Practically every estate planning and Elder Law attorney we know has years of stories, some heartbreaking, some inspiring, that are the natural result of devoting their professional life to helping families and seniors. Some of these stories are novel-worthy, and others can be the source (when permission is given or if you make a lot of changes to the fact patterns) for great website content. But—and this is important—not everything that grips the heart makes for good SEO content. You need to know the difference.
IMS provides clients with high quality, SEO-focused content. That’s how your website content is prepared from the get-go and that content is also at the heart of the weekly blog support that arrives every week. We can’t recommend it highly enough! Use it regularly, tweak it to make it reflect your firm or your market, add your personal touch to make it more “you” and speak with your account manager if you have questions about how blog posting will impact your SEO visibility.
A scattershot approach isn’t a strategic plan. Updating paragraphs here and there every now and again is not how to improve your content. If you want an editorial overhaul, submit a support ticket and let’s talk about how your vision of new content fits into the bigger picture. If you’re spending hours making minor changes, you’re losing billable time and not gaining much.
Keyword competition is a serious business. Writers, bloggers, marketers, journalists, editors and producers are all out there trying to get their message to the top of the page. Please know this successful SEO content is not a matter of simply repeating the same phrases over and over again. Google does not like keyword stuffing. It’s about creating a superior UX (User Experience) through providing usable, relevant content. It’s what we do at IMS, every day.
An important note: taking content from another website is dangerous. Seems like you should just be able to lift and edit similar content and no one will know, right? You could not be more wrong.
Taking content from another website without permission or without attribution is plagiarism. It’s also copyright theft. You would never think about taking someone’s car—you shouldn’t take their web content!
When content is licensed or syndicated, it is solely for the use of those who have paid to use the content. The content that is provided by IMS, for example, is solely for our client’s use.
Lifting up content that appears on a website of a firm that has changed ownership, even if you were a partner at that firm, poses certain risks. The old firm owned that content. The new firm does not. We have seen people scrape content that did not belong to them and suffer the consequences from their legal peers as well as penalties from Google for using unauthorized duplicative content.
We know you are really good at your work as an estate planning and Elder Law attorney. We’re really good at SEO-focused content and building websites that work for SEO and UX. Before you start tinkering with an updated page here and there, submit a support ticket and let’s talk about the big picture and what changes, if any, are needed for your site.
And by all means, do start working on that novel in your spare time. Just don’t make it part of your estate planning website!