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If you have followed the steps outlined in the last four posts (here, here, here, and here), you should have a nice list of potential keywords for your law firm website.  This final post in this series will focus on how to evaluate the keyword the keyword list that you have compiled.  Our goal is to identify the keywords that are most likely to bring you qualified traffic.

Choosing your top keywords is all about good old-fashioned economics—the interplay between supply and demand.  Your best keywords will have a higher demand relative to supply.  Demand is measured by the search volume; supply by the number of other sites competing for the same term.  The amount that people are willing to pay for a term usually correlates with supply and demand.

Keyword Research Using Google Adwords Keyword Tool

All of this data (search volume, competition, and price) is available in the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  To use the tool, log in to your Google account in the top right.  Then paste your keyword list into the “Word or phrase” box and click Search.

You will get four columns of information for each keywords: Competition, Global Monthly Searches, Local Monthly Searches, and Approximate Cost-per-Click:

• Competition – This column gives you the 0 to 1 score of how competitive a particular keyword is.
• Global Monthly Searches – This column gives you the approximate 12-month average of searches for the keyword on Google search.
• Local Monthly Searches – This column gives you the approximate 12-month average for the number of searches in your country (if you specified a country or language for your search).
• Approximate CPC – This column gives you the approximate cost-per-click that you might pay if you were to bid on the keyword in Google’s advertising platform.

You should look at these results using all three of the match types on the left.  The three match types are:

• Broad Match – The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words.  For example, data for “Florida bankruptcy lawyer” may also include data for “Florida bankruptcy attorney” since “lawyer” and “attorney” are synonyms.
• Phrase Match – The sum of the search volumes for all terms that include the whole keyword phrase.  For example, “Florida bankruptcy attorney” may include “Orlando Florida bankruptcy attorney” and “Miami Florida bankruptcy attorney” since each of these terms include the phrase “Florida bankruptcy attorney.”
• Exact Match – The search volume for that keyword idea only.  “Florida bankruptcy attorney” will return data for “Florida bankruptcy attorney” only.

Running your keyword data through these queries will help you pinpoint which terms are most likely to work well for your site.  If your website has a high domain authority, you may be able to rank for competitive keywords without much work.  Most sites will need to either choose lower-competition keywords or be prepared for link-building.

Keyword Research Using Google Adwords Testing

In some situations, you may want to know exactly how much traffic a keyword will bring to your site.  You can find this out by setting up a Google Adwords campaign, then using your web analytics to test how much traffic the keyword is sending.

If you have the budget and have more than one keyword to evaluate, you may want to set up the campaign for a broad match.  You can then test from there to narrow down to your best exact match keywords.  But if you have done all of the steps mentioned so far, this may not be necessary.  Instead, just set the campaign up for an exact match and direct the traffic to the most relevant page of your website for that term.

Once the campaign is set up, monitor the traffic to your site and the conversion rate (the number of visitors who take a predefined action, such as e-mailing you or downloading a white paper).  This will give you a more accurate picture of the type of traffic you can expect for that keyword.  Once you have the data you are looking for, you can cancel the Adwords campaign.

Keyword Research Using SEOmoz Data

If you have an SEOmoz Pro account, you can use SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool to get some nice data regarding keyword competition.  This tool gives you a percentage measurement of keyword difficulty so that you have a better estimate of how hard it will be to rank for the term.

But perhaps the bigger benefit is the competitor data that comes with the keyword difficulty report.  The competitor data lets you know who you are trying to beat for the term. It also gives you actionable metrics so that you know what to do in order to land that top spot.

Note:  If you are not a Pro member, you can take advantage of the free 30-day trial to check out the tool and the other benefits offered by SEOmoz, including their other SEO tools, forums and educational materials.

Important Note:  The Long Tail

Keyword research is a critical part of your website strategy.  It lets you understand your audience better and design your flagship content around what they are searching for.  This can help guide your site architecture and let you know where to focus your link-building and other SEO efforts.

But even though keyword research is important, it must be kept in perspective.  Your top-level keywords (things like “Florida foreclosure attorney”) will probably make up less than 25 percent of your overall traffic.  The remainder will come from thousand or even millions of “long-tail” keywords that are impossible to predict because they are seldom used.  As a group, these long tail keywords make up the bulk of online searches.

This means that you should resist the tendency to focus on the most profitable keywords to the exclusion of other topics.  View keyword as a tool to help you focus on your potential clients’ needs.  Your content should ultimately be written for people, not search engines.  If you think a topic will be useful to your potential clients, write about it—even if it doesn’t involve profitable keywords.  This will help you land those long tail keywords and help the search engines identify your site as an authority on your topic.  But most importantly, it will give your potential clients the information they are seeking.

