Last reviewed: February 2026

Planning a 12-Month Law Firm Blog Calendar

HubSpot’s marketing benchmark research found that companies with regularly updated blogs generate 67% more leads than those without — though that figure reflects HubSpot’s largely B2B customer base and may overstate the effect for service businesses. For law firms competing in local organic search, the directional point holds: consistent content production correlates with more consultation requests and signed cases. But “regularly updated” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statistic. Publishing without a plan creates content that cannibalizes itself, misses seasonal demand, and burns resources on topics that never convert.

A 12-month editorial calendar isn’t a content wish list. It’s a strategic document that connects every post to a keyword target, a practice area, and a business outcome. The calendar most law firm marketing teams build is organized by topic. The calendar that produces results is organized by keyword-to-URL ownership. The difference: one fills a schedule, the other prevents the structural problems that cost you six months of rework.

How Often You Need to Publish (and When It Matters Less)

The most common question is frequency. The honest answer is that it depends on your market competition and your resources, but there are useful benchmarks.

For law firms in competitive metro areas, top 25 markets where multiple firms invest in SEO, publishing 4 to 8 posts per month is the range where organic growth becomes consistent, based on aggregated benchmarks from legal marketing practitioners and Orbit Media’s annual blogging survey data. Firms publishing fewer than 2 posts per month in these markets typically don’t build enough topical signals to move rankings. Firms publishing more than 8 posts per month see diminishing returns unless each post targets a distinct keyword cluster.

In less competitive markets, 2 to 4 posts per month is often sufficient to build and maintain organic visibility, provided the content targets specific, researched keywords rather than generic topics.

The tradeoff between frequency and depth matters more than raw volume. One 2,000-word post that comprehensively covers “what happens after a DUI arrest in [County]” with jurisdiction-specific procedure, timeline, and outcomes will outperform four 500-word surface-level posts on related DUI subtopics. Depth earns rankings. Volume earns indexation. You need both, but if budget forces a choice, depth wins.

Most law firm blogs need 3 to 6 months of consistent publishing before organic traffic shows measurable growth. Pages ranking in top positions are typically 2 or more years old, according to Ahrefs’ 2020 analysis of page age across two million keywords — a directional finding that industry practitioners still consider valid, though the exact figures may have shifted. This is a long-cycle investment. Firms that publish aggressively for two months and then stop don’t see the return. Firms that publish consistently for 12 months do.

Not Every Topic Deserves Equal Treatment

A blog calendar without prioritization produces content that’s busy but not strategic. The framework that works is scoring each potential topic across three dimensions.

Search demand. Does the topic have measurable keyword volume? A post targeting “how long does a personal injury case take in Texas” has verifiable search demand. A post on “our firm’s holiday party recap” has none. Not every post needs high volume, but the calendar should be weighted toward topics people actually search for.

Practice area revenue impact. Personal injury cases might average six-figure recoveries. Estate planning might average mid-four-figures. If organic leads convert at roughly similar rates, the PI content deserves more calendar space because the revenue per converted lead is higher. This doesn’t mean ignoring lower-revenue practice areas, but it means the calendar should reflect where organic traffic creates the most business value.

Competitive difficulty. A realistic assessment of whether your site can rank for the target keyword within 6 to 12 months. High-volume, high-competition terms like “personal injury lawyer [major city]” are practice area page targets, not blog post targets. Blog posts win on long-tail, specific queries where competition is thinner: “can I sue my employer for a workplace injury in [state]” rather than “employment lawyer.”

A scoring model doesn’t need to be complex. Rate each dimension 1 to 5, weight revenue impact highest (multiply by 2), and rank topics by total score. The top-scoring topics fill your calendar first. Lower-scoring topics fill remaining slots or get pushed to future quarters.

Seasonal Legal Trends You Can Plan For

Certain legal topics follow predictable search patterns. Building content around these spikes, published 6 to 8 weeks before the demand peak, lets pages index and build authority before the traffic arrives.

