Evergreen content is the foundation of a strong law firm website because it provides information that remains relevant and useful to potential clients over time. The most effective resource libraries are organized around content hubs or pillars that connect related pages, helping search engines understand the site’s structure and boosting visibility in search results. For human users, you will probably also want to create a “resource library” page that organizes links to individual pieces of content by topic and content type (e.g., how-to guides, legal definitions). A well-organized, consistently maintained archive of evergreen resources not only improves your law firm website’s performance in search results, but also helps to build trust with potential clients and establish your law firm website itself as a go-to resource for questions in your practice area.
What Is “Evergreen” Content?
Evergreen content is material posted to your law firm website that retains its value over time. This retention of value needs to be calibrated both by the consistency of the information itself (statutory definitions and rules of procedure will normally qualify; a discussion of cases currently on a district court’s docket usually would not) and by the consistency of the searches potential clients run to find that information (”grounds for divorce in Mississippi” would count, but “Easter egg hunts on public property” would not).
What Is a Resource Library?
Those topical parameters help to establish what evergreen means, but ideally you (and your content strategy team) should be putting some thought into defining resources, as well. How-to guides, “complete guide to…” articles, and checklists to prepare for various legal scenarios can all be valuable types of resources when linked with topics of consistent interest to your client base. Commentary unpacking the implications of recent court decisions may not be, even if they serve valuable functions elsewhere (these can be great for podcast appearances!).
How Do You Know Whether Your Content Is “Better” Than Your Competitors’?
If you want to create evergreen content that outperforms the topical coverage of competitive law firms because it is “better,” you will need to put some consideration into defining what better means in the context of your law practice and your content strategy. The conventional wisdom for creating “better” content is to pick a competitor whose website is ranking higher than search engine results pages (SERPs) than yours is and try to push past their content on several key metrics. The metrics you choose to emphasize can make all the difference in how this approach plays out for you.
More Is More
One of the most crucial elements of a beat-your-competition strategy for evergreen content is to simply create more of it than other law firms are offering. Sometimes there is a tendency to think of “more” purely in terms of word count, or number of pages/posts hosted on your law firm website. That’s a missed opportunity. To get more from your “more,” develop a plan for building out your evergreen content library that frames “more” in two related ways:
- Thoroughness of detail
- Number of angles or perspectives
You are looking for ways to increase the number of angles from which you examine a topic or the number of perspectives from which you explain it, and you are aiming to maximize the level of detail with which you develop coverage from each point of entry.
Organization Is Everything
If you don’t yet have a clearly-defined content hub on your law firm website, your evergreen resource library gives you a great opportunity to create one. Technically, you could create the resource library using any structure you liked, or simply by posting a series of standalone pages that each provided thorough topical coverage of the legal issues they addressed. However, organizing your resource library in this way fails to take advantage of one of the most powerful tools for helping search and answer engines make sense of your law firm website and (therefore) recognize when to show users your content in response to a search query.
I like to recommend starting with a content hub or pillar because a content pillar is usually going to consist of content that will be “evergreen” anyway, and because building out a pillar or hub structure sets you up to tackle every facet of your chosen topic from multiple angles. By organizing your resource library as a content pillar, you position the relevance of the items in that library to register with search engine indexing bots. The “map” of your website shows Google (and other search tools) how the pieces of evergreen content relate to each other both vertically and laterally, so the result is that search tools are able to consider the entire hub in determining the quality of your law firm website and the relevance of its content to a user’s search query.
Beyond Structure: Keyword Selection and Audience Targeting
Another way in which you can outstrip your competitors is in the selection of keywords you target. There are two ways to think about keyword selection for evergreen resource libraries.
Big Picture
The first way is in making sure you are hitting the big, generalist terms that are sure to show up repeatedly in searches by people looking for the kinds of legal services your law firm offers, month after month. Often these variations on the name of your practice area, or a legal requirement (e.g., “court-ordered mediation”) that commonly affects the kinds of cases you handle. The good news here is that content designed to target these keywords will almost always be relevant; the bad news is that even high-quality, extremely relevant content may have trouble getting ahead of the competition simply because there is so much content out there, jockeying for eyeballs and clicks.
Tight View
The second way is to focus on identifying long-tail keywords that clearly correspond to a very specific legal question that most of your competitors are not answering, or only answering shallowly. Then write (or have your content team write) content that answers each question directly and comprehensively. Be prepared for the fact that to use this approach to keyword targeting effectively you will need to answer a lot of questions, probably more than you think. On the other hand, the process of answering them will mean that you are also fulfilling the goal of covering your topic from multiple angles we discussed earlier.
Beyond the Basics
Even after you target high-competition and low-competition keywords, there are bound to be at least a few competitors covering most of the same topics your website addresses; they are working in the same area of law, after all. Talk with your digital marketing team to try and make sure that you are not competing against exactly the same handful of websites across all targeted keywords. Remember that part of the goal is to ensure that your evergreen resources are more comprehensive than those of competitors. If you are competing on all keywords, but not against all of the same firms for each keyword, this is a good sign that your resource library is covering a wider range of subtopics related to your practice area than most of your competitors are covering individually.
Make It Manageable
The exact details will depend on the scope of your planned resource library and the topical and type-of-content categories that make sense to you and your content team Organizing your content in terms of categories that your clients themselves use in conceptualizing their legal concerns can often give you a boost in matching search relevance and in helping your website visitors recognize what they are seeing, so that they find navigating your website to be an intuitive process that puts them at ease, rather than an additional source of stress and confusion in their search for reliable legal information. However, you also want to make sure that you develop a framework for organizing your evergreen resource library that makes it easy for you and the team managing your website to see where new content fits into your established categories so that the library as a whole maintains a consistent organizational structure, even as you add content to it over time.
Maintenance Matters
Once you have your evergreen content library set up and ready for visitors, you will want to keep it “fresh.” That might sound like a contradiction in terms, but the idea here is to make updates as needed, when the laws in your state change or when new court decisions affect how cases are likely to be handled during litigation. Remove any content that is misleadingly out-of-date as soon as possible, and work with your digital marketing team to create new content that adds new answers to familiar questions as time goes by.
Resource Libraries and Legal Marketing Agencies
Building an evergreen resource library is not about publishing more content for the sake of volume. It is about creating a comprehensive, well-organized collection of legal resources that consistently answers the questions your prospective clients are asking. When supported by a strategic content hub structure, thoughtful keyword targeting, and ongoing maintenance, an evergreen library can become one of the most valuable assets on your law firm website. Whether you develop it in-house or partner with an experienced legal marketing agency, investing in evergreen resources today can help your firm attract qualified traffic, build authority, and generate leads for years to come.
Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms. Annette authored the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at Annette@LawQuill.com
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