How lawyers can find topics to blog about that will drive clients your way.
This is a transcript for the video “how to” presentation.
You can watch the video here:
Attorney Blogging: Finding New Blog Topics That Drive Targeted Traffic
Dan Stratford:
Hello, and welcome to another blog post by Lawyer Marketing Experts author Dan Stratford.
Today we’re going to talk about finding blog topics. How do you find topics on which to blog if you are attorney. As you know blogging can be a great way to drive prospects to your website.
We’re going to talk about how to do that today, and what the best way is to find blog topics that will drive prospects to your website. If you’ve seen one of my videos before you’ll recognize me, my name is Dan Stratford, I’m a partner and 50% owner in C1 Partners, which is a digital marketing agency based out of Denver, Colorado. I’ve been the author of lawyermarketingexpert.com since I founded it in, I believe it was January or February of 2008. I’ve been advanced Google’s certified ad words since 2006, I’ve been at Certified Legal Education, Certified teacher for the bar association for National Webinars as well as I believe every state from Colorado to Hawaii.
I did that while I was working at Lexis Nexis and helped them build the western USA region with their SEO solutions back in 2008 and 2009. Before that I was with DEX Media and got to see the fall of that industry as they tried to offer legitimate Internet marketing solutions which they do sometimes. But the truth is, yellow pages really struggles with providing the high level of Internet marketing service, just because of their business model.
At any rate, let’s talk about finding blog topics, we are just going to go live on my computer. First of all, one thing that I have developed over the years, is what I call my core attorney keywords. What that is, is it’s a list of keywords that I can plug into a keyword research tool, it might be a … In this case it’s a Word Tracker, but it might be a Word Tracker, it could be a Google tool.
But, what I do is I take a core group of keywords, for example this one is criminal, for a criminal defense lawyer. I come up with a list of terms for which I … The types of cases that a criminal attorney might want to acquire, from criminal, to DUI, to marijuana, to white collar, to drugs.
Then I put next to those words lawyer, attorney, and law firm. Then I put a city name, this allows me to take this and paste it in. I won’t go into that today, because we’re talking about blog topics. Let’s say I take that same list, and I, instead of putting a city name, I put a question.
The first one we’ll do is, “what”, so I will put, “What?”, as my question. So, “Criminal Lawyer What?” These are my core keywords. What this does, in the right tool, that tool will tell me how people are searching on-line around the word “what”. The tool I like to use is Word Tracker. Word Tracker will pull data from their own resources or from Google resources.
The first one I’m going to do is I will do Word Tracker. I’m going to paste all of the keywords here, so I paste here, however you want to do it. I copied them from that last page, now I paste them here. Okay. Then I hit, “research”. There we go, let’s try it again, I hit, “research”.
It brings back to me the number of times that Word Tracker has found these words on the Internet with the words “what” around them. Then I can export all of these keywords. I’ve done that, and I’ve begun to build a blog topic’s spreadsheet by using this tool. “What’s” I’ll Google, now I’ve got all the terms of what is criminal law, what is common law robbery, what is the difference between civil and criminal law.
As you start to blog on these topics, and by the way if you’re in Houston you could add Houston to some of these questions, but it’s not necessary. You want your blog to be very natural, and very authentic, and organic to drive the right results. But you might want to localize some of these topics, like, “What does a criminal defense attorney do in Houston?” Or in, “Denver”, or “Kansas City”, or “Los Angeles”.
Going back to my core, turning keywords, so we’ve done “what”, now let’s do “when”. I’m going to change this, if you grab this corner it will take “when” all the down to the bottom of this list. Notice I changed “law firm” to “law”, it just kind of opened it up a bit. When I want to look for keywords where people are searching for my services, the core word’s going to be “law firm”, but when I’m looking for questions there’s no reason to not use “law”, it will give me more options.
Before I do that though, I’m going to see what Google has to say about these questions. If I research that, I will see what Google pulls back. Even though I clicked on “paper click” here or PPC, it’s still on Google. It’s just also going to get me that cost per keyword. There we go. Google gives me a slightly different list, “What is criminal law?”; What is sufficient evidence in criminal law?”
You can see that, that’s the “what” I’ll Google here, I’m going to put in my, “What all Word Tracker, data.” There’s different ways to paste it in there. I’m just going to do it this way this time. Now I got, “What all Google data.” I’m going to click this corner here, hit “control C”, or “Command C”, if you’re on the Mac.
Then I’m going to paste that into my, oops, into my blog topics. Now I’ve got, “What all Word Tracker”, I might want to sort these from most searched, to least searched. Now I’ve got the, “what all Word Tracker.”
I’m going to do the same thing for the “when”, so I’m going to go back to my core attorney keywords. I’m going to copy that, it’s going to paste it there. Hit research. Interesting, not that many choices on this one. Either way I’m going to close these two out. I do not need them. Let’s see here, I may have already exported that one. Nope. Nope. Nope. Get rid of that, all gone, let me see here.
Make sure I did this also, you’ll see, I also wanted just DUI related questions, so I did, “DUI-what-when-where-why-who” and “how.”, for all of these questions. I did it that way because sometimes if you go more than fifty keywords at a time, you won’t get all the data you need, so I did those five. When I did those five, I got this list here, which is all questions about DUI. I just want to make sure that I pasted it in my blog topics, DUI, Word Tracker, Google. There it is, “What is a DUI?”
