Keyword Research Checklist For Lawyers

A Step-By-Step Checklist For Your Keyword Research Process

Keywords are one the most critical aspects of Lawyer SEO. The keywords you choose are how users are going to find you, what you're going to compete with other websites for, and what you need to optimize for search engines. That said, it's important to note where and how you find your keywords, how you use them, and how you fit them into your SEO strategy.

Step 1: Brainstorming Process

Before you even start looking for viable keywords, you first have to decide how you want your law firm to be found. Consider the following when you're brainstorming:

• What areas of law does your law firm specialize in?

• Is there a specific demographic you want to market to?

• What state do you practice in?

• Do you have a physical law firm office? What city?

• What other services do you offer? For example, do you accept free online consultations?

How you answer the questions above can dictate how you choose your long-tail keywords. Of course, you want to optimize for high-volume keywords like "California Labor Attorney", "San Antonio Personal Injury", and "Employment Lawyer", but strategically using diverse keywords is one of the best ways to expand your online presence.

Step 2: Use Keyword Research Tool

The best (and easiest) way to do keyword research is to use tools to find keywords and their search volumes. There's a wide variety of online tools for you to use, both paid and unpaid, and all of which boast different extra features.

If you don't know where to start with your keyword research tool, you can start with Google Keyword Planner. Like most Google SEO tools, Keyword Planner is free to use and gives you some insight into the most popular keywords for Lawyer SEO.

You can also filter your searches on locations. This allows you to see the most popular keywords used by local searchers for their queries.

Step 3: Assign Main Keyword For Each Page

When you're optimizing for a specific keyword, it means your competing with everyone else who's using it. This means that if two or more of your pages have the same main keywords, they're competing with each other for rankings.

This is called keyword cannibalization, and it can happen to both beginners and long-time practitioners alike. It's possible that instead of putting everything into one page so it's complete, relevant, and valuable, you might be splitting content into two separate pages. Likewise, you might be optimizing one page to a less relevant keyword.

Step 4: Make Content

Once your main pages are up, you want to have a consistent stream of fresh content to drive more traffic to your site. You can start with a legal blog, which will allow you to write and publish law-related content that might be valuable to users.

Remember: Blogging as a content marketing strategy attracts site visitors by giving them valuable or helpful content. Instead of advertising your firm, you make legal guides, how-tos, checklists, and legal news and build a following.

Also, don't forget to write your keywords into your blog posts. Just make sure that they're relevant to the topic and make grammatical sense. If some high-volume keywords don't fit into the sentence quite well, use them somewhere else (i.e., your tags, image alt text and captions, etc.).

Step 5: Update Your Keywords

The most popular keywords are just the most commonly-used search terms on search engines. While some keywords don't lose search volumes for years on end, others are seasonal and trendy. Or, like most things, keywords just fall out of use in time.

So, it's very possible that some of your keywords are going to lose value. In short, it is a good Lawyer SEO practice to regularly do updated keyword research, taking into account that keywords can change and lose volume over time.

Remember: This doesn't mean you should never write about "trendy" legal topics. On the contrary, the spike in volume is an opportunity to get more traffic, so don't hesitate to write a feature about the most recent news story.

Why Should You Let LawyerLeadMachine Help You?

Lawyer SEO gives you a competitive edge in the search rankings. If you want to give it a try, you can look through our Basic Lawyer SEO Guides. If you're too busy to do Lawyer SEO yourself, you have options to work with us here.