Marketing your firm and growing your firm’s online presence relies on a balance of both on-site and off-site content. Having a website that is informational and up to date is important, but having content about your firm posted elsewhere can also influence the success of your firm’s website. Here’s how to strike a balance between the two:
What is On-Site Content?
On-site content is exactly as it sounds. Anything hosted on your firm’s website is on-site content. Your firm’s blog, FAQs, resources, practice descriptions, etc. all fall under this umbrella. On-site content should help boost your firm’s SEO as well as influence potential claimants to work with your firm.
When you’re creating on-site content, it’s important to optimize your content. This means adding keywords and phrases that you’d like your firm’s site to rank for. You also should make sure your on-site content has technical optimizations like meta descriptions, title tags, alt text, etc. to make it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl your site.
What is Off-Site Content?
Off-site content is content that pertains to your firm that is not on your website. If your write different guest blogs, these would qualify as off-site content. Other examples include your firm’s social media accounts, client reviews, news articles, etc. Some off-site content isn’t always optimized like you would optimize on-site content, meaning it’s not strategically written for specific keywords or has a structured markup that you implemented. An example of this would be client reviews where others are posting rather you.
Though you can’t do technical optimizations to your off-site content, you can still optimize the off-site content you write, unlike the reviews your firm may receive. Keywords can be added to guest blogs to help them to appear in searches. As you post on social media accounts, you can be selective about what gets posted. If you are a Social Security firm, you may only want to post about cases your firm takes (such as avoiding posting about qualifying conditions that develop during childhood if you do not take SSI cases).
How Do You Find a Balance?
Striking a balance between on-site and off-site content is important for your firm’s success. Backlinks are a major ranking factor for Google and other search engines. Because of this, if you spend all your time working on your firm’s site but don’t have any off-site content, then your site will likely not do as well as other law firms that have both. On the other hand, if you only work on writing guest blogs but don’t have an informative or current site to link back to, then your efforts are a lost cause.
Link building is an easy way to find a balance between the two. You’ll need to write off-site consent, like guest blogs, that link back to your firm’s site. The pages on your firm’s site that you link back to should be high quality content.
To make sure enough time is dedicated to both on-site and off-site content, consider making a schedule. For example, you can take some time every Monday to work on content, alternating every other week which type of content you work on. This way, you won’t neglect one over the other. By working on both, you’ll have an evolving site that should continue to rise in the search engine rankings.