Writing an article for a lawyer to boost a service page
Client
Law firm in Canada
Date
Late Dec 2024
Services
SEO, Blog Post
Situation
A client, mid-sized law firm in Canada, wanted to boost a service they’ve had for quite some time with no major focus on it.
Since I signed an NDA, I can say that it’s a service related to estate planning, with no further details.
It’s a competitive niche with established law firms (like Mills & Mills, McKenzie) and specialized service providers dominating the SERP.
Task
To support the new service page with internal links from the blog, focusing on informational intent keywords. All previous articles were focused on a different service, so I had to write a new one.
Action
Here’s how I approached the task, step by step:
Step 1: Keyword research
I analyzed the keywords competition ranks for in Ahrefs and found a balanced option in terms of keyword difficulty and search volume. We’re talking a “who can do X in Ontario” kind of keyword, related to estate planning.
This particular keyword was an excellent foot-in-the-door option as well: people looking for articles on this topic are clearly in the process of estate planning but lack the knowledge of the process, so they can use the help of an expert lawyer.
To the task, it meant my article can provide value and help potential clients with their research, while leading them to the service page (and the contact form).
Step 2: Extra keywords
I used Answerthepublic and Google’s suggestions to gather more info and get a list of secondary keywords. It gave me the future structure.
Step 3: Research
I researched Ontario laws, read through existing content on the topic and outlined all the factual answers I’ve got to provide to make the copy useful.
Step 4: Writing
It took about 6 hours to write the article in Google Docs, start to finish. A fairly big piece of about 3,000 words: I was aiming at “biggest existing first page pieces +20%” in terms of volume.
Step 5: Visuals
I found 3 CC0-licensed, high-resolution images to include in the article. Also, I designed a simple infographic in Figma, summarizing the piece in one image, with the client’s logo on it. All shrunk in tinypng to boost loading speed.
Step 6: Publication
In WordPress, I formatted the final article and prepared it for publication:
In Yoast , I wrote a simple meta description and meta title (final results were green-green for SEO and readability).
Once the article got the approval of the client (the specifics of the law industry, nothing goes live without a green light), it was published with almost no changes.
Result
The article ranks #1 for the primary long tail keyword in Google, even after several core updates.
Since publication about a month ago, the article brought 1,2K clicks to the website and made 67,5K impressions.
It ranks for 946 queries in total:
As for the goal (to boost the service page), if we compare the performance of the service page before and after the publication of the support article, it’s clearly a success:
Note that no budget was allocated for backlinks and no changes were made in the original content of the service page.
This article did its job well and brought more weight to this estate planning-related service page. Though I have no access to their CRM, the client stated in email that they’re happy with a stream of leads that come for this service.
Also, the article has good positions in AI tools: Perplexity uses my infographic as the first image suggestion for all questions regarding this service in Ontario, and ChatGPT provides the client’s website as a source in its answers on the topic.