Self service is a critical part of any website. Being flexible is crucial, and while you might have plenty of friendly faces ready to pick up the phone or respond to an email, some people just like to find solutions themselves. This is where one of your most valuable assets comes in, your legal FAQ page.
The general public is pretty unaware of the inner workings of most industries, but the legal sector is probably more unknown than most. The fact is, besides having watched a few episodes of Suits most people don’t really know what lawyers do, and more importantly, what they can do for you. This is where your legal FAQ steps forward to fill the gap.
So how exactly do we optimise your FAQs to educate your audience as best as possible?
Understanding Search Intent
The most important thing to understand about writing your legal FAQs is understanding your users’ search intent. How do you know what people want to know, so you can write about it?
There’s many methods you can use, but one of the main ones is of course our good friend Google. What are the most frequent auto-predicted questions? Conduct keyword research in certain categories to see what the most frequent queries revolve around, and guestimate what each user might want to know. There are also many websites you can use like Quora, AskThePublic, Yelp, etc. These websites will highlight very specific questions that people have asked.
The next way of finding out what your clients want to know is by asking them. Use your current clients, past clients, and your reviews. Ask people why they came to you in the first place, what made them reach out, what did they need to know? This is especially important because these findings are ultra targeted to you!
Social media is a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy, but you can also use it to feedback into your legal FAQs too. What are your visitors commenting about? Use polls, surveys, and other interactive features to generate input from your followers and understand their intent.
Finally, and maybe most obviously is using your incoming inquiries. While some visitors might turn straight to FAQ’s to find information, others will phone in, email in, or use your AI chatbot to ask questions. While some will be inquiring generally, some will ask much more specific questions. If these questions aren’t being answered by your legal FAQs, now you know some of what’s missing.
Organisation Is Optimisation
Naturally there will be hundreds of questions and answers about any legal topic. Try and find a way of categorising your legal FAQs such that they’re not overwhelming as part of the user experience. A web page with 150 questions on it is going to be overwhelming. Break your FAQs down into subsections/topics. You might have a general FAQ page, and then individual pages for niche topics like car accidents, workplace injury, corporate law, and child custody etc. Each of those topics are very different to one another so why group them together.
Legal FAQs are typically very text heavy too, so be sure to think about using some clever javascript to hide bulky answers. Remember, the user experience is still key, even if your content is designed for SEO.
Be Clear & Concise
Most visitors on your FAQ page are not likely to be legal experts. That’s why they’re there. Don’t confuse them with excessive use of legal jargon. Use layman’s terms, simple English! Be clear and concise, and get to the point. Many FAQs often have a lot of duplicate content, or content that is frankly unrelated to the question. If you do think you’re going off topic, or want to expand, use internal links to encourage users to find more information elsewhere. Maybe towards your blog, or a landing page. 2 paragraphs is really the maximum you’ll want per question.
Use CTA’s
To contradict myself from earlier, while visitors don’t always want to talk to a human, remind people you are still there to help. You can answer much more specific questions in a far more personable way than a couple of paragraphs of text. Just nudge people that while there is information on the FAQ page, they can always get more by talking to you!
Optimise for SEO
Of course legal FAQ pages are in their design fantastic content for your SEO. Don’t do all the hard work researching and writing questions, just to undermine it by not optimising it for the search engines. Of course there is a host of technical optimisations you should be using, from title tags, meta descriptions and schema markup. For a full guide on technical SEO checkout our guide here.
Final Thoughts On Legal FAQs
A good FAQ page can contribute heavily to your organic search strategy and overall lead generation. Ensure you find out first what you need to write about and why. Content should always be designed with the user in mind, so utilise as many channels as possible to find out what they want to know. Once you’re happy your content is relevant, be sure to optimise as best as possible, but don’t neglect the user experience. SEO is of course important, as is organisation, but remember you should only be a phone call or Whatsapp message away.
If you’re looking for more support on your legal FAQs, or need some guidance on your digital marketing strategy, please contact us here for a free consultation!
