Legally Blogging: Is More Better for Your Firm Blog?
For lawyers looking to build a reputation, make a name online, increase their standing as legal experts, or just express themselves, blogging is an essential tool. A good blog can improve your Internet search results, bring traffic to your firm website, and help increase your professional profile.
But how much blogging is too much blogging? Or too little? A recent blogging experiment by an SEO company showed that more isn't always better when it comes to blogging.
More Posts Don't Mean More Readers
It's true: if you publish it, they will come. Putting out frequent new content can help drive traffic to your legal blog and your practice. Google, in particular, loves the "freshness factor" and rewards recent posts with ranking in search results. But that doesn't mean you (or your staff) should push out two or three blog posts a day.
Publishing twice as much doesn't necessarily lead to higher readership nor does posting less frequently drive readers away. That's the lesson from a recent experiment by Moz, a search engine optimization company (the people who help you get high rankings in the Google results). Moz has been running a respected, pretty widely-read SEO blog for over ten years now. This summer they decided to experiment with posting frequency, to see how publishing frequency affected traffic.
In typical tech fashion, they conducted a simple A/B test. On a typical week the Moz blog put out a post a day and got a bit under 40,000 unique visitors over the week. Publishing at half the typical rate, they expected their viewers to decrease. That didn't happen. Instead, the numbers dropped only slightly, going down 5.6 percent. When they published twice as much, the number of visitors barely moved. Other metrics, like reader engagement and newsletter sign-ups, also remained fairly stable despite the changes in blog-posting frequency.
The take away? Skipping a day or two of blogging won't tank your traffic, nor will doubling down.
Quality Matters
When it comes to blogging, quality matters. For many blogs, a lot of traffic comes from established posts instead of just new content. For example, Moz has an old post on webpage title tags that generates thousands of views a week, despite being almost two years old. At FindLaw, we're always surprised at how many people want to know about non-legal careers for J.D.s. In the end, the quality of posts, not their quantity, is the foundation of a successful blog.
Related Resources:
- Search Engines Could Already Be Tilting Elections, Study Says (The Washington Post)
- Federal Judge Stops Blogging (Again). Should You? (FindLaw's Strategist)
- Lawyers: 5 Reasons Why You Should Resurrect Your Blog (FindLaw's Strategist)
- Five Things to Consider When Posting on Your Law Firm Blog (FindLaw's Strategist)