You want prospective clients to find your law firm.
There are many ways to facilitate this, but the best is to optimize your presence in search engines.
After all, most of your clients and prospects are primarily using search engines for researching lawyers and law firms for their needs.
But here's the thing.
Chances are, most of your competitors are already outranking you in search engine results pages (SERPs) for queries relevant to your niche.
And as you might imagine, higher rankings get not only more visibility, but more traffic and more prestige as well.
If you want to earn that visibility and traffic for your own law firm, you'll need to find a way to outrank your competitors. Search engine optimization (SEO) can help you do this. But an SEO strategy without keyword research is like a boat without a rudder; it may be powerful, but it lacks direction.
Accordingly, keyword research is typically the first step of any SEO strategy, and it's certainly the best place to start as a law firm.
So what exactly is SEO keyword research? And how do you practice it?
In SEO, keywords (and by extension, keyword phrases) are words and phrases that people enter into search engines like Google as a search query.
For example, “lawyers” is technically a keyword, though most people don't search this broadly. “Personal injury lawyers near me” is a much more common keyword phrase, as is “How to choose the best personal injury lawyer.”
If you can optimize your web presence for phrases like these, you'll increase your chances of ranking in the SERPs produced for these queries.
SEO keyword research is the process of analyzing various keywords and phrases for the sake of finding the best possible targets. Some SEO keywords are more valuable for your law firm than others, and for a few different reasons; some keywords are more relevant to your organization, some are more popular search terms, and some are easier to optimize for.
The process usually begins with some simple brainstorming, which you can do even if you don't have much SEO experience. Think about what your law firm represents, what types of customers you serve, and what those customers might search for if they're looking for a business like yours.
Most people start producing a list based on their brainstorming efforts, then they turn to the power of specific keyword research tools that allow them to gather more data and come up with new ideas.
You can figure out the best keywords for your law firm to target by studying the following metrics:
· Relevance. Relevance is largely a subjective matter. You need to choose SEO keywords that are relevant to your organization as well as the clients and prospects searching for it. Otherwise, there isn't much of a point in receiving the traffic.
· Search volume. Within the realm of relevant keywords, you should also choose keywords and phrases with relatively high search volume. Search volume tells you how many people search for this keyword or phrase within a given time period, usually one month. The higher the search volume, the more people are searching for it, and the more traffic you'll receive if you can rank at the top for that keyword or phrase.
· Competition. That said, choosing only the keywords with the highest search volume is a surefire recipe for failure. That's because you also need to consider the competition; keywords with high search volume often have high competition, making them difficult or even impossible to rank for. Keywords with lower search volume may not get as much visibility or traffic, but you can reach rank one for those terms quite easily.
Ideally, you'll select a host of keywords and phrases that are highly relevant to your organization, with high search volume, and minimal competition. These perfect keywords are unicorns, however, so you may have to make some compromises.
Your strategic keyword targets are going to inform every element of your SEO strategy, including your onsite optimization, your content creation, and even your link building. You'll use them to create new pages of your website, inform the topics for your blog posts, serve as anchor text for your links, and more.
You can start the keyword research process by simply getting into the mind of your ideal target client or prospect. What is this person looking for? What has this person recently experienced? What types of things would they enter into a search engine if they were either A) interested in services like yours or B) could benefit from services like yours?
Already, you can likely come up with various ideas directly related to your area of expertise. For example, people might search for things like “family lawyer,” “divorce attorney,” or “custody agreement lawyers near me.”
But if you want to go a step further, you should also consider the types of questions that people ask search engines related to legal matters. Think of things like “what should I do if someone is suing me?” or “how do I create a last will and testament?” Consider all the things that your prospects and clients ask you when first meeting you.
If you're struggling to come up with ideas, or if you just want to flesh out your list even further, look to online resources that specifically support questions and answers related to legal matters. Avvo, Justia, and Lawyers.com are fantastic resources for this.
Keep a list of all the keywords and phrases you've generated. Most experienced SEO professionals do this in a spreadsheet, making it easier to manage SEO keywords both now and in the future.
As your list expands, you can consult other tools designed for keyword brainstorming. SEMRush, Ahrefs, Google Trends, and Google Keyword Planner are good places to start. All you have to do is enter a handful of keywords and phrases, and these tools will help you generate even more ideas.
In the course of your brainstorming and development, be sure to highlight keyword variations and related searches. For example, if you came up with the keyword idea “divorce lawyer,” you should understand that “divorce attorney,” “divorce law firm,” and “divorce legal help” are all functional variations of that query.
