I’ve written before about legal blogging.  But being a KM guy, I usually focus on the benefits of using blogs inside the law firm, for KM purposes. 

Kevin O’Keefe (Real Lawyers Have Blogs) writes a lot about using blogs as marketing tools.  And he should know – he’s helped a lot of firms dramatically increase traffic to their websites.  Check out his recent post, Lawyer blogs driving traffic to law firm websites. 

Just as most firms got on the website band wagon in the 1990s (some reluctantly, remember?), most firms–the ones that haven’t already–will have one or more blogs in the next few years.  I know, I know: this is not such a ground-breaking prediction given the recent report that “53 of the Am Law 200 firms in 2007 were blogging a total of 110 blogs.“  And it’s not just small firms that are on the band wagon: check out Kevin’s post that has a long list of firms that blog.  There’s some big names there. My favorite take away from Kevin’s “Lawyer blogs driving traffic…” post (above):

Blogs are turning out to be a very cost effective means to drive traffic through the law firm website and particular, practice areas and lawyer bio’s.

Why?

• Law blogs focus on substantive legal information, as opposed to promotional copy. Google can tell the difference and is obviously more interested in pushing information, as opposed to marketing copy, to the top of search results.
• Blogs have more frequent updates. More updates, the more keywords and key phrases people will be searching for that you’ll have in your blog site.
• Viral marketing. Blogs routinely get cited by other blogs and reporters. You’re seen when your target audience is doing research on your niche in the law.
• Subscribers by RSS and email. Websites don’t have subscribers.
• Blog RSS feeds being aggregated by Google Blog Search and Technorati so blog posts are picked up by reporters and bloggers subscribed to keywords and key phrases at those places.
• Links. The holy grail of search optimization. Incoming links from other relevant sites (law in this case) establish the importance of a site in Google’s mind. The more links, the more important, and the higher you’ll be in search results.

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