DUI and criminal defense content spikes around major holidays: New Year’s, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving weekend. Content published in early November targeting “DUI penalties in [state]” is positioned to capture December and January search volume.

Family law topics, particularly custody and divorce, spike in January. Attorneys call it “divorce month.” Content targeting “how to file for divorce in [state]” published in November or early December catches the January surge.

Tax-related legal content follows the obvious calendar: demand builds from January through mid-April. Estate planning sees steady interest but spikes around tax season and again in October when year-end planning begins.

Personal injury content around car accidents peaks during summer driving season and holiday travel periods. Workplace injury content aligns with seasonal industries: construction injuries peak in summer, retail workplace injuries spike during holiday season.

Building these into the calendar isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about aligning publication timing with when the audience is actively searching.

The Evergreen-to-Timely Ratio

Here is where most calendars go wrong. A post explaining “what is comparative negligence” remains accurate for years. A post about “new [state] distracted driving law effective January 2026” has a shelf life measured in months before it needs updating or becomes misleading.

The sustainable ratio for most law firm blogs is roughly 70% evergreen to 30% timely content. Evergreen posts build the foundation of organic traffic that compounds over time. Timely posts capture seasonal or news-driven demand and demonstrate the firm’s currency on emerging legal issues.

The maintenance burden of timely content is real and needs to be budgeted into the calendar. Every timely post requires a scheduled review, typically within 6 to 12 months of publication. If the law changed, the post needs updating. If the event passed, the post needs either refreshing with current data or marking with a clear timestamp. Our post on updating old blog content covers the audit and republishing process in detail.

Plan update reviews into the calendar as recurring tasks. Q1: review all posts published the previous Q1 and Q2. Q3: review posts from previous Q3 and Q4. This creates a rolling audit cycle that prevents outdated content from accumulating.

Preventing the Overlap That Tanks Rankings

A 12-month calendar producing 48 to 96 posts will inevitably touch similar topics multiple times. “What to do after a car accident” and “steps after a truck accident” and “what if I was hit by an uninsured driver” all orbit personal injury. Without deliberate differentiation, they cannibalize each other.

The prevention mechanism is a keyword-to-URL map that every post checks against before writing begins. The map is simple: a spreadsheet with columns for target keyword, assigned URL (existing or planned), search intent, and publication date. Before any new post enters the calendar, check the map. If the target keyword or a close variant is already assigned to another page, one of three things happens: differentiate the intent clearly, merge the topics into one stronger piece, or drop the new topic.

The cannibalization post walks through the diagnosis and resolution process. The editorial calendar is where prevention happens. The cannibalization audit is where you fix problems that the calendar didn’t catch.

The blog calendar should also integrate with your site’s broader keyword-to-URL map that covers practice area pages, location pages, and service pages. A blog post targeting “personal injury lawyer Houston” competes with your Houston personal injury practice area page. That’s not a blog topic. That’s a practice area page keyword. The calendar needs visibility into the full site keyword strategy to prevent this overlap.

Review the calendar quarterly. Not just for upcoming topics, but for how published content is performing. Posts that didn’t gain traction after 6 months either need updating, consolidating with a stronger piece, or replacing with a better angle on the same topic.

The first step isn’t building a 12-month calendar. It’s building the keyword-to-URL map that the calendar sits on top of. Export your current pages and their target keywords — the keyword research post walks through how to build this map from scratch, including the prioritization framework for law firm-specific terms. Identify gaps. Score potential topics using the demand, revenue, and difficulty framework. Assign the top-scoring topics to the first quarter. Then extend to the full year, leaving 20 to 30% of slots flexible for timely topics, legislative changes, and opportunities that emerge mid-year. That map takes an afternoon to build. The clarity it creates lasts the entire year.

The editorial calendar is an ongoing discipline, not a project with a completion date. Build it once, review it quarterly, and treat it as the operational backbone of every content decision your firm makes.