Excerpted from SEAK’s streaming course: How to Refine, Improve and Grow Your Expert Witness Practice
Okay. So, so we have alluded to a few times the notion of some blog posts. So, a blog post can be essentially ways to, you know, juice your search engine optimization to really, in some capacity, circumvent this whole process of SEO, right? You’re targeting a phrase, you’re saying, “Okay, I’m an expert in this particular field, this very narrow field,” and then you’re going after that search term, that key phrase on Google. So, you know, when you’re deciding what posts you might wanna do or, you know, a topic that you want to write about, you obviously need to consider a few things. One, you know, do I have the qualification? Do I have the expertise on these narrow little areas? Is this an area where there is litigation, right? Is a lawyer going to even want to search for this particular term? And then think about, okay, how do I write this? Do I have something that I’ve already done that I can kind of configure for something like this? Obviously, as with the website, as with LinkedIn, you have to be so careful that you’re not putting stuff out there that’s going to get you in trouble, right? You’re not talking about a raft of bitches, you’re not creating things that are gonna come back and haunt you down the road. You’re not saying, “These are the five things you must do in every case,” and then not do those five things in your case going forward.
So, have to be very careful. You know, the blogs are gonna work best if the content is unique. We talked a little bit about unique content earlier. But, you know, you don’t want to be taking this post and posting it on your website, on another website, on the seat blog, okay, one place. You can certainly take pieces of things and recreate them for different places, and you can certainly link back and forth. But the blog post itself should really only go in one place, should only live in one specific place. You know, just like LinkedIn and your website, this isn’t gonna do you any good if a lawyer, you know, searches for a runway construction expert witness and gets clicks on your blog post, and then there’s no way to contact you from the post, right? You wanna include a brief file, a photograph, your cell phone number, and email address, make it easy for the lawyers to get in touch with you from the post.
Jim likes to say that these blog posts don’t need to be war and peace. These don’t need to be long. They don’t need to take you hours and hours and months and months of research and peer review and whatnot, right? You’re not writing for that particular audience, but it does need to be free of grammatical errors. It needs to be very objective, very clear, written well so that a lawyer can understand it, those things. So, obviously, you know, take the time to review it before you post it, have somebody else proofread it, all that. It really needs to be flawless once it gets posted. So, we work on these a lot. We do these blog posts with experts all the time. So, one example here, so runway construction expert witness, right? That’s a niche. Again, this person is an engineer, but in terms of finding a little area where there are probably some big cases, high-dollar cases, you know, he can separate himself from the field. So, you know, the key phrase that we were going after with this was runway construction expert witness. And as you can see, that blog post is number one in the organic results. So, if you click on this, you know, this…again, it’s not long. He talks about a few different sort of issues that come up. He then talks about why an expert witness would be necessary in a case like this, right, what’s the role, what are some of the issues that the expert can discuss and offer their opinion on, and then he provides a little bio about himself and his email and a phone number.
So, it’s not hard, it’s not heavy lift, it is going to take some of your time. But it’s not…you know, this isn’t tens of hours or, you know, hundreds of hours. This is a couple of hours here and there to create this. Another example, so dry needling, right? So, there are thousands upon thousands of chiropractors that do expert witness work out there. And so if you were just to search, you know, chiropractic expert witness, you would have umpteen results. But one specific area within chiro that is sort of a niche is the issue of dry needling. So, this chiro did a blog post on dry needling. You know, Dr. Woolley just talked about what happens in certain instances when dry needling…you know, what it can do, what the positives and negatives are, and then what are some adverse events that result from dry needling. And then he talks about how you might need an expert witness in certain cases to talk about the different issues that come up. He uses a great photograph. He links, I believe, to his directory listing. And then he also has his email right here, his website, his cell phone number, easy to contact him. He, you see, has some references. You certainly can cite your references. Don’t need to, you can use images, things like that. And this next one I was gonna show you has some images.
Just in case you’re… Dry needling is like acupuncture. That’s what they’re talking about with that.
Yeah, exactly.
I didn’t know what it was when he wrote that.
So, this is a woman who’s a medical director, a hospitalist actually, right, Jim?
A hospital’s negligence expert.
Yeah. Hospital negligence expert witness. And so, you know, she was going after this term healthcare systems expert witness, right? And so she wrote this blog. She uses a few different images about sort of, you know, delays in diagnosis, and what happens, and what are some of the risks associated with that. So, again, this isn’t long, you know, just a couple of simple paragraphs explaining it and then indicating that you might need a healthcare systems expert witness to offer an opinion in cases like this, great photo, link to her directory, website, email, cell phone. Pretty straightforward. So, just a few examples of ways that you can do this. So, you know, obviously, it takes a little bit of some forethought in deciding what is sort of the key phrase that you wanna go after, you know, what do you wanna target, what…it’s usually blank, blank, expert witness. So, what are sort of those little areas that you wanna focus on. You can do more than one. This doesn’t need to be a singular focus. You can kind of, you know, take one, start with one, start slow, see what happens, right? This gets into… You can do this, you can post it, and then you can start to sort of track, you know, are people contacting you through this blog post. When a lawyer calls and you’re asking them, “How did you hear about me?” “Oh, this blog post.” You can track that. You can see where these are coming from, you know.
If you have a blog on your website, you can track that through the analytics, things like that. So, it’s just, you know, a great way to kind of juice the search engine optimization without so much of a heavy lift, right? This isn’t creating a whole website. This isn’t anything like that. This is really just, you know, taking the time to create this content and then either posting it on your website or posting it on on our seek blog, you know, whichever the case may be.