Five Crazy Easy Ways to Slip Local Keywords in Your Legal Blog Posts

There’s nothing more annoying when you’re trying to improve your law firm SEO than seeing your competitor’s keyword-stuffed fluff ranking higher than yours. How can you get an edge and still produce blog content that isn’t overly sales-y or unreadable? As a veteran keyword-whisperer, I have tea to spill! Here are five of my personal favorite tricks to incorporate juicy local keywords into lawyer blog posts.

#1 Way to Slip Keywords Into Your Legal Blog: Subheadings

See that subheading right above me? It’s an example of one of my favorite ways to organically add local keywords to any blog article—simply repeat the blog’s title (assuming it contains your keyword phrase) in a subheading list. Instead of saying: “Use Subheadings,” I used the colon to create a title > subtitle format, allowing me to organically repeat my keywords. The hidden bonus with this one is that a keyword in a subheading gets more SEO fairy dust than a keyword in the text body—woot woot!

#2 Way to Slip Keywords Into Your Legal Blog: Case Write-Ups

Most lawyers in their blogs essentially just explain laws, legal processes, and answer commonly asked legal questions. Not much of this is geographically-specific, especially if you are in a big state like California or Texas. There’s nothing wrong with discussing state laws and procedures, but a lot of people would find it insanely valuable to read brief summaries of real local cases you’ve handled. A handful of personal injury lawyers have figured this out, but the rest of the attorney community is overthinking client confidentiality here. These blog posts can be anonymous, and you can ask clients up front if it’s ok to share their outcome incognito on your blog.

What do “real case write-ups” accomplish? Think of all the local words you can use:

~ The location where the incident occurred

~ The local law enforcement agency involved

~ The name of the courthouse

~ Where the client worked or went to school

On top of the free-flowing use of organic local keywords, you can also incorporate a standard blog format for these case write-ups that uses my first tip (subheadings).

#3 Way to Slip Keywords Into Your Legal Blog: Captions

You know those generic stock images of crunched bumpers, scrabble tiles, and legal documents scattered on a desk that virtually all lawyers use in their blogs? Well, those images, which are strategically placed for SEO purposes, can actually have captions underneath them. Despite the fact that most law firms dedicate HALF of their annual budgets to marketing with SEO as their top priority, somehow I never see attorney websites utilizing image captions?!

Under each blog image, add a caption that says “Jane Doe // Los Angeles Bankruptcy Attorney // Chapter 7 Secured Debts” or “John Doe // Houston Divorce Lawyer // Child Support FAQs.” This won’t affect the readability of your post, and the caption text basically just blends into the wallpaper, so to speak.

This should be a no-brainer (hopefully) but the title of each blog image (the actual .jpeg file’s name) should follow the same format, such as “easy-ways-slip-local-keywords-legal-blog-posts1.jpeg” followed by “easy-ways-slip-local-keywords-legal-blog-posts2.jpeg.” Likewise, image alt tags can contain a variation of your keyword phrase that describes the image.

#4 Way to Slip Keywords Into Your Legal Blog: “As a…”

As a long-time legal content writer, this is my go-to phrase for sneaking lawyer keywords into blog paragraphs. Did you notice it? “As a legal content writer” (or, in your case, “As a Miami immigration attorney”) is a readable phrase you can easily incorporate two to three times per 500-word blog post. Don’t just say, “Ohio DUI Frequently Asked Questions,” and then list five questions and answers with bullet points. Instead add this sentence after the subheading and before the list: “As a respected Ohio DUI lawyer, here are six questions I commonly hear from clients.”

#5 Way to Slip Keywords Into Your Legal Blog: Statutes

As you know, there are a boatload of fluff-infested blog posts in the legal industry. This is one of my favorite examples of typical law firm content marketing fluff-osophy: when a criminal defense lawyer is discussing options, the criminal process, or post-arrest questions and never mentions public defenders. Instead of just ignoring the pink elephant here, what if this reality was addressed head on with cold, hard facts. Tell readers how overworked and underpaid public defenders are.

Nevertheless, I digress…my point is that the more specific and detailed you make your blog posts, the more likely you are to find those local terms popping up without much effort (i.e. San Francisco Public Defender’s Office). Case in point: mentioning relevant statutes. “The statute of limitations on product liability cases in Seattle is…” can be rephrased into, “In Seattle, the statute of limitations on product liability cases, governed by Chapter 7.72 of the Revised Code of Washington, is…”

Legal Content Writer HQ Recap

What it really comes down to it, you need to use that same kind of strategic thinking that you bring to settlement offers and plea bargaining to your law firm blog—that’s what it takes to really maximize local keyword usage without sacrificing readability. To summarize:

~ Use your keyword phrase in your subheadings

~ Start posting real case write-ups and give local specifics

~ Put keywords in image captions

~ Use the phrase, “As a [your keyword phrase].”

~ Mention applicable statutes

If you’d rather focus on practicing law and leave the keyword finagling to a professional legal content writer, give me a shout.