Choosing good keywords for a law blog involves more than just a brainstorming session. It’s an art more than a science. I will now lay down some general guidelines to follow if you have the time; if not, get yourself a good, reputable professional who knows the law.
Lawyers usually go off half-cocked. They have an inherent lack of understanding what their clients actually call whatever it is that the lawyer is doing. What you need to do is stop talking lawyer and start talking client. It’s common for lawyers to get lost in their own jargon. Plaintiff’s trial lawyer to most people is a personal injury lawyer. And family law lawyers are divorce lawyers to most of the people you talk with.
Start your list in a plain text editor instead of a word processor. Add none of that word processor’s hidden code. Now. Every word or phrase. Anything that comes to mind. Re-read and write more short phrases, then look it over again.
Most websites come with a stats tool that will show you what people searched for to get to your site. Find the terms that you recognize related to your practice. Some might have been asking for the weird topic of your last post.
Of course, the stats from your website won’t give you all of the possible keywords. Some terms that your site never ranked for, because of past design choices or keyword choices, aren’t on any list.
Go take a look at your competitors’ sites. Pull up the page that shows the service you want and pick the View menu, and choose Source. Now read down the HTML. Yes, it will take a little time, but look for the META NAME=”keywords” tag and record any useful phrases that are listed there.
The meta keywords tag doesn’t do much for search engines. However, your competitors’ developers, who may not know what they’re doing, might stuff the tag full of terms you can use.
Treat this like a mini-version of asking your mom to name your baby. Ask your mom, your friends, your business associates, what they would type into a search box on a search engine to find a lawyer who does what you do.
Geography
Like any other form of advertising, geography is hugely important to marketing a law practice on the web. It’s unrealistic to think you will compete with lawyers outside of where you live in your non-web marketing; and it is unrealistic on the web. Be smart when you assess where your clients come from. Often narrow is better.
It’s not hard. Just type the name of the town/city or neighborhood you serve. If you’re in a large metro area, you need to know which nearby cities to list. Then pull up a Yahoo! or Mapquest map and note the surrounding towns on the map.
Many times the smaller towns you select can get you a high search placement, and the prospective client in that town will relate to seeing their town in your blog name.
It’s not just what the terms you use are, it’s also where you use them. A page that begins with ‘Madison divorce lawyer’ beats the one that’s all about family law stuff, and that has you competing with every Los Angeles divorce lawyer.
One thing that is sure - people misspell search terms. For some words, 15 to 20 percent of searches may contain a misspelling. Google often shows the right spelling, but not all search engines do. So sometimes it makes sense to rank for a search term that is a misspelling.
You can miss similar words when you are picking keywords for your law blog. A thesaurus in your word processor can help you find them. Just look up each word.
People using the web are funny. Some people type town names and common legal terms as one word, some as two: LaCrosse or La Crosse, ecommerce or e commerce. Put both versions on the list.
While you work through the list, put each plural directly under the singular form. Search engines treat a singular and a plural as two different words. “Lawyers” is searched about four times more often than “lawyer”.
A hyphenated form of a word can easily be searched for. The search engines treat a hyphen as a space and search for two words. Ecommerce and e-commerce get searched about equally. So if you pick the terms with the hypen, also use them without the hyphen. Typing the other version while you list the first will save you some time later.
Someone lookin for a lawyer who does what you do ain’t likely to remember your or your firm’s name. They might remember you by type of law you practice, like bankruptcy or divorce, and where you are. Unless your developer (web guy) was a poor knucklehead, anyone searching for you by name will find you.
You really want the top search result for anyone who searches for you by name, so it’s still a good idea to put your name and your firm’s name in the title and the keywords of your Contact Us page. Then you will likely still rank at the top of any search by name.
You shouldn’t use your rivals’ names as keywords on your site. Do list their names so you can see how many searches there are for them, and what terms are associated with them.
Keyword Tool
Then run that draft list through a keyword tool. It will give you related terms that you missed and show you which terms are searched for most.
Don’t waste time counting exact numbers. What’s important is the relative importance of each term, i.e. “divorce lawyers” gets searched for many times more often than “divorce lawyer”. This sort of relationship between the search frequency of the terms probably holds true with all the search engines.
Some of those folks who claim they can make web pages show up at the top of search engines probably rerun these same searches frequently, which can skew the counts. Doubtless that many lawyers overpay these people. But still, do this tedious work.
Most of these vendors probably use the Wordtracker keyword research tool. The tool takes data from many metacrawlers and does about 150 million searches, equivalent of about 300 million in two months.
Peter Kent did a nice summary of what the Wordtracker tool gives you:
Number one: The number of people who searched for an exact phrase in the last 60 days, and an estimate of the daily number of people who searched across all engines for the exact phrase.
Number two: the list of related keywords, a.k.a synonyms, and their relative search volumes.
Number three: Wordtracker reads the meta keyword tags from hundreds of sites, and ranks the terms in them by frequency.
Number four: frequently misspelled terms.
Number five: it compares the frequency of searches for a term with the number of pages which pop up in a search for it. A handy way to spot terms which aren’t crowded with others.
The Wordtracker research tool takes time to learn how to use, and you shouldn’t guess. Hire a pro, or rely on one of the best guides I know, which is Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Peter Kent.
Sort the List
Sort the list with the highest number of searches on top, and the least searched on bottom. Your favorites may get few searches, so send them down the list.
Choose the words for your title and keywords that don’t mean different things to different people. Run a search for each of your top terms. Anything that brings up a site that doesn’t sell services you offer should get the boot.
Number of searches doesn’t indicate searchers’ qualifications. “Divorce lawyer” may bring web surfers from all over; the page for “Madison divorce lawyer” may better serve you, even though you’ll get fewer searches.
Keyword selection is not rocket science, once you understand what to do; but it is time consuming. It’s a pain-in-the-neck-every-Sunday afternoon kind of thing. Done right, optimizing for search engines is a worthwhile investment. Learn to do it yourself, or hire someone you can be comfortable holding responsible.
About Delancey Street
Delancey Street is a premier, and award winning, business debt settlement company that helps business owners nationwide. Our goal is simple: help you escape debt in a safe and legal manner. Based out of New York, we can help in 49 of 50 states. We tell you how it is; because your business and future is on the line.
