by letting them know the next steps they should take for their particular case.
How Often Should You Post?
How often you should post a blog is a question law firms ask me all the time, and while there is no specific number of posts, you should post when you have something important to share with your readers. You don’t need to come up with 3 blog posts a week if they aren’t going to be interesting to your readers or if they are poorly written.
Another option if you do not want to write all the blogs yourself is to hire a legal writer or legal marketing agency that handles the content creation for you.
Blogs serve a number of purposes so if you can post at least once or twice a week I would recommend it, but for smaller firms try to post at least once a month to keep your website active.
Another tip I would recommend to save time is to set some time aside and brainstorm some content ideas and then plan out your content calendar, when you are going to post them.
You should also refresh older content occasionally and update it with any new insights, changes in the law, maybe added a frequently asked question or even to update it to improve the SEO performance of it.
Your blog can help you with client acquisition so be sure to put time into it and add value for your readers so that your blogs will rank on Google.
Promoting your legal blogs
Now that you created your blogs, a content calendar, set up a blog on your website, whew, it’s time to start publishing and sharing them with the world.
If you’re a new legal blogger, be sure to craft attention-grabbing headlines for you posts before you start publishing them on the web.
Be sure to post your blog content on your social channels such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. In addition you can select some blogging platforms such as WordPress.com or Medium.com. Both are free to use and you can create your own subdomain on their platform. This will help you expand your footprint on the internet while opening up your content to new readers.
Another legal marketing blogging tip, look for platforms in the legal vertical that will allow you to post on their platform or that will accept guest blogs. Not only will this build you up as an authority, it will help your website SEO rankings.
Repurposing for Social Channels
So how should you post on your social channels, just post your whole blog, a blurb, what image should you use, etc? This is where repurposing your content comes into play. Not all types of content, both topics and medium, work for all channels. Posting the right content to the right channel is important.
People on Facebook are looking for entertainment whereas those on Linkedin are more business oriented. Posting your firm’s latest news on facebook wouldn’t go over as well, but it might on Linkedin.
If you’re an injury lawyer targeting a car accident case, a Facebook post regarding “insurance coverage you must have if you’re in an accident” may not do as well as “the 10 most dangerous roads in their city or state.”
If you’re a bankruptcy attorney you can provide information someone may stop to read on facebook such as how to file for bankruptcy without losing your home. Be creative with your titles to get attention and hook the reader in.
When posting, Don’t just post links to your content. Share rewritten summaries or small snippets of your content. Social media platforms like Linkedin and Facebook want to keep members on their platform, not redirect them away to other websites. Keep links to your content to a minimum in your posts.
Alternatively, write a brief summary of part of your post to share on social media websites. You can go a step further and add value by asking readers a question or giving you take on a subject to encourage engagement
Finding the Time To Write Blog Content
The toughest part of blogging isn’t starting—it’s carving out time to write high-quality content that ranks well online. If you’re a solo attorney building your reputation, you likely have more time than cash, so writing your own stuff makes sense.
But if you’re at a bigger firm, spending your days on settlements and client meetings, you’re smarter to hand off content creation. Two solid choices are:
- Legal assistants
- Marketing agencies focused on personal injury
We specialize in crafting content that pushes personal injury law firms to the top of Google. A legal assistant can help, but they usually don’t have the SEO skills to make your content rank.
If you’re a top-tier personal injury firm ready to beat your competition on Google, contact us for a quick chat. One call will tell you if we’re the right match.