Guest blogging is one of the most powerful tools attorneys can use to increase the number of visits to their website and build brand awareness. If you’re an attorney or legal professional, chances are that there’s high-quality organizations or blogs out there that could benefit from your expertise.

What is guest blogging?

Guest blogging is the act of offering a blog or article to another related organization, typically for free. In exchange, the guest bloggers are credited with the article, will be known in a community as experts, and potentially even get a link back to their own websites.

Choosing your goals with guest blogging

There are three primary goals as to why an attorney may want to guest blog:

• Become known in a community. When someone gets hurt or needs legal assistance, they’ll think of your firm first.
• Get more traffic to your own website. If more visitors come to your page, there will be more opportunity for them to call you or fill out a contact form.
• Get backlinks. If a website links back to your firm’s site, Google will see this as a form of “thumbs up.” The more websites you have pointing to your firm’s site, the better you’ll perform on search engine result pages.

If you’re choosing to guest blog for the first two options, you’ll only want to reach out to blogs or websites with a big following. There’s no point publishing a blog that will never be read by potential claimants!

Be wary of guest blogging only for option #3, backlinks. Google has cracked down on this time and time again. Low-quality blogs on low-quality linking back to your site will cause far more harm than good.

The best option is to shoot for all three goals! You’ll be well known by the right audience, you’ll be getting plenty of referral traffic, and you’ll even beat your competitors on Google and Yahoo.

Starting guest blogging campaigns: Finding the right audience.

Before you offer an article on legal technicalities to every website on the Internet, you’ll first need to choose an audience you want to reach out to. The organizations you reach out to will vary depending on your goal with guest blogging, but here are some rules to keep in mind:

• Rule #1: The organization should be relevant.
• Rule #2: There has to be a need for the content.
• Rule #3: The guest blog should be high quality.

Finding relevant organizations

As an attorney, the best way to think of relevant sites to reach out to is to think, “What type of cases do I want?” You never want to contact a completely unrelated website—it’ll be a waste of your time, their time, and it could even hurt your ranking on Google.

If you’re a personal injury attorney, you likely do not want a link pointing to your website from a popular cooking blog. There’s no connection between a cooking blog’s audience and a personal injury firm, so why bother offering a guest article?

Finding a need for content

It won’t be helpful for you to offer an article to an article to an organization that already has expert knowledge on-hand. When you think you’ve found a relevant organization, do a search of the site to determine whether or not they already have legal information pertaining to your area of law.

Submitting high-quality articles

This part is pretty self-explanatory. If you don’t submit good blogs, they won’t be published. If you’re offering an article on the intricate details of workers’ compensation claims, you may not want to ask your part-time paralegal to write it for you. Not only will a link to an inaccurate and low-quality blog look bad for your firm, but it may be deemed spammy by Google’s ranking algorithm.

So you’ve found relevant organizations? That’s great! Your next step is reaching out…learn more in our upcoming article on guest blogging, part 2!