Your Firm's Blog Stopped Working in Month Four

Look at the blog on almost any law firm website and you will find the same shape. Eleven posts in the first three months. Four in the next three. Then a gap of two years, and a post from last week apologising for the gap.

This is so common it is nearly a law. It is worth understanding why it happens, because the reason is not laziness and it is not the quality of the writing.

Nothing Happens for a Long Time

Search rewards published work slowly. A page that will eventually rank spends its first few months ranking for nothing at all, then appears somewhere on the fourth page, then moves. The gap between doing the work and seeing the result is measured in months.

Every other marketing channel a firm uses gives feedback faster than that. Paid ads report back within a day. A billboard produces calls that mention the billboard. A blog produces a spreadsheet where a number went from zero to zero.

So the blog is the first thing dropped when a trial calendar gets heavy, and it is dropped precisely during the period when stopping does the most damage.

The Posts Were Not Aimed at Anything

The second reason is more fixable. Most firm blogs are written about topics rather than about searches.

"Five Tips for Safe Summer Driving" is a topic. Nobody types it. "What to do after a hit and run in Denver" is a search, and it is typed by somebody who is going to hire a lawyer this month.

The difference is not the writing. It is whether anyone chose the target before the writing started. A post aimed at nothing in particular can be excellent and still be invisible, and when it turns out to be invisible, everyone reasonably concludes that blogging does not work.

We start every plan with exact monthly search volume and what advertisers are paying per click on the term, because those two numbers separate a phrase worth owning from a phrase that merely sounds professional. That is the first step of how we approach law firm SEO, and it is the step most often skipped.

Nobody Owned the Schedule

The third reason is the one nobody puts in a proposal. A blog needs a person whose job it is, on a date, whether or not anyone feels inspired.

When publishing depends on an attorney finding a spare evening, the schedule is competing against billable work and family, and it will lose every single time. That is not a character flaw. It is arithmetic.

What Actually Works

The firms whose blogs work do three unglamorous things.

• They pick the target before writing. One page, one search, chosen because the numbers say somebody is looking for it and somebody is paying to be found for it.
• They publish on a fixed cadence. Not when inspiration strikes. On a schedule, at a volume that can be sustained through a bad month.
• They keep going past the quiet part. Months two through five look like failure and are not. The archive compounds; the early months are the cost of entry.

None of that requires better writing than the firm can already produce. It requires deciding in advance and then not stopping, which is a harder problem than it sounds and is most of what a firm is really buying when it hires this work out.

If You Are Restarting

Do not apologise in a post. Nobody was waiting. Pick three searches you would genuinely like to be found for, write the best page on the internet for each, and publish them a fortnight apart.

Then keep going for a year. If you want that run by someone else, that is exactly what our marketing work is.