I’ve spent a few weeks trawling through numerous law firm websites, in order to create personalised content marketing reports for firms ranked outside of the UK top 100. After a while, it’s hard not to notice the same mistakes being repeated when it comes to content. Here are my top 5 tips for showcasing your content better:

1. Don’t hide your blog

Sometimes, finding the blog section of a law firm website is about as hard as jumping through three fire hoops while translating terms and conditions into a lost Latin dialect.

Honestly, unless you’re very ashamed of your blogging efforts, it should be front and centre of your website, and not the 17th item in an unrelated drop-down menu.

Incidentally, if you have an external separate domain on which you share your thought leadership, highlight it clearly on your website. Don’t call it something grandiose like Fluffymunchkinoids without qualifying it. You’re making it too easy for people to miss or dismiss.

In some cases you have to wonder if the blogs are meant to be read. After being forced to choose one of several categories which are all essentially the same (newsletter, e-alert, brochure, news, articles, insights, overview, etc), clicking through to a list of posts and opening each individual title, you are then asked to click again to open the PDF where it’s hosted. By that point, most of your prospects will have given up the ghost.

Make the journey shorter and less fussy, most people won’t care whether you term your post an ‘insight’ or an ‘article’, they’ll care about the content’s relevance to them.

2. Make it easy to read

Let’s mention too the badly formatted blogs: tiny font in tight lines. You’re not going to increase print costs by making your content readable on the web! Give your text space to breathe and make it easy on the eyes. This is particularly crucial if your content is over 500 words: compact blocks of text are not easy to read on a screen.

There’s no harm in adding a picture or two to break up the text or aid understanding. This doesn’t have to distract from the serious nature of your content.

3. When was it written?

Another frustration, which occurs quite frequently, is having un-dated blogs. This might seem like a small niggle, but I personally want to know when the website was last updated and how out-of-date an insight is, and so will your clients.

If you are creating regular content, flaunt it, it’ll highlight how responsive you are to breaking industry news.

4. Go easy on the gating

Call to actions have definitely become all the rage on law firm websites, and that’s great – getting people to subscribe to your content is a great way to help convert leads. However, if all of your content is gated, then how do your prospects know that it’s worth giving up their precious addresses for? In an age of spam, we need proof we’re not setting ourselves up for a flood of irrelevant emails.

5. Create content in the first place

Finally, if you are a modern law firm looking to attract prospects and you are not creating any content on your website, then it’s high time to crawl out from under that rock and join everyone else.

If you want a free personalised report on your law firm’s content marketing activity, go here.