14 Mar How to do legal copywriting right
Legal copywriting can be a difficult field. This is mostly because of the complexity of reinterpreting legal content for non-lawyers, but it can also just be the result of a lack of professional content writing experience.
The difference in format between specific and detailed legislation and a concise, effective website front page can be astronomical. This is why you must have a clear understanding of what works in the online world … and what doesn’t. Learning to write for an online audience is tough. Here’s some advice to help you get started.
The medium is the message
The primary difference between legal copywriting and writing for business is the medium. Online, the attention of your audience online is crushingly limited. Readers online prioritise information-gathering and scanning rather than dedicated reading. As such, properly structuring your content becomes paramount.
Managing the attention economy means adapting your vocabulary and varying your sentence length. And maximising readership and engagement requires proper search engine optimisation (SEO) and specific calls to action. Writing in the vernacular style of the legal profession – with its unique mix of verbosity and precision – will kill your blog stone dead.
Copywriting follows set structures
So, how does one go about writing legal content for an online audience? Well, the best place to start is probably your structure. Writing for the online sphere requires an effective depth of information broken into digestible chunks that follow from one to the next in a way that is logical to the layman.
Headings are essential to signposting your information, helping you atomise key concepts and present them in pieces so readers can skim quickly or refer back to your articles when looking for specifics. Front-loading what an article is going to be about in the first paragraph allows you to manage reader expectations.
Don’t beat around the bush with some oblique tangent to introduce your article’s topic. Be blunt and upfront: “… this article is about Topic A, if you read on you will learn about X, Y and Z”. Always focus on your reader; imagine the most disengaged possible audience, now try to pitch your message to be relevant enough to pique their interest.
Use legal vocabulary sparingly
Copywriting can be difficult, and legal copywriting in particular presents unique challenges. Complex and difficult concepts abound in the legal world. Specific jargon, precise vocabulary and many phrases in Latin make up what the public calls “legalese”. A field as notoriously difficult to understand and interpret as the law requires practice and patience to make it palatable to people perusing your website.
Therefore, it’s important to cut out all of the unnecessary vocabulary and simplify your sentences without dumbing-down your content or misinforming your audience. Remember, the point of your article is to inform without being confusing. Rule of thumb for writing accessible content about complex topics: if you’re stripping things back to their essence, that’s being simple; if you’re losing the essence, that’s being simplistic. Don’t be simplistic.
Writing in a digital world
Finally, you must understand how to gain readership in online spaces. For the information people read in the digital world, most of the collation is done by search engines. Usually Google. If you don’t understand how SEO practices dovetail with how computers prioritise search results, your content might never be found. Either by human readers or the search engines themselves.
Keywords, hyperlinks and using metadata effectively are all pivotal in improving the amount of views (or “hits”) your content receives. It’s an important insight because Google isn’t able to “read” your content. Instead, the software behind the search analyses a chunk of text for things like word frequency, overall length, popularity, tags and many other kinds of data as signals to determine what overall rank it warrants.
The good news is that you can manipulate these signals. In short, when you make sure search engines can read and rank your articles, they’ll be ushered to the top of the search results when a human reader comes looking.
You are not alone
Legal copywriting is a distinct challenge, but you can prevail if you start simple and stay smart. The tips in this article are only some of the many that you can use to get your message across and boost engagement with your website.
However, if keeping all of this in mind seems too daunting and distracting you from getting back to billable hours, then you’re in luck. Outsource it!
Here at Search and Site Authoring, we’re proud to have writers from legal and business backgrounds on our team. Their specialist knowledge plus our editorial nous means your content will be accurate as it takes the things you need your audience to know and turns them into articles they want to read.
Get in touch to find out how we can take content writing, articles and blogging off your plate and let you get back to being a lawyer.
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