Maintaining a blog on your legal website is important for a couple of reasons. First, it’ll give you an easy way to add and maintain content that’s relevant for users seeking legal help. A blog is an obvious choice when you’re outlining how someone can qualify for SSDI vs. SSI or how comparative negligence plays into an auto accident claim, for example. Additionally, a blog is simply a great place to show your legal expertise or highlight some big cases you’ve won in the past.
While nationwide firms almost certainly have dedicated marketing teams, what about smaller firms or solo practitioners? If you wear multiple hats at your law firm, you may not be sure how often you actually need to update your blog. Unfortunately, there’s no cut and dry answer to this question.
Rule of Thumb: Once Per Week
If a potential claimant finds your law firm’s website for the first time but sees that you haven’t updated your blog since 2015, he or she may be dissuaded from contacting you. Most marketing experts will recommend that you upload your blog once per week at a minimum. This frequency is enough to appease claimants who’ve found you online, and adding 50 high-quality articles will likely help your firm show up in many additional search result pages.
The second benefit of blogging once per week is it’ll keep your site fresh enough for Google. Google and other search engines will crawl your site periodically to “check in” and make sure you’re still actively maintaining the domain. If you haven’t added any new content in a while, Google will check you less and less frequently. This can make it hard for new content to rank well on search results, as well as potentially hurt your overall rankings online.
So, if you’re just looking for a straightforward (but incomplete) answer: add one blog per week.
Consider Site Size
While one blog per week is fine for most attorneys, those who’ve just started their practice or created their legal website will likely need to blog more often just to get the site off the ground. Content is one of the most important factors when it comes to ranking search results and determining which attorney’s website shows up first when a claimant searches for “Social Security lawyer near me.” If you’re starting from scratch, you should usually work a little harder to get enough high-quality content online to even start showing up in search results.
Focus on Quality, Not Quantity
Another factor you’ll have to consider in addition to how much content you already have is how high quality your blogs are. The search engine world is focusing more and more on user experience and quality content. Essentially, five mediocre blog posts will rarely get more traffic than one strong and long blog post on the same subject. If you can, write blogs that are 1,000 words long (or more) if you’re only writing one article per week.
Finally, try to write content that will be relevant five years from now, not something that’ll only be helpful for the next month. This is known as evergreen content. A great example of an evergreen topic for Social Security attorneys is the Blue Book. No matter what conditions are added to the Blue Book, odds are good that the SSA will always use its own manual for medical eligibility to approve disability applicants. While a blog on cost of living adjustments could get you a small burst of traffic, it’s unlikely to be relevant after a year passes and next year’s COLA is released.
While blogging may feel like a tedious task, it’s one of the best ways to slowly grow your website’s online traffic over time.