How do I choose topics and titles for my blog?
Before delving in here, the first thing is to make sure you've got a blog in place for your law firm. Now, how do you choose topics for your blog articles?
In our experience, getting the blog page up and running can be a bit of a hurdle but once it’s all in place, with a few articles to start you off, how do you continue to come up with topics and titles to make your blog page sing?
It’s not simply writing about anything. It’s a matter of making the right choice for your business’ products and services and writing content that your potential customers are searching for.
5 tips for choosing topics (and titles) for your blog articles
1. Listen to your clients
When you clients visit you for the first time, they’ve got lots of questions. If you listen closely, many of them have the same questions. These are often questions about the “basics” to do with their particular matter.
You need to identify those common questions and turn them into blog articles. It goes to reason if your new clients are asking the same questions, there are lots of other potential clients out there wanting to know the same thing.
Once your clients have been with you a while, sometimes the questions become a little more sophisticated or complex. You now need to identify these questions and write about them. The beauty of these more complex questions, is that you’ll have already written the basic articles and you can use that series of articles to link to from your more complex ones; after all, no need to reinvent the wheel with every article.
2. Google search bar suggestion
If you’ve got a vague thought around what you want to write about but you can’t quite come up with the full topic, you can use the Google search bar to provide you with some ideas.
Let’s say you want to write about Family Law property settlements, simply type into Google search “Family Law property sett….”. Don’t actually complete the search term in full. Wait for Google to provide you with the options in a drop-down list. These options are what other people have searched for.
3. Read comments in articles and social media posts
If your blog has “comments” enabled, you should be checking these regularly. Firstly, in case they require a response but secondly, because they may give you clues on other articles you can write to satisfy your visitors’ queries.
You should also check comments on your competitors’ articles, your own social media channels and the social media channels of your competitors.
4. Use a third-party keyword/keyphrase research tool
There are many third-party keyword and key phrase research tools. They range from basic to incredibly complex.
If you’re small though, there’s a major risk with them – you can get totally bogged down with them and find yourself digging deeper and deeper into your analysis. You need to keep this in mind and ensure you’re not investing more than your potential return.
Three of our favourites include:
AHREFS
- Keyword research / exploration
- SEO auditing
- Competitor analysis
- Backlink audits
- Site audits
- Rank tracking (lost positions, gained positions in search)
- and much more.
The starting point (as at writing) is US$99.95 per month so, for small businesses, it’s could be considered a commitment.
There are many sites where you can get a 7,14 or sometimes 30 day free trial of the full suite of services.
BuzzSumo
- Analyses your social media channels’ performance; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest
- Content discovery
- Brand monitoring (competitors)
- Discover influencers
- Content curation
- Content research
- Competitor research
- Question analyser (the most popular questions asked across hundreds of thousands of forums)
Buzzsumo has a free service but it’s quite limited; both in the number of searches you can do as well as the number of results you can see.
The paid starting point is US$79.00 per month. Again, you can start a 7-day trial for free.
Google Keyword Planner
You will need to have a Google Ads account (previously known as Google Adwords).
Google keyword planner is geared towards paid advertising. It allows users to research keywords and key phrases for use in pay-per-click campaigns. Basically, you enter words or phrases related to your products or services and the Planner will find keywords most relevant to those terms. You can then select these keywords to both use in your ads campaigns but also in your website or other digital content and they can form the basis of your blog titles.
It’s also important to note that once you’ve run Google Ads campaigns, you will have analytics available on those campaigns. The data will show you what search terms people entered into Google that caused your ad to show up. It goes to reason that if a specific search phrase appears several times, that’s something common people want to know about and you should be blogging on that topic.
The tool is free with your Google Ads account.
5. Write it down
How many times have you had a great thought but you haven’t been a position to implement it right then? Maybe you were in the shower. Maybe you were on the footy field. Maybe you were driving.
You think, “This is fantastic. I’m going to do this as soon as I get into the office.”
But you don’t… because it’s gone from your mind.
Often when you’re out and about, or in conversation with friends, family, colleagues or even complete strangers, ideas will come to you for great blog topics.
Write it down!
If your law firm hasn’t built a blog yet or you’re struggling to drive your online presence, that’s our speciality. And we only work with law firms; so we know your industry. Get in touch for a free, no obligations chat and let’s see if we can get it all going, together.
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