How to perform Keyword Research

What is Keyword research?

According to Wiki, ‘Keyword Research is the practice Marketers and SEO experts use to find and research alternative search terms that people use on search engines while looking for a particular subject, product or service to ensure your website is visible in search engine results. (Page 1 for the win!)

By ensuring you incorporate relevant terms, questions and phrases on your website, you can, in turn, increase the chances of your website appearing not only in search engine results but appear in them at the exact time that a user is actively looking for your product or service. By breaking your website down into topics, you can then create lists broken down even further in relation to the locations you wish to target, practice areas and industries.

In this post, we’re going to cover how to perform keyword research for law firms, this is a basic guide, and there are many more aspects of Keyword Research. At FireTap, we believe to feel the full effects of Keyword Research and optimisation, if you do not have a delegated SEO staff member, outsourcing would be the most effective option for you.

Why do I need to do Keyword Research?

Keyword Research is arguably one of the most important factors of Digital Marketing, alongside link building and content marketing. Effective keyword research and implementation can help you find the most popular and searched for terms relating to your service areas, and determine the best keyword option for ROI based on your goals. Choosing the right keyword can be a huge driver of traffic to your website and increase brand awareness.

By promoting your services on search engines using the most effective keyword, you can improve your rankings and authority, as well as quality score. Your quality score is a score of how relevant your website landing page content is to your Meta-tagging and the chosen keyword, the higher the score, the higher the chances of you ranking higher are.

Most people don’t click past the first page of search engine results, so ensuring your website is visible on the first page at the exact time people are searching for your services, you are maximising your chances for both an increase of traffic and leads due to relevancy. Missing out on just one super important keyword can be the difference whether your website gets traffic or not.

Keyword Research for Law Firms

As mentioned, keyword research can assist with optimising your content to rank better within search engines. It can also help you to identify trending and engaging topic ideas to assist with your blog writing and website content. You can create content tailored to your audience’s tone of voice by using keywords and phrases that have actually been searched – therefore humanising your content.

Many Law Firms have different practice areas and service offerings, which allows your firm to choose a Keyword most relevant to that topic. Depending on your location targeting, you can opt for long-tail keywords (at least three words) which may have a lower search volume, and be less competitive, but can help you dominate your local search area for specific search phrases rather than generic terms. Long-tail keywords are used when you want to target a more niche demographic rather than the masses – if you have a Law Firm with only one office location, this may work well for you.

How to do Keyword Research

So where do you start? – Create Lists!

Foundation Lists

The first step in keyword research is to build lists of keywords and terms relating to your practice area/topic/service.

By breaking these lists down into the following, you have your foundation keyword list.

• Locations
• Practice Areas (and sub-topics if necessary)
• Industries
• Important People within the firm
• Case Studies
• Blog Posts

Once you’ve created your lists, you can expand on the list by creating and adding additional keywords, phrases and questions.

Keyword Planner

Your list building doesn’t end there. Once you’ve got your foundation lists, head over to Google’s ‘Keyword Planner’ and enter the most relevant keywords (usually 3 is enough) and search for similar keywords and phrases within the planner.

The higher the search volume for a keyword, the higher the competition. Don’t get bogged down by keywords with a huge amount of searches, as mentioned, long-tail keywords can work great for Law firms who want to dominate their local search area. Even though long-tail keywords have a lesser amount of searches, the competition is lower, therefore your chances of visibility on the first page of search engine results is higher. It’s about finding the right balance.

Related Search Terms

Next you can input your keyword into google, e.g.

And scroll to the bottom to see related search terms, these are great for long-tail keywords;

Competition

You should have a pretty good looking list at this point. But you should still look at what your competitors are doing and what keywords they are using. There are many tools you can utilise to see your competitor’s top keywords, such as SEMrush, BuzzSumo, Ahrefs and Wordstream, to name a few.

A basic analysis of your competitor’s keywords would be done by an analysis of their website Meta tagging and website content. Do their keywords rank well? How are their rankings? By searching your chosen keyword, you can see which of your competitors comes up on the first page and it is the right choice of keyword to optimise.

Google Trends

Your Keyword Research is almost complete! For further research, you can then head over to Google Trends and type in your chosen keyword to see how the search volume for that keyword has trended over time, as well as related and trending topics. You can find additional seasonal keywords here. This is a great additional option, as it’s free.

Google Search Console

For ongoing, effective blog post optimisation, Google search console ‘search analytics’ is a great feature, which helps you analyse the clicks your website received on Google. You can check your website’s indexing, internal and external linking and analyse which keywords land your site in search engine results for particular blog posts. This tells you which keywords people are using to find your content, allowing you to use it to your advantage and make necessary tweaks moving forward.

If you’re familiar with SEO, you know it’s a long-term strategy that takes time. It especially takes blog posts a while to gain traction on google and appear high up in SERPs, don’t let this deter you. By going back to old blog posts and updating and optimising them on an ongoing basis, you’ll create content that is always relevant and up to date and will see great results in the long term.

FAQS

FAQS are important to include in your website copy as more often than not, these can include the exact term users are searching for. Try to cover every aspect of your practice area service as well as subtopics. Around 10 FAQs per service page is sufficient.

Let FireTap write your Law Firm’s website copy. From blog writing to website writing and optimisation, our SEO gurus do it all. We have years of experience in the Legal Industry with Law Firms of all sizes.

Like most SEO services, they work best with a long-term based approach, FireTap provides on-page website optimisation, as well as off-page optimisation. We know Legal Marketing – talk to the experts today.