The focus of every legal website is to instill trust in the website’s visitors about the firm’s services. It is this trust that will see visitors turn into the firm’s clients. Content acts as the bedrock for instilling this sense of trust and credibility in website visitors. As can be imagined, writing such content especially for a site offering legal services is nothing short of a challenge.
The content needs to be useful, interesting, engaging and well-written. Even though, you are writing for the legal domain, you still need to hook in your website visitors. For some, service oriented content is like the most boring kind of information on Earth, but that doesn’t mean you give up. You need to make an effort to make your content readable, to ensure people love going through it. So what if it’s a legal website? Just because other website or legal firms are boring their readers to death, doesn’t mean you go the same route. There are various ways and means you can implement to write killer content for your site; and what’s more they are not very difficult to follow. The underlying theme running through them is ‘keep it simple’.
So let’s take a look at some of these ways:
1. Plain Language always Works Best
Content writing for legal websites will obviously contain legalese, but there is a danger that the legal jargon can get out of hand. Remember, your visitors are not legal eagles, and more often than not, have very little or no idea of legal terminologies. So, it’s important to do a bit of plain speaking and keep things simple. No, keeping things simple and making sure that even the most complex legal language is conveyed in easy to understand words, doesn’t make the legal firm come out looking like an amateur. On the contrary, readers tend to appreciate the firm more, if they understand all the legal web content up on the web pages.
2. Do a bit of of Plain Speaking
Nobody, and this bears repetition, nobody, likes web content that seems to make some extraordinary promises. Your web content vis-à-vis legal websites must stay away from tall claims, projecting a sense of overconfidence, or promoting the view that a particular legal firm is the best in the industry and everybody else is an idiot. That’s not going to work. You need to play it straight with your content, make no false promises and tell it the way it is. Make sure to showcase the firm’s strengths and abilities, but do not go overboard. Great legal content, is all about telling people the truth, that’s it. This is what instills trust in the website visitors.
3. Support Assertions with Facts
Website visitors looking for legal services don’t have all the time in the world to go through your content. More importantly, they are looking for facts and figures to trust the firm’s services and any claims that it is making. The website is targeting a particular target audience, that is looking for specific legal services. Your content, must convey why this audience needs the firm’s services. How will it help them? Why will it help them? And support the How and the Why with solid facts.
4. Keep them Engaged
If you get this aspect right, you really have nothing to worry about; that’s because ensuring your website visitors spend some time on your site, is a Herculean task. But it can be done. How? Add videos, infographics, news stories, resources and anything else that will keep your visitors browsing through the site. Using diverse content formats is just one of the many ways of upping the interest quotient in your website. You have a better chance of making your legal website conversion friendly, if you take steps to create and host engaging content on your site.
5. Stay away from long sentences or paras
Short sentences and paragraphs are the order of the day for legal websites. You don’t want your readers to get lost while reading the content. Short sentences make your content more readable and easy to understand. Also, content assimilation becomes easier if it’s compartmentalized into short paragraphs. This also makes the content easy to scan. Your content needs to make an impact on its readers in double quick time and this is only possible if you cut down on your sentence length, make them more to the point and less ‘beating around the bush’ ; also the short paragraphs mean all those words staring out at the readers do not overwhelm them.
6. Read Once, Read Twice, Read Again
When you are done creating the content, read it, and check whether it’s sounding right to your ears. Are you able to understand it and does it make sense to you? More importantly would you like to come back to it? If there are any doubts in your mind, rework the content again; repeated iterations make sure that the content you finally have up on your site is perfect.
7. Keep Freshening it Up
Nobody likes coming to the same content again and again, even if it’s of top quality. So, it’s in the law firm’s interest that the content is not just spruced up regularly, but updated periodically as well. Fresh content also brings tremendous SEO value to the table, which is another point in its favor. This also allows you to incorporate any new content ideas that you might want to implement as a means of improving your content.
Simple Does it Best
Zero fuss, not Glitter, should be your mantra while writing legal web content. You aren’t writing a thrilling novel, but trying to convey useful information in the most direct manner possible. If you keep this fact in mind, there is no reason why you cannot come up with high quality content that will have your readers wasting no time in getting in touch with your law firm.
