Law Firm Marketing: How to Choose the Right Keywords for SEO

Keywords are important since they inform search engines about the content of your web pages. They help create content that aligns with users’ search phrases and ultimately determine how much traffic your website receives.

Targeting the right keywords can make or break your legal SEO efforts. The keyword research process is the first step you need to take to ensure you select the best keywords for search engine optimization.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of identifying search queries or keyword phrases that your target audience uses when they search for something online. It reveals the competitiveness of target keywords and their difficulty.

When you have insight into what trending keywords are, you’re better equipped to grow website traffic, boost search engine rankings, and acquire new clients. Through keyword research, you can identify the relevance, authority, and volume of keyword types.

After conducting keyword research, you can establish and execute a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for keywords you care about.

The Difference Between Google Ads and Keyword Research

The major difference between Google Ads keywords and search terms is who uses them and why. Marketers use keywords to create SEO and PPC campaigns, whereas searchers (prospective clients) use queries to search for information online.

For instance, a user might type in “accident attorney Chicago” without knowing this specific keyword is being used by a law firm to target clients. Conversely, marketers use search terms to inform keyword ideas and their overall SEO strategy.

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Where Are Keywords Used?

Keywords are utilized across digital marketing efforts. They play a role in PPC campaigns, website content, SEO results, content marketing, and many more avenues to help consumers find your practice.

Why Is It Important to Use the Right Keywords on Your Legal Website?

Keyword research works simultaneously with your law firm’s efforts to attract the right audience and increase brand visibility. Accurate keyword research increases your chances of prospective clients getting in touch with you through your digital marketing strategy.

Your law firm may be doing a great job creating high-quality content, but if no one is reading it, it’s wasted time (and money). Once you have the right keywords for your legal website, you have a better chance of gaining valuable leads.

The 9 Different Types of Keywords to Improve SEO

There are nine different types of keywords you can use to target prospective clients at each stage of the buyer’s funnel.

1. Short-tail keywords: These are made up of three words or fewer and are sometimes called head keywords. They have a high search volume and a highly competitive rate. For example: “lawyer in Chicago.”
2. Long-tail keywords: These consist of three or more words and are quite specific, often revealing user intent. For example: “cost of a personal injury lawyer.”
3. Short-term keywords: Any words or phrases that have been in the news or hyped over social media. These have good search volume, but a limited lifespan.
4. Long-term evergreen keywords: Keywords like these are continually relevant and stay “fresh” for readers over long periods of time. For example: “How to sue for personal injury”.
5. Product defining keywords: These explain and describe your product. For example: “defense attorney”.
6. Customer defining keywords: These search terms identify a specific subset of clients. For example: “personal injury lawyer dog bites.”
7. Geo-targeting keywords: Prospective clients use these keywords when they are searching for law firms in a specific location. For example: “personal injury lawyer in Long Grove.”
8. LSI keywords: These keywords are semantically relevant to your main keyword. For example: “disability lawyer”, or “car accident lawyer.”
9. Intent keywords: Online user queries are usually informational, commercial, or transactional. These keywords reveal search intent and are used when prospects are close to hiring.

The Best Keywords for Lawyers

Completing keyword research determines what the right keywords are for your legal practice.

To give you a rudimentary example, if you are a law firm that focuses on criminal defense in the Chicago area, you might use keywords like “criminal defense lawyer Chicago” or “assault attorney Naperville”. You wouldn’t use keywords like “defense lawyer in New York.”

Another aspect to consider is keyword relevancy. This refers to how important certain keywords are to each page of your website and its affiliated content. Search engines like Google use relevancy to determine what your page is about and ranks it in search results.

When Google crawls your website, it analyzes the topics covered in your blog and other pages. The more comprehensive your coverage of a particular topic is, the higher your Topical Authority score, and the better your organic visibility.

This is why it’s critical to choose the right keywords for topic clusters (groups of related content that collectively cover a broad subject area). Topic clusters signal strong contextual support for Google, as well as link building for law firms and internal linking frameworks that help users and search engines find your relevant content.

The Best Keyword Research Tools

Once you have identified a general list of keywords, you can use industry-standard keyword research tools to help narrow down your keyword list.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a paid tool that combines both keyword research features and competitive analyses. It features a keyword explorer to help your law firm find out what terms have the highest monthly search volume and provides helpful direction when building your list of target keywords.

Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is beneficial simply because Google has access to an immense amount of invaluable keyword data like ranking difficulty, and low competition keywords. This is a great keyword tool for beginners that helps you understand the basics of choosing the right keywords.

Answer the Public

This platform dives into interrogatives (who, what, when, where, why) and prepositions (with, for, of, etc.) to help generate relevant keywords. Answer the Public is excellent for determining long-tail keywords and helps you answer questions that get you into Google’s featured snippets.

Conclusion

Keyword research works together with your SEO strategy to provide brand awareness and give prospective clients an easier way to find you with the best marketing ROI for law firms over the long term. And that’s crucial for any lawyer’s SEO, be that SEO for personal injury, SEO for DUI attorney, or any other law firm specialty. With the right targeted keywords, your law firm can generate more business than you thought was ever possible. If you need assistance defining what keywords will provide the most revenue for your business, Comrade Web Agency is a phone call away.