Having Your Law Students Write SEO for Personal Injury Lawyers

Welcome to our exploration on a unique approach to SEO for personal injury lawyers: leveraging the talents of law students. Are you curious about how budding legal minds can amplify your firm’s online presence through search engine optimization? You’re in the perfect spot. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the potential benefits and considerations of having your junior lawyers and articling students take the reins on crafting SEO-rich content.

Should Law Students be Writing SEO Content For Personal Injury Lawyers?

Law students are doing their articles with your law firm to put their academic learnings into practice and get exposure to practicing law. Participating in your content marketing strategy and is not directly why they are with your law firm. Thus, there is some discussion around whether your law students, articling students, and junior lawyers should be doing a lot of work on SEO.

I think that specifically for personal injury lawyers new in their career, having exposure to marketing strategy and marketing tactics is important for their development as complete lawyers. It is important for them to understand how to best market themselves, and the law firm they work with. I think as injury law continues to evolve as a practice area having an understanding of marketing and advertising is an invaluable skill. The nice thing about SEO for personal injury lawyers is that it gives exposure to the articling student to so much of the consumer behaviour of potential customers.

When a law student works on SEO for personal injury law specifically, they get to see what types of content resonates with victims, and how to best present complex legal matters. There are lots of great takeaways for any lawyer to be involved with their content marketing and SEO.

Best Practices When Using Law Students In Your SEO Strategy

In my experience, most Managing Partners love the idea of law students contributing to search engine optimization projects. However, there are some key considerations to consider before having them contribute to your SEO program for your injury law firm. Here are some things to consider:

• Manage Expectations: Your law students and junior lawyers are injury lawyers, they are not SEO experts. You cannot expect them to develop content and have it rank at the same scale as an SEO expert. For difficult keywords and competitive keywords, they may not be able to write for that at all. Manage expectations and be realistic for what the results of law students writing for your website should be.
• Junior Lawyers are Not Content Writers: It isn’t reasonable to expect a law student to be able to produce as much content as your marketing department or freelance content writer. So be mindful for how much content you are asking them to produce. A good start is two posts per month.
• Tell Them What Topics to Write: Content selection and research are some of the hardest parts about SEO for personal injury lawyers. Ensure you take this burden off their plate. Give them a list of topics that will benefit your SEO strategy and let them pick one.
• Ensure You Prioritize The Right Work: SEO content production should be the last thing on their priority list. Ensure they are doing their legal work and law society obligations first before adding more deadlines to their workload. SEO writing should be a welcome break from other legal work, not an activity that adds stress.

Basics of SEO for Personal Injury Lawyers

Of course, most articling students or junior lawyers will not have the first idea about SEO for personal injury lawyers. They have never thought about search engine optimization, and won’t know how to write for search engines. Here are some basics to get them started:

1. Choose the keyword you want to rank for, for this example we’ll write for the keyword “Car Accident Lawyer Canada”.
2. Include the focus keyword in your blog or page title.
3. Ensure this keyword is featured in one of the first three sentences of your written content or first 10% of the content.
4. Try to utilize headings as often as possible, and ensure the keyword is in at least one of the headings
5. Try for the content to be at least 600 words, but shoot for 800.
6. Try to include the keyword in the body of the content 1%-1.5% (this metric is called keyword density) thus, for your “car accident lawyer Canada” blog of 600 words, the word car accident lawyer Canada should appear 6 times. However, be careful not to stuff the word into the blog too much. More than 2.5% and it may hurt your rankings.
7. Try to think about other pages on your site that you can link to that will add value
8. Include 1 link to a different website that will add value to your content
9. You should have an experienced SEO expert optimizing your url, meta descriptions, and focus images, so don’t expect your articling students and junior lawyers to do this.

If your articling students or junior lawyers are able to follow those guidelines you will have a successful internal SEO for personal injury lawyers program. The content they write, assuming your webpage has reasonable page speed, decent backlinks, and other factors, you should start ranking for more keywords and higher for other keywords.

Get Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy On Track

SEO for personal injury lawyers cannot be ignored. When individuals are injured they turn to search engines to understand what to do. You need to be present in these searches to win these files. The search engine results pages for injury lawyers are incredibly competitive. While I advocate for having internal members of your injury law firm actively involved in your SEO execution, you still need knowledgeable SEO management to drive results. Rock Bound Marketing has been guiding SEO strategies for injury lawyers since its inception. If you are struggling with your organic search performance, and want to get on track, contact us today.