Reach

Reach content is intended to ‘reach’ out to a new audience. This type of content is unique, keyword-rich, search-engine-optimised content which describes the law and promotes your services. This is the ‘traditional’ form of content found on most legal websites. It’s important to make sure that it’s more than a bullet-point list that lays out your areas of practice. 
Google rewards in-depth, authoritative content and, in our experience, pages which is in the form of a list is not given the same weight as prose. This content is low-risk, easy to produce and should be added as permanent landing pages to the site as opposed to blogs or other transient media.

React

This is content that addresses an issue or event which is relevant to your business. This type of content can be harder to plan because you are ‘reacting’ to external events. Not only that, you are trying to provoke a reaction in your potential client base. For instance, someone looking to instruct you in a conveyancing transaction has planned ahead and knows that the transaction is happening and that they will need a solicitor.
The key to this type of content is offering a new perspective or insight into the issue at hand. Ensure that you aren’t regurgitating tabloid headlines but are offering a unique legal perspective on events. There will almost certainly be an increased volume of search traffic relating to the event whether it’s a new Act or a celebrity divorce. What you want to do is to contribute to the debate on the matter and engage your existing and potential client base. This type of content increases your visibility online and demonstrates your practical expertise.

Roadmap

This type of content comprises focused in-depth legal guides. These go into detail on the law, use technical terminology and layout the process step-by-step. While some lawyers are understandably reluctant to lift the veil on their practice, this type of content is extremely valuable in getting results online. By including technical terminology (such as sections of Acts, Latin and other niche terms), you will attract a much greater volume of ‘long tail’ searches. These are searches for longer queries or which use niche terms. Obviously, there will be fewer searches for, say, the section of an act but there will be a great many for different terms. Capturing these searches is the key to succeeding online.

Repurposed

This is old content which is given a new lease of life. This includes older landing pages, externally-posted (or published) items such as journal articles. It also includes non-searchable items like PDFs, eBooks, whitepapers and so on.

This can be a valuable way of quickly generating content at the outset of a content strategy. Providing the law is still current, this type of content can be reworked quickly and easily to provide a solid base from which to start your content marketing campaign.