This is our fourth post on keyword research for law firm websites. We’ve talked about the importance of keywords to your website strategy, how to think strategically about the two primary keyword types, and how to put together your initial seed list.  This post will discuss a few great (and free!) tools that you can use to expand your seed list.

Expanding Your Keyword List with Ubersuggest

Once you have an idea of your basic terms, you can use the free tool at ubersuggest.org to expand your list.  This is a great tool that can save you hours of manual work.  It scrapes Google’s suggestion feature (the words that auto-populate when you start typing a term in Google) to give you an expanded list of related keyword terms.

To use ubersuggest, simply type in your base keyword term into the box and click “Suggest.”

Ubersuggest will return a list of keyword suggestions organized by the base keyword and the letters of the alphabet. Clicking the green plus button by a term will add it to a keyword list on the right.

Once you have worked your way through the results, you should have a healthy group of keywords.  Click the “Download” button on top of the keyword list to produce a tidy little list of keywords.

Expanding Your List with Keyword Eye

To further expand your list, hop on over to the keyword visualization tool at Keyword Eye.  You do have to register to use this tool, but it only takes a few seconds.  The basic edition (Keyword Eye Basic) is currently free and should work just fine.

Once you are registered and logged in,  select “New,” they “Keyword Suggestion Report.” from the top left corner of the screen.  In the search box, enter your keyword term.  Be sure to select Google US for the search engine if you are a US attorney (it defaults to Google UK).

Click “Run Report.”  You should get a pretty keyword cloud, with the most popular keywords indicated by larger font.

Be sure to toggle between the Keywords, Visualization, and Grid View tabs at the top.  (The Grid View tab in particular will give you a lot of useful information about search volume and competition, topics that we will discuss in the next section.) If you run across any terms that you failed to include, add them to your list.

By now, you should have a healthy list of keywords.  In fact, the list might be so large that it seems unworkable.  Don’t worry, the next post in this series will teach you how to hone in on the money keywords for your website.

In the last post in my series on keyword research for lawyers, I talked about the two basic types of keyword phrases for law firm websites: provider-based terms and information-based terms.  Now it’s time to get our hands dirty and start preparing a seed list.  This post will focus on compiling the initial list. The next post will help you expand your list to include phrases that you may not have considered.

Putting Together a Seed List for Provider-Based Terms

Putting together your seed list of provider-based terms is fairly straightforward.  It will involve a combination of your practice area and descriptive terms that people use to look for lawyers.  The formula for a basic provider-based seed list would look like this:

Practice Area + Provider (e.g., Bankruptcy Attorney, Bankruptcy Attorney, Bankruptcy Lawyers, Bankruptcy Law Firm)

If your practice is limited to a specific geographic area, your seed list could also incorporate those geographic terms.  A local seed list would be structured around one or more of these formulas:

State + Area of Law + Provider (Louisiana Bankruptcy Attorney, etc.)

City + State + Practice Area + Provider (New Orleans Louisiana Bankruptcy Attorney, etc.)

When putting together compound keyword phrases like this, I like to use SEO Book’s free keyword list generator.  This tool allows you to separate out the variations of each component of your keyword, then combines them into a comprehensive list.  (If have been doing this manually using find-and-replace, you will probably want to send me chocolate for letting you know about this tool.)

To use the tool, simply enter your keywords into the various Word List boxes (be sure to follow the directions—comma separated with no new spaces or lines between keywords), then click Generate.

This will give your initial seed keyword list. Don’t worry about being comprehensive at this stage.  You will have opportunity to flesh out and refine your list using the tools described in the next sections.

Note:  Later, we will learn how to identify top keywords based on actual search volume.  Depending on your local area, there may not be enough local search volume to give you any actionable data.  In other words, incorporating the city and state-specific keywords may be too restrictive.  If that is the case, simply eliminate those Word Lists from the Keyword List Generator.

Putting Together a Seed List of Information-Based Terms

Your list of information-based terms will require a bit of good old-fashioned brainstorming.  Think about the types of questions that clients most often ask, the subspecialties of your practice area, and the names of the court proceedings or documents most often used in your practice.  This should give you a basic list.

Again, don’t be too concerned at this point about missing a term or two.  You will have opportunities to expand your list as the process moves on.

