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Keyword Research For Law Firms
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Keyword Research Guide For Law Firms
Keyword research is the process of identifying all possible search engine inquiries that are relevant to your company and customers.
Not only does keyword research entail collecting keywords, but it also entails classifying and categorizing them into logical, related categories, which can help you decide how to update current pages on your site or generate new material.
While some SEOs argue that keywords are no longer vital or will be in the future, they are still significant for search engine rankings and for determining the search intent behind a query.
It will be critical to understand the following as long as people search using search engines by typing a query into a search box or using a voice query on an "assistant":
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What are the questions?
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How vital they are to your firm.
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How you might come up with the best material to respond to the query's goal.
Even if search trends change, keywords will continue to matter if consumers are looking for an answer to "something." Using individual keywords and optimizing a single page for a single keyword have both fallen out of favor.
Using sets of related keywords and assessing their relative popularity, on the other hand, can help you not only identify possibilities to increase organic traffic to your site but also comprehend the general intent of your potential users.
This data can help you better achieve those goals by optimizing your website and optimizing your product selection, navigation, and user interface, among other things.
Themes with Keywords
Some people call clusters of related keywords "themes" or "topics," although they're just groups of individual keywords that indicate a similar need or intent from a searcher.
As a result, keyword research should never be used as a list of keywords but rather as a tool for forming segments of connected keywords.
A single topic or theme may lend itself to a singular piece of content that can address all of the demands within that topic, resulting in a single page being "optimized" for the whole set of keywords.
Alternatively, the subject may be broad enough to indicate that you should have an entire area of your website dedicated to answering the user's intents.
For example, content with "Personal Injury Lawyer" as keywords might also have:
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"Lawyers for accidents"
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"Personal Injury Attorney"
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"Car crash Lawyers"
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"Car Accident Attorney"
Because of voice search, which results in long, natural language search queries, some SEOs think that particular "head" keywords won't matter any longer.
In general, search queries are growing longer, thanks in part to voice search.
That doesn't completely diminish the importance of using shorter "head" keywords as a starting point for your keyword research and as a means of uncovering various longer-tail keyword variants.
How to Conduct a Keyword Research
For SEO purposes, keyword research entails gathering all potential variations of keywords that are relevant to your present site, content, offered services, and so on, as well as valuable to your potential clients but not immediately related to your existing offerings.
Keywords relating to marketing or recruiting, for example, could be of interest to site viewers but not immediately relevant to the site's products.
Small company marketing keywords may not appear to be applicable to the present site in this situation, but they are for the same people who the site is aiming to attract.
Following the creation of an initial list of all potentially relevant keywords (most programs will generate enormous lists of keywords that may or may not be relevant to you), you must whittle the list down to only those terms that are actually relevant for the site you're researching and its potential users.
The words must then be organized, sorted, and prioritized.
It's worth noting that we're concentrating on organic keyword research rather than PPC keyword research. While there are similar qualities between the two, there are also considerable distinctions, particularly in terms of competitiveness.
If you're a small, new site competing against sites like Wikipedia and Amazon for a particular search term, ranking for that keyword may be a long-term plan or a lower priority in the short term for organic ranks and traffic.
In contrast, when it comes to PPC, the only decision you need to make is whether you can effectively compete on the keyword.
Client Discovery
Understanding the site in issue should be the first step in starting any new keyword research endeavor or developing keyword lists.
If you're an outside consultant or agency, this is especially vital because you'll never understand the service or its clients as well as people who deal with them on a daily basis.
If you're an in-house SEO conducting keyword research for a new company or a division you've never worked with before, it's critical that you understand the products or services on offer, as well as the demands and pain points of current stakeholders, and both users and internal stakeholders.
Without this data, you may not be able to build a comprehensive list of keywords or determine whether all the keywords are relevant and essential, particularly in difficult or highly technical industries.
Initial keyword research ideas include:
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Spend at least a few hours exploring and browsing the website, making a list of keywords that may be useful.
