Lesson Overview
In this lesson, we’re going to cover the basics you need to understand about how SEO fits into your overall blog marketing strategy. Some of the things we’ve suggested in previous lessons about names and strategies will make more sense after you learn a little more about SEO.
SEO need not be technical or complicated. At its heart, it is a content strategy, whereby you want to create content which people who need your services are searching for.
Lesson Objectives
- Understand the role SEO plays in getting clients via blogging.
- Know what search engines look for and what they “weigh” when determining search rankings.
- Know several strategies and tactics for improving your search engine rankings.
- Have step-by-step instructions on how to optimize your blog overall.
Why SEO?
We’ve been bringing up SEO (search engine optimization) in nearly every lesson here on Blawging Lawyers, because it is integral to your overall strategy online. Anybody can slap up a free blog and beat out words on a keyboard. You’re not creating a blog to hear yourself talk, you’re doing it to get clients. And how are these clients going to come to you?
Increasingly, they are finding you (or not) on the web, via Google search. But the legal profession in general has not realized this very important sea-change in consumer behavior. Their loss is your gain.
By having a blog, and then, further, by engaging in some smart SEO, you will be able to accomplish the core mission of Blawging Lawyers: getting traffic, getting clicks, getting clients, and, finally, getting paid. By the time more attorneys and firms figure out what’s going on in the future, you will already be well-entrenched in search engine results.
Is SEO Ethical?
The SEO we’re going to show you is not “voodoo,” nor is it the least bit unethical. There is a lot of misinformation and ignorance on the web about SEO. Here inside Blawging Lawyers, you are getting the straight dope, the real deal. There certainly are techniques (commonly referred to as “black hat”) that are not illegal but which may displease the search giant Google. Everything we’re going to show you here is just common-sense “white hat” techniques anyone may employ to improve their search engine rankings.
Bonus Content: WordPress SEO Secrets
As an extra bonus, included with this lesson is the entire PDF ebook to Michael Martine’s WordPress SEO Secrets, a course he sells online to WordPress bloggers. See the download links below the lesson.
It All Starts with Keywords
Keywords are words that people type in the little search box on Google or other search engines. Eighty percent of what you need to know about SEO can be summed up in the following sentence:
Put the words your clients are using to search for legal services into your blog content.
That is as simple–and as complex–as it gets. It should seem obvious, right? But attorneys often think they have to write something that reads like a legal brief and which does nothing to attract clients or media attention. In short, they forget (or never even knew) who they’re writing for, and what this audience wants.
Let’s break this down.
“The Words Your Clients Are Using”
In previous lessons, we have discussed the importance of using the same words your clients use (”lawyer” instead of “attorney,” for example). This is a keyword issue. If a prospective client is looking for the region’s best elder-care attorney, and that’s you, but your blog is called something like YourNameHereLaw.com, then that prospect is not going to find you.
Clients can’t be your clients if they can’t find you. If you can’t be found, you can’t get hired and get paid.
Not only do you want to use these words in the name and URL of your blog, you want to use them in almost everything you write on your blog. The reasons why search engines love blogs is because new material is constantly created which contains relevant information to searchers. “Normal” websites just sit there: nothing new is added. There is no reason for new visitors to come to it.
“Put Them Into Your Blog Content”
The primary and secondary keywords your clients are using in their searches need to appear in your blog posts. There are several important places in a blog post this information should go. Enough needs to be said about them to give them their own sections below.
Places in Blog Posts to Put Keywords
Post Titles/Headlines
What you write for your post headline also becomes its title. The title (also called the title tag, because that’s exactly what it is in the code of an HTML document) is the text which appears at the top of the browser window when a visitor is on a web page. It also appears in the tabs of the newer browsers which offer multiple tabs (web pages) in a single window.
Google and other search engines place an immense amount of “weight” to this text, because it’s an accurate indicator of what kind of content is on a web page for which a visitor may be searching.
What you should do:
- Use your major and minor keywords in post headlines, preferably as the first word or words (keywords can actually be more than one word–they can be a phrase). Think about the words you want the post to be found for in a search which a non-lawyer would use.
Post Subheadlines
When you’re writing content for the web, writing in giant, neverending run-on paragraphs is a no-no. People like to skim and scan the contents. Luckily for us, subheadlines throughout a post not only make a post more easily scannable, they are also good for search engines.
What you should do when writing a post:
- Click on the “Kitchen Sink” button in your WordPress post writing toolbar (it looks like a bunch of tiny little squares, like buttons on toolbars). When you click this button, a new row of buttons appears in WordPress.
- Click the first thing on this new second row. It is a drop-down which says Paragraph or Format (it changes depending on what you’re doing). When it opens up, you’ll see things in there like Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, etc.
- It’s likely that your post title will be a heading 1 or a heading 2. Your subheadings should be the next higher number (the higher the number, the smaller the heading). Think of using headings the same way you’d work with levels in an outline. For example, if your blog post headlines are heading 2, then your subheads should be heading 3.
Post Text Content
Using keywords in the content of your post is a must. You want to continue the theme you started with the post title by including keywords liberally in your post content. There is no magic formula to this, but generally, you don’t want to overdo it. If you read your post out loud and it sounds unnaturally repetitive, you’re over-stuffing keywords.
The percentage of keywords within written content is referred to as keyword density. There are tools for measuring this, but really the best way to make sure it’s correct is that it reads naturally.
What you should do:
- Use your main keywords for the post as early in the first sentence of the post as possible. Repeat them in the first paragraph if you can manage to make it sound natural.
- Use your main keywords several more times throughout the post in the regular “flow” of text, but using them in other places is also effective (see the following points).
- Use keywords in bulleted and numbered lists.
- Use keywords in boldface or italics type.
- Use keywords in blockquotes when you’re quoting source material.
- Use keywords in hyperlinks. This is vital, in fact. Long story short, link to your own blog posts as much as you can. Google doesn’t care about your site, it only cares if content on a page is a match for a search. Google thinks in terms of pages, not sites.
Conclusion
The most significant aspect of blog SEO is knowing how your prospective clients think and what words they use to search for you, then you should use those words in your blog. A lot. 
As we’ve said earlier, anyone can have a blog. What really matters is: are people who are looking for your services finding you? That’s completely up to you, and how you create your blog’s content. The strategies and tactics we employ to be more easily found in search are SEO.
Summary
- If you can’t be found you can’t be hired. Since more and more, legal services consumers are searching online, SEO is a necessity for the blogging lawyer.
- Know what your primary and secondary keywords are (if you’re not sure, we’ll discuss how to find out in the next lesson).
- Use those words in strategic places throughout your blog content: titles/headlines, subheads, blog post content, and links.
Listen to the Discussion for Lesson 8 - How To Get Search Traffic
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