Should Lawyers Still Be Blogging in 2025?
There was once a time when everyone, and I mean almost everyone, had a blog. You might recall. It was the mid-to-late 2000s. The internet was amazing. Sure, it’s amazing today, but it still had that shiny and new smell back then. Blogger and LiveJournal were huge. I knew writers who had multiple blogs, all for different subjects. I knew pets who had blogs. Heck, I had a family member who blogged for their newborn kid.
That popularity naturally made its way to professions that had a strong online presence, including the legal profession. Blogs were a massive source of organic traffic for a company or firm’s website, bringing people to the site itself to find out what the company or firm had to offer. Restaurants had blogs. Nursing homes had blogs. Dentists had blogs. So did every law firm.
There was one catch, though. Not all those law firm blogs were successful.
Catchin’ All the Blogs: Do We Gotta?
Along with every law firm blog that sprung up during the 2000s and 2010s, every personal injury firm site had a Pokémon Go blog in 2016. You know the one. Pokémon Go, and the legal ramifications of injuries related to playing the game, were hot topics in the news. Firms were on the lookout for potential cases and blogged about the topic because—let’s face it—the word “lawyer” doesn’t appear as a synonym to “hot topic” in most dictionaries.
For many law firms and their marketing agencies, those Pokémon Go blogs were the very essence of the blogging they did at the time, and that strategy made sense logistically. Blog about the things that may drive cases and get traffic for those cases. Boom. Blogging in a nutshell. The problem is that every firm was blogging about the same exact topics in the same exact manner.
Around this time and earlier, marketers on a global level realized they could push their sites to the top of search rankings by copying and pasting X keywords according to a mathematical formula. Sometimes these keywords were invisible except for in code. Other times, they were blatantly repeated over and over on a page to an unreadable level. This resulted in some of the top pages on Google becoming spammy nonsense that served no value to anyone.
As a result, Google was forced to take a closer look at the quality of its top-ranking content. The folks at Google started adjusting their search algorithms to ensure valuable content rose above the ashes of the spam. Quality mattered. Readability mattered. Uniqueness mattered. Marketers started having to change their strategies to keep up with Google. It was no longer worthwhile to make slight changes to the same blog and post it on five different sites.
In the years following the decline of spammy, re-spun blogs, businesses started questioning the value of their sites’ blogs. Was it worth churning out super short blogs about the same topics that other firms wrote about already? Probably not. Was it worth reusing content in multiple places for the sake of having “new” content on a blog? Definitely not. The days of blogging about all the things using all the possible keywords under the sun were long gone.
What About Blogging in 2025?
With AI-assisted writing tools becoming increasingly easier and popular to use, many businesses like law firms are wondering whether it’s worthwhile to blog at all in 2025. Why write blogs at all if an AI bot can do just as good of a job? Why compete at all if there’s no way to guarantee that keywords will be as effective as they used to be?
All great questions. The answers come down to the very same factors Google started introducing years ago into their algorithms: User experience, quality, and uniqueness. Ever since our LiveJournals and Pokémon Go apps were left behind in the dust, these three pillars became the pillars of search engine optimization (SEO) and are what separate poor content from great content online.
People-first content matters more today than ever, in fact. AI tools may be incredibly simple to use, but that doesn’t mean that humans can’t tell the difference between the word choices an AI bot makes and the words that a human may write. Google uses the very same methodology that AI bots use to determine what’s written by an actual human and what isn’t. Unsurprisingly, Google wants to see humans writing human-first content, and Google even takes steps to penalize sites that utilize AI-written content (more on this in a later blog!).
So, should lawyers blog in 2025? Just over the course of the last couple of years, there’s been similar chatter among marketers as to whether new startups and businesses should blog at all. These questions come at an understandable time when it may seem daunting to try and blog in an online world where everything is so very vast, complicated, and now full of robots.
The short answer? Yes.
The long answer? Yes, as long as you or your marketing agency can blog with a people-first approach. Blog about genuine concerns your clients have. Blog about questions potential clients ask. If your marketing agency writes your blogs for you, give them topics that you know are on the minds of your clients. All of this counts as people-first content because—you guessed it right—it comes from people.
At GAVL, we’ve always believed in people first. Our clients matter first and foremost to us, and we’re at the top of our game when it comes to writing quality legal content (including blogs!) for lawyers and firms around the nation. Our writing team is 100% in-house. Reach out to us to learn how we can help.