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Send a preliminary "SEO keyword research questionnaire" to the customer or primary stakeholder, which includes questions and requests for information, such as:
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Make a list of the terms you believe are the most significant to you.
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Are you planning to introduce or phase out a new product, service, or content category in the near future?
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Who are your intended audiences?
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Who are your leading rivals?
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In which locations do you practice?
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Is your traffic affected by the seasons? Do you have seasonal offerings or content?
Consider meeting with marketing managers, marketers, domain experts, or even potential site users or clients to gain a thorough understanding of the various ways they may refer to a service, as well as the problems they are attempting to solve by accessing the website.
Keywords Brainstorming
Including members of the team, clients, your content team, and others in the keyword brainstorming process can help you come up with more keywords and more relevant keywords than you could on your own.
It will also boost their acceptance of the keywords' significance and the importance of the keyword research itself. Hold brief brainstorming sessions with stakeholders to see what phrases they think are helpful based on their understanding of your site.
Personas of Users and Searchers
You may not have access to pre-built searcher personas at this time, but many establishments have already gone through the process of creating client personas.
Looking at these client demographics can only help you come up with new keyword suggestions.
You can also run the list of keywords you generated through the personas' filter to check whether they are genuinely relevant to the keywords that will drive traffic from the users your site is trying to reach.
Where Do You Find Keywords?
Below is a list of where or how you're going to pull data for your keyword research.
Keywords in Google Analytics
Because the vast majority of your keywords will be recorded as "not given," you may not believe that Google Analytics can supply you with useful keyword data, particularly organic keywords.
You may also believe that keywords that already bring traffic aren't vital to include in a keyword list, but if they're obviously relevant to your site, they can surely be used as root keywords to produce more related keywords using other methods.
Keywords in Google Search Console
If you don't have access to backward engineer not supplied keywords, Google Search Console is another option for obtaining the keywords that are currently driving traffic to your site.
GSC will only show you the top 1,000 terms, but it's an excellent place to start if you're looking for keyword suggestions.
This is especially true if you are new to the site and are just starting with keyword research.
Again, this isn't your final keyword list, but it should give you some ideas for additional keyword research.
Google Ads
Although slightly slanted toward pay per click, Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) is still a wonderful source of keyword suggestions.
To utilize it to generate keyword suggestions for a website, you'll almost certainly need access to a Google Ads account that actually spends money.
If you don't have access to one, Google will provide you a wide range of keyword traffic rather than more precise information.
Keyword Research on Competitors
Mining competitor sites for possible keywords might be just as valuable as mining your own site for keywords.
Searching for phrases where your competitors rank high but you don't, or even where you both rank for the same term, can help you expand your keyword list.
Google Trends
Seasonality and overall patterns for changes in search engine volume for keywords over time can be found in Google Trends. Google Trends will also provide you with a list of related inquiries, which you may iterate on to get more term suggestions.
This tool isn't simply for determining the relative popularity of terms; it can also provide helpful information on geographic differences.
Keyword Research by Location
Most keyword research tools will return global search volumes or search volumes for a certain country by default. You may need to combine numerous sets of keyword data if you're interested in multiple countries.
Most keyword research tools, on the other hand, cannot go down to the granular level if you only want data for a specific city, state, province, territory, or other location.
If you're doing keyword research for a company that can only function in one state, for example, you should limit the search volume regionally to get an accurate view of the entire search volume accessible.
This is when Google Ads can come in handy once more. Other tools may require you to alter search volumes based on the percentage of your segment that is compared to the entire country, with the exception of geographically specific phrases.
Creating an Action Plan Based on Your Keyword Research
Using the information provided above, you can begin developing a strategy to target the phrases for which you are not already ranking well.
Begin with the most lucrative search chances that are also linked to high-volume terms. When implementing your keyword strategy, map your most essential keywords onto your current pages, if any exist, and consider how you might modify those sites or try to attract links to them to boost their ranks.
You can start by putting together your content plan for producing new pages on the main part of your website or new blog posts, white papers, videos, and so on if you don't already have pages for an important group of keywords on your site.