So I did that, started to go through it and highlight the terms that I thought would be valuable. Let’s go back to doing the “when”, “When was the first domestic violence law passed?” Not very many from Google. Let’s see if Word Tracker gives me … That’s interesting, “When does Maryland marijuana law go into effect?” These are interesting questions that I may, or may not, want to answer. I’m going to export these.
One thing that I think I will do just to save an extra spreadsheet, is to combine these into one spreadsheet. I’ll show you a little bit of a secret here, so you can see I’ve got a lot of windows opened up, I’ve got a lot of stuff going on here, this is how I do questions. But I’m going to re-name this. This is going to be “when”, “crime”, it’s Google, and Word Tracker.
Now I can move this over to, look at all those spreadsheets I have opened, blog topics and move it to the end, voila, now I have it in here with all my other ones. I will do one more, go back to my core attorney keywords, and we’re going to do “where”, I might decide to just do a bunch more. Here’s “where”.
One thing I like about Word Tracker, it’s very easy to use. The Google tool can be easy to use, but I think Word Tracker is a little bit better. Because I can just quickly get the answers I’m looking for. Okay. Now we’re seeing what Google decides when it comes to questions about criminal defense attorney and the words “where”. Interesting, not a very great questions. Sometimes it’s hit or miss.
We seem to get the best results with “what” today, that’s for sure. “Where does criminal law come from?”, sources were in criminal law. None of these are great questions, although, that is pretty interesting that someone is even asking the question, that’s just pretty funny. Go back to it here in a second. The question is, “Where is there a law against shooting a big foot?” Anyway, that’s interesting.
So this is “where-crime-wt-” and “Google”. I am going to move this over to the correct blog topics spreadsheet. Now I’ve added it to here. Go ahead and close these out, because I do not need them. Let’s do another one here.
So, that was “where”, let’s do “why”. So, “criminal lawyer-criminal attorney-criminal law firm” and “why”, again I take all of these terms which happens to be about exactly fifty. Put them in the Word Tracker tool. Okay. Some of these questions on this one look like they might be better than the last. I’m going to do this research.
Notice on the left here, Word Tracker has this keyword questions, where you can put in a bunch of questions without asking, “why-what-where-when” or “who”, and pull back the results and then click on this. I like that tool, I think it’s a great idea on their part, but for a few reasons you get fewer results from that than you do from doing it this way. So it looks like there were no results in Google for “why”, which is another reason I like Word Tracker, it give me a different source.
This is “why-crime-wtg”, which means I pulled Google data from Word Tracker, you can name things however you want, blog topics. Move it to the end. There we go. So we did “why”, and now we are going to do “who”.
Let’s do it here, and we’re doing it this way. One thing you’ll notice, and when I get this running I will show you what I’m talking about here. First we will research Google search terms. You notice on my core keywords I have all these different core keywords, “family lawyer-divorce”, so “family-divorce-child custody-child support maintenance-alimony-parenting time-adoption-separation”, and it goes on, and on, and on.
I even added some at the bottom here when I started to thing about … Attorneys were asking me about prenuptial, and prenup is a popular term. Or malpractice, “malpractice attorney-malpractice law-malpractice lawyer-medical malpractice-personal injury”, but you’ll see I have, “injury-accident-death-fall”, which will bring back, “slip-and-fall” with “attorney”.
I must have been looking in that city called “McAllen”, but I could change this to “Dallas”, and just do research on Dallas. I’ll do another section on how I do core keyword research. This is good news. We’ve got some good keywords from Google. Now let’s see what Word Tracker brings us back. And we’ve got some decent keywords here.
Again, I’m going to combine these two lists because they’re short, relatively short. I’ll call this my “who-crime-wt” and “Google”. I’ll move that over to the blog topics for attorneys. Criminal defense attorney, specifically, worksheet, right. Let’s go ahead and close out this.
Let’s see what we have here, do we have one more to do? We have “how”, this will be the last one. Which is convenient because I need to make a … I actually need to call an attorney, who’s asked me to call him this morning. All right.
We’re researching “how”, “How does crime relate to the law?; How much does a criminal defense attorney make?” Anyway, some of these questions you might want to answer, some of them you may not want to answer. I’m going to do this for both of them, so I’m going to call this, “how-crime-wt” and “Google”. Okay.
Let’s make sure we get the Google data, then we’ll be finished. Google may not be … It looks like it … I’m going to re-paste that in there, it didn’t quite paste the way I would’ve liked. There we go. Let’s see what it says.
Another great way to get blog topics is to download your keyword research from Google ad words, which will show you in a different presentation. Now we’ve got the Google data, and we have the Word Tracker data for the “who”, and I’m just going to put that right there for the “how”.
So these are blog topics with questions that have “how” in them. I’ll move this over to my spreadsheet, and now I have pages, and pages, and hundreds, if not close to a thousand. Maybe at least hundreds of blog topics I can look at and choose from.
The great thing about these is when I blog on questions that people are asking on-line, my website is more likely to come up in the search results.
So good luck to you, get to blogging, and get to bringing in new clients to your law firm. Thank you very much and have a great day.
Links to other Blogs About Blogging for Law Firms