Companies that blog generate 55% more traffic to their website

Companies that blog generate 55% more traffic to their websites than those companies that do not blog.

This per an ebook on ‘Optimizing Relationships With Social Media‘ I just downloaded from HubSpot.

Blogging allows you to talk about topics that are more appealing to people and allows you to make more interesting correlations. You can use long tailed keywords, you can attract more inbound links and you can use the comments section to generate conversations.

Your blog helps you become more interesting on social media as well. Take the content that you create on your blog and you share it on Facebook, on Twitter and other networks.

Hubspot’s study was admittedly focused on small businesses. But the same logic applies to large businesses — as well as law firms, both large and small.

• Blogs generate long tail search results. Sophisticated law firm clients done’t search for corporate lawyer or family lawyer on Google. They’ll search on exactly the subject on which they are looking for information. Maybe a Subchapter S question or whether a teen can choose which parent to live with after a divorce. Blog and you’re apt to have content on such subjects.
• Valuable content generates incoming links — meaning textual links from other websites and blogs linking to your blog. Bloggers, reporters, associations and anyone else sharing valuable information share and cite valuable information from elsewhere on their own blog, news site, or website. Links determine the importance of a blog or website in Google’s eyes. The more important a blog or website, the higher it will rank in search results.
• Blogs generate a social network for you. People regularly share posts from blogs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Publish valuable content on a blog and your content gets shared.
• Blogs enhance your reputation as a lawyer with care, passion, and expertise in a particular area of the law. You’re thus going to generate more searches to your website for people wanting more information about you and what you do.

I’ll take relationships and word of mouth over website traffic as a lawyer. But website traffic has its place in growing your reputation and getting legal work.

And if you’re a legal marketing professional working in a medium or large law firm, you’re being pounded on for reasons on why our lawyers ought to blog. Here’s some ammunition for you.