Do you draft your online attorney biographies and then let them age like a fine wine in the cellar? If so, think again.
Employee bios are the storefront window showcasing your firm’s best assets. When boundless choices exist at the consumer’s fingertips, differentiating your value proposition in the minds of savvy consumers has never been more important.
Attorney bios allow you to demonstrate your team’s knowledge, skills and abilities while scoring several additional search engine optimization (SEO) benefits—if they remain current and relevant. Outdated bios can have the opposite effect. Here, we’ll look at the benefits of keeping employee bios vibrant and up to date.
Do Outdated Websites Have Negative Consequences?
Undoubtedly, an outdated website can detract from your message when comparing your site with your competitors. On the other hand, an updated website will show your audience that your company is contemporary, professional and accessible.
With attorney bios, you should aim to update them at least annually. Make sure you include any new promotions, awards, successful projects and news mentions to keep them fresh. Encourage attorneys to share their professional accomplishments on social platforms like LinkedIn, with a link to the firm bio.
How Do You Include SEO Elements?
With Google’s updated EEAT model, establishing your site’s experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness is paramount to how you rank in search results. Using your attorney bios as an additional touchpoint, you can capitalize on the supplementary content for search engines to crawl.
As you produce and refresh bios, it’s easy to sprinkle in SEO elements, such as:
- Researched Keywords: Perform keyword research for search terms the audience may use to find content like yours. For example, “IP attorney near me.” Applications like Ahref’s keyword research tool[MH1] [JR2] can show you keywords, phrases and their relative competition among other websites.
- Engaging Headlines and Shorter Paragraphs/Sentences: Quick readability of your bios is essential. Make sure to break up your paragraphs with headlines and consider phrasing those headlines as questions. Headlines posed as questions perform better in search and provide a better user experience (UX). Most readers will skim the headlines to find the information they need, and a quick question can make it easier to find. Walls of text will turn readers off, so use bulleted lists (like this one!) to make content more accessible.
- Internal and External Links: Links fall into several categories, but internal and external are the most important. External links, or outbound links, should point to credible sources for the facts and figures you cite in your content. In bios, you can add a few outbound links to professional membership organizations and professional license databases, state bar listings, etc.
Internal links are also essential for moving the audience along. Quick wins include providing a link to another page or blog that dives deeper into a particular topic and wrapping up each page with a link to your contact page. (Additional areas like linking strategy, canonical links, backlinks and more can take up a whole post all their own.)
Leveraging SEO best practices, your attorney bios can boost your site’s SEO score and contribute to your page reaching higher search results than your competitors.
Crafting Content for Awards and Requests for Proposal (RFP) Submittals
When you are formally evaluated for an award nomination or in response to an RFP submission, your attorney bios are fair game to see how you stack up. When an up-to-date bio correlates with the information submitted, that bio can quickly become a critical factor in choosing one candidate over another. A bio can showcase someone’s projects, cases, publications and other information, setting them apart in the reviewers’ minds.
Need Help Keeping Your Bios Vibrant?
In the daily hustle and bustle, it can be easy to forget to update your company bio. However, keeping these write-ups fresh, crisp, and compelling can help create unforgettable impressions for your audience.
At Poston Communications, we combine data-driven strategy with boundless creativity to help our clients deliver the right message, at the right time, for maximum impact. Our content and PR teams can help you anticipate actions, like updating employee bios, as part of a carefully crafted communications strategy.
Contact our team to see how we can help.