Online Legal Marketing Begins With The Right Word

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Online Legal Marketing Keyword Research

You’re about to launch your online legal marketing efforts – whether it’s a blog, a static website, or social media marketing strategy (ideally, it’s a combination of all three – but that’s another post for another day). Where do you begin? A domain name? A hosting account? Installing WordPress? Hiring a web developer or a graphic designer to make your online home look all swanky?

Nope. You begin with a word. The right word. Actually, the right words.

And I’m not talking about your pearls of wisdom, either. I’m talking about your keyword terms, those words and terms that you want to rank for on the search engines. Pick the right words and you’re well on your way to online legal marketing success. Choose the wrong ones and you’re dead in the water, floating on page 48 of the search engine results page.

Bear in mind that you need not – indeed, should not – pick only one word to work with. Pick 10, 20 even 50 words and phrases at the start; once you conquer them, you can move onto others.

If you’re marketing a bankruptcy law practice and are located in Cleveland, you may want to focus on “Cleveland bankruptcy lawyer,” or “Cleveland bankruptcy attorney.” Depending on the traffic those terms get, and the competition on the search engines, these may be good or bad ideas as a place to begin.

Choosing Keywords For Your Online Legal Marketing Efforts

First, you want to play word association with yourself, doing everything you can to brainstorm. Think about the words people use when they talk to you. Ask clients if they searched online for a lawyer and, if so, what they plugged into the search engine.

Next, you’ll need to do some legwork to determine the relative volume of searches done for each search tool. There are a number of free keyword search tools online. In no particular order, some of them are:

Third, you’ll want to hand-pick some of the keyword search terms on which to focus your efforts. If you’ve got a relatively new site or are redeveloping an existing site from the ground up (i.e., a gut renovation) then you probably want to start off with the long tail keywords. These are keywords that don’t get a ton of traffic individually but get a good amount in the aggregate. By focusing on the long tail, you can pick up some traffic without as much competition.

Once you’ve chosen a bucket of keywords and search terms, you’ll be able to begin your online legal marketing efforts with gusto. Of course, this is just the first step to climbing the search engine results page. But without this critical first step, you’ll never get the success you seek.