This post is the second in a series on how to find effective keyword phrases for law firm websites.  In the first post, I talked about the importance of keyword research to effective search engine optimization:

It’s almost time to start putting together our initial keyword list.  But before we do, I want make a distinction between keyword types that will help you think strategically about your keyword research and your overall website design.

Categorical Seed Lists

Keyword research begins with a seed list—a collection of keyword phrases that may be important to your website. Your keyword phrases can be composed of root (attorney), secondary (bankruptcy attorney), and tertiary terms (Louisiana bankruptcy attorney) terms, and so on.

When I am putting together a seed list, I group keyword phrases into two broad categories: Provider-based terms and information-based terms.  An understanding of each of these type of terms will help you to develop an effective keyword strategy.

Provider-Based Terms

Provider-based terms are keywords that people use to look specifically for attorneys.  Louisiana bankruptcy attorney is an example of a provider-based term.  Searchers who use provider-based terms aren’t just looking for information.  They already know that they need help and are looking for an attorney.  In other words, searchers using provider-based terms are already in buying mode.

Because people who are looking for a buyer are already in purchasing mode, provider-based terms tend to be high-converting keywords.  In other words, people who use provider-based search terms are more likely to convert to paying clients than people who are just looking for information.  But because your competitors realize this too, the highest-converting keywords will often be the most competitive.

Information-Based Terms

People use information-based terms when they are looking for information on a topic.  They may not know whether they need an attorney, but they have questions they need answered.

For example, a person searching for bankruptcy auto loans is probably wants to know whether she will be able to keep her car if she files for bankruptcy.  She may or may not decide to hire an attorney or file for bankruptcy.  She simply has an immediate question and is looking for an answer.

As you may guess, information-based terms tend to have much lower conversion rates than provider-based terms.  A high percentage of information seekers will find their answer and move on.  But this doesn’t mean that you should ignore information-based terms.  In fact, I believe that information-based terms are more important to your overall website strategy than provider-based terms.  Here’s why:

• Depending on your practice area, there is probably a much higher volume of searches for information-based terms.  The higher traffic volume will often make up for the lower conversion rate.
• There is usually less competition for information-based terms.  Grab the low-hanging fruit.
• Using information-based terms helps you build your content around your clients’ needs.  Answer your potential clients’ questions.  When they do need an attorney, they will be much more likely to call you.
• Because informational pages are not overtly commercial, they are more likely to naturally attract links than provider-based terms.
• It is much easier to develop content to support pages that are optimized for information-based terms.  There are only so many ways you can naturally incorporate “bankruptcy attorney” without drifting into keyword-stuffing.
• Building a site around information-based terms is the right thing to do.  Don’t make your clients pay for a consultation just to get a basic answer to a simple question. Answer their question up-front and save the consultations for clients that really need your services.

When I was building my own law firm websites, I focused almost exclusively on information-based terms.  I started with my clients’ needs and worked out from there.  This attracted more traffic and garnered more links.  As a result, the pages that were focused on provider-based terms naturally shot up in the rankings.  I ended up ranking well for both information-based keywords and provider-based keywords—a win/win.

The next post will get to the specifics of how to put together your provider-based and information-based keyword lists.

If your law firm website is going to do well in search, it must use the words that your potential clients are using to search for it.  When your client goes to a search engine and types in a phrase, the search engine algorithm will use several factors to return results that it believes is most relevant for that phrase. The search engine considers variables such as:

• Does the title tag on your page include that keyword phrase?
• Does your page text include that keyword phrase?
• Does your page text include variations on the keyword phrase?
• Where does the keyword phrase appear on the page?
• Do the pages that link to your page use that phrase in the link text (anchor text)?

There are a bunch of other factors, and the algorithms are far more complex. But the principle holds true:  Your placement in the search results (and correspondingly the number of eyeballs that see your site) depends on whether the search engines can relate your page to the terms that your clients are using to search for it.  If the search engine cannot make the connection, it does not see your site as relevant to what your clients are looking for.

So how do you know what keywords your potential clients are using to look for your services?  This post is the first in a series on how to do just that.

This series will focus on how I do keyword research.  There are many different (and possibly better) ways to do it.  But, alas, I am a creature of habit and tend to stick with tools and processes that work well for me.  I will try to link to these tools (most of which are free) and give step-by-step instructions.

Note:  I wrote recently about how your law firm website should be built around your clients’ needs.  Many law firm websites make the mistake of using keywords that the attorneys use to describe their services.  Don’t do that.  Think like your customers.  Use the language they use.  Write to their needs.