It can be tricky to always come up with new blog ideas to add to your website – but they have a number of benefits. Here are 10 blog ideas, specifically for professional services firms, which you can adapt to your audience and use to demonstrate your expertise and key people.
Why is Blogging so Important?
Having an active blog page on your website has several purposes. There are a number of practical reasons to blog which will help with your website performance. But there are also many points that will boost your marketing and online profile.
Some reasons for law firms, accountants and professional service suppliers to blog include:
- Keep your website regularly refreshed with new content
- Build on your key words and searchable terms
- Answer your targets FAQs
- Drive traffic to your website
- Drive new enquiries or calls to action
- To set you apart from our competitors
- Helps to humanise your brand
- Gives you industry credibility
- Build writing skills within your team
- Demonstrate trust
- Showcase your knowledge and expertise
- Prove that you are ‘on the pulse’ with topical issues
- Provide you with content for social media
Hopefully that provides you with enough motivation to keep or start blogging! So, what is next?
Before you start writing, you should ask yourself three simple questions:
- Who are you writing for?
- What will your reader get from reading this blog?
- What is your objective?
Companies should never blog for the sake of blogging, so make sure you have some objectives in mind and have a clear picture of your target reader. It also makes writing easy, if you can visualise who your audience is.
10 Blog Ideas for Professional Services
1. Tell a Story
A storytelling blog can be both informative and entertaining. It is also a great way to persuade someone to read until the end, because they will intuitively want to know what happens! It could be a personal story, like ‘why I became an accountant’ or ‘my first day in court’, or a story about a client you have helped. These types of blogs are good for raising the profile of someone in your firm or demonstrating expertise.
2. An Interview
An interview with a team member is a great and informal way of raising the profile of key members of your team and depending on the size of your firm, could provide you with content for many months. Make it interesting with a range of questions, both about their role, expertise and some fun, personal questions too.
3. Answer Some FAQs
An FAQ blog is a great way of boosting your SEO as you are stuffing your website full of questions that your target audience might be searching for online. If you blog helps answer a question or problem that someone has, then they are far more likely to re-engage with you. If you have multiple departments in your law firm or accountancy practice, each department can have their own blog of frequently asked questions.
4. Trending Topics
Talking about something topical is a powerful way of staying current, relevant, boosting your SEO (as fewer people are discussing) and demonstrating your expertise. The only trouble with these types of blogs is that they need to be produced and shared quickly, which can be difficult when you have busy fee earners. There are likely to be topics that you can plan for throughout the year, e.g. Tax Year End, Christmas and changes of legislation that you know are coming in. But if you want to promptly react to a news story, then you must act fast.
5. Numbers and Tips
A personal favourite of mine is to use blogs with a number of tips. Like this one! You know that you want to hear all 10 tips and will read to the very end. It’s simple psychology! Is there a topic that you can break down into 5 stages, 7 ways, 10 top tips or a 20-step guide? This is also a good way of repurposing an old blog to breathe new life into it.
6. Behind the Scenes
Everyone loves exclusive access to things. Why not give readers a glimpse of life behind the scenes. This can be a particularly good blog topic for recruitment purposes. Finding out about a day in the life of a divorce lawyer, or reading about what life is really like as a trainee solicitor are great ways to highlight your team and build rapport.
7. Dispel Myths
In the professional services industry there are numerous misconceptions. Writing blogs that squash misunderstandings and clearly explain the truth are a great way to show your audience that you have their best interests at heart and have the ability to communicate well. The myths that you bust, might also be high volume search terms which will boost your SEO.
8. Seasonal Content
There will be trends in your industry that are the same every year. This can help you plot out some key topics that you will need to discuss or share information on. You can keep building on or refreshing your existing content rather than reinventing the wheel each season. These are likely to be popular searches and information that you target clients are looking for.
9. Thought Leadership
Can you offer a unique perspective on something? Predict a future trend? Or give your opinion on legislative changes or things that have occurred in your industry? These types of blogs may take more thought and time but can be powerful pieces of content that place you as an industry expert and even get picked up by press or other publications.
10. Guest Blog
When you have exhausted your ideas – why not get someone else to feature on your blog? This can be a great way of diversifying your content, broadening the audience you reach and building partnerships with other advisors or professionals that you work with. For example, a post on retirement planning from an IFA is a perfect compliment for a private client firm’s website. The firm you feature can return the favour and allow you to guest blog on their website. This also means backlinks, which are another feature of website pages that can boost your SEO.
Hopefully these 10 blog ideas have given you some inspiration for your next piece of content. If you would like more information about blogging, a training session on professional services content creation or are thinking about outsourcing your blog to experienced marketers (aka us), then please get in touch. We would love to help!
Editors Note: This article was originally posted in 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.