Writing a law firm blog can be daunting and time-consuming. You likely already have a firm grasp on the material, but there are many factors involved beyond your mastery of your subject.
These following simple, and very excellent, tools will help you get started at both writing and marketing your law firm blog. And if you need help beyond these, you can always ask us to step in.
Grammarly
Grammarly is an incredible grammar tool. It is what the autocorrect in Word or other word processing platforms wish they could be. In fact, once you start using Grammarly to draft your articles you will fall in love with the contextually relevant corrections. For instance, you can use different “levels” of review for differing purposes. Say you want to do some creative writing – you can set the article to evaluate your writing on those grounds vs. evaluating it like a business letter. Grammarly will then change what aspects of your writing it will suggest correcting.
Choose How You Want To Be Corrected with Grammarly
For this article, we use the Business: Blog Post setting. This setting provides suggestions for reducing contractions, antecedents, passive statements, spelling errors, and much more.
There are two different versions of Grammarly; a free basic version and a premium version.
The free version includes:
- Fix critical grammar and spelling errors
- Punctuation and contextual spelling checker
- Works across the web
The premium version (pay per month/yearly) includes:
- 400+ checks and features
- Punctuation and contextual spelling checker
- Style and document-specific checks (business, academic, etc.)
- Sentence structure checker
- Vocabulary enhancement
- Plagiarism detection
Grammarly works on Gmail, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, LinkedIn and other places on the web. There is also a standalone application you can download to either Mac or Windows.
Google Search Console
Search Console is a free service provided by Google to help you get the data, tools, and diagnostics needed to create and maintain a Google-friendly law firm blog (or any other website for that matter).
Once you add your site, you can analyze clicks from Google search, impressions, click through rate (see here why that is so important), as well as historical traffic data. Much of what we talked about in our article, Using Google Analytics to Improve Your SEO, can be found on Search Console and Google Analytics.
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio allows you to connect to all your marketing data and turn that data into informative reports. The reports are fully customizable – so you can set them up once and always be able to see the critical KPI’s you have developed at a glance.
Being a Google product, you can connect to all your Google data (Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Sheets, Google BigQuery) and use those data aggregators to feed into your live reports.
Though this tool is free, the value it provides to your workflow and monthly analysis is immeasurable. Once you get everything setup well – you will save a lot of time visiting each of your traditional data sources. This application will become your one-stop-shop.
Note: We use Data Studio to provide all of our law firm blog development clients a Data Studio custom report (live) that they can use to view the progress of our work anytime they wish.
AHREFs
Ahrefs is one of 4 or 5 primary SEO tools (SEM Rush, Moz, etc). We like AHREFs because of the way it focuses on backlink analysis and keyword profiles. Used in conjunction with a custom SEO plan we have used AHREFs to help many clients determine exactly which keywords to target to start crawling up the keyword rankings on Google.
AHREFs will cost you a good chunk of $. However, there is a free trial to see if it works for you.
Alternatively, we provide an in-depth and customized analysis for our law firm clients when we onboard them into a blog development plan. AHREFs plays a critical role in that analysis and in hiring us, clients get tangential access to the data it provides.
A Blog Development Plan
OK, this is less of a tool that you can find online, and more of a custom project. But if you are going to be successful at developing a blog, you can either write until your fingers fall off (work harder). Alternatively, you can make sure that everything you write is because it will have a net positive effect on your likely search engine ranking vs. that of your competitors (work smarter). A well-developed blog/SEO plan will do this for you.
We’ll cover how to develop a blog/SEO plan in an upcoming article. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to us for an example!
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Using Google Analytics to Improve Your SEO