Each variation and related search can function somewhat on its own in your SEO strategy, though it is worth noting that due to semantic search, Google often blends semantically similar keywords and phrases together.
Don't worry about anything else at this point; just focus on cultivating a large list of potential keywords and phrases that are relevant to both your organization and the clients and prospects it serves.
At this point, you should have a long, borderline comprehensive list of keywords and phrases that are highly relevant to your law firm.
Now, your job becomes whittling that bulky tome down to a more manageable list. Many law firms and lawyers start with a list of about 20 keywords and phrases, but feel free to increase or decrease this according to your budget and your goals.
The two primary factors you'll need to consider beyond relevance are search volume and competition. The best targets are ones with high search volume and low competition, but these are understandably rare, due to the attractiveness of high search volume keyword terms in such a competitive industry. You'll need to decide for yourself how to balance these; most lawyers and law firms choose a diverse mix of “low hanging fruit targets” with low search volume and low competition along with “long-term goal” targets with high search volume and high competition.
Head keywords, or relatively short keywords and phrases, like “DUI lawyer,” typically offer very high search volume, but also high competition. Long-tail keywords, or longer search queries, like “How do I get out of a DUI?” typically offer very low search volume, but also low competition. The best SEO campaigns include a mix of both in their keyword targets.
Local keywords, as you might expect, are keywords and phrases that also include some geographic element. For example, these are search queries like “real estate lawyer Ohio,” “real estate lawyer Cleveland,” or even “real estate lawyer near me.”
These keywords and phrases are especially valuable for local SEO – the practice of optimizing your law firm for local searches. Local SEO is very similar to national SEO, but with some extra considerations for local search results.
Optimizing for your geographic location can be an easy way to avoid big competition and maximize visibility for the people geographically closest to you. Just keep in mind that in addition to optimizing for local keywords, you also need to optimize your local presence, such as by cleaning up your local citations and maximizing the quality and number of local reviews for your law firm.
Local SEO is a complex topic that requires its own article, but suffice it to say that most law firms do benefit from having at least a handful of local keywords among their strategic targets.
If you're hoping to get more out of SEO keyword research for your law firm, these tips should give you a good start:
· Work with the pros. We've tried to make this guide thorough, yet accessible. It should help you understand the basics of keyword research, but as you probably understand, SEO keyword research is better performed in the hands of an experienced professional who knows what types of keyword targets work best. If you have the budget for it, we advise you to work with SEO professionals for your keyword research needs.
· Consider budget and scope before beginning. There is no such thing as universally applicable keyword research. That's because each business has a unique budget and a unique scope. What works for a small, local, boutique law firm simply isn't going to work for a large, more generalized law firm. Make a plan for your budget and the scope of your SEO campaign from the beginning so you can choose better strategic targets.
· Triangulate the truth with multiple tools. Unfortunately, keyword data isn't perfect. It's constantly in flux, and different tools use different methodologies for providing you with data. Accordingly, it's good to triangulate the truth by using multiple tools to cross-reference each other.
· Understand search intent (and cater to it). Google is all about serving user intent. When someone asks a question, Google tries to find them an answer. When someone is obviously searching for a certain type of business, Google tries to find businesses that match those defined criteria. Accordingly, the better you understand search intent, and the better you cater to that intent, the better results you'll see.
· When in doubt, go narrow. A small number of very focused keywords is possibly the best way to start any SEO strategy. This way, you can use your budget on keywords that are extremely relevant with low competition; even if these searches don't generate much volume, you can at least get some early results to fuel the rest of your campaign. This is also a great way to stress test your SEO strategy; if you can't increase your rankings with very niche keywords with limited competition, you'll need to make some changes before you increase your budget and scope.
· Study your competition carefully. It's also a good idea to understand your competition. Go beyond simply looking at the competitive rating of various curative phrases and try to understand the tactics your competitors are using to optimize for them. What types of articles are they writing? Where are they building links?
· Optimize with caution. Keyword stuffing is the practice of deliberately including keywords in your content for the explicit purpose of manipulating your rankings. If done excessively, it leads to a much poorer user experience and can actually work against you, earning you a penalty that precludes you from advancing your SERP rankings. When optimizing for your strategically valuable keywords, do so with caution.
· Measure your results. Finally, be prepared to measure your results. You won't know how effective your keyword targets are until you put them to use and objectively observe their impact.
Keyword research is never easy.
It’s even harder in a competitive market like legal services.
That’s why it’s valuable to trust your keyword research – the foundation of your SEO strategy – to competent professionals with expertise in your niche.
We’re waiting for you. So don’t hesitate to reach out today – and find out how we can help your law firm dominate the SERPs!
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