If you’ve been marketing your bankruptcy practice online for any time at all – in fact, if you’ve been marketing any type of law practice at all – you’ve probably hear the adage that “content is king”. It’s no secret that informative, timely, relevant content will help you build an attentive audience… but getting people to your website or blog in the first place … well, that’s another matter.

Ever wonder how Google and the other search engines know which websites to list when you conduct a search?

Here’s a secret – nobody knows the exact answer to that.  If I knew, I’d own all of Manhattan and would summer in the south of France (which I’d also own).  That’s how much money the information is worth (give or take a few bucks).

I do, however, know some of the important things that Google looks for.  And one of those things is … Google looks for stuff that matches up with the search.

In other words, Google looks for specific phrases within website content – phrases that match your search – to find sites and pages that will likely give you what you’re looking for. These phrases are called “keywords”, and they’re the subject of much discussion, confusion, and frustration.

That’s because most people – even seasoned website owners – don’t know how to use them properly.

Out of every ten websites or blogs you visit, you can safely guess that maybe one will be run by somebody who understands how to use keywords to bring in traffic. The rest are just throwing words against the wall, hoping some of them will stick.

This is where you can leverage a bit of internet marketing knowledge to put yourself far ahead of 90% of the other bankruptcy lawyers out there who are trying to market their practices online. The funny thing is, after you’ve learned how to use keywords correctly, it’s pretty easy to rocket past your competition.

The most important thing you can do is stop thinking like a lawyer, and start thinking like a potential client. Put yourself in a consumer’s shoes for a minute… you’re sick of creditors calling you day and night; you’re tired of worrying that you’ll wake up to find that your car has disappeared from your driveway; you’re frightened that the bank is going to repossess your house if you can’t cough up your mortgage payment soon.

In short, you need a solution… and the quickest way to find anything these days is to search for it on Google (or a handful of other, arguably less important search engines).

So you pull up Google’s home page, and type in… what?

See, as a lawyer, you probably would have guessed “bankruptcy”. And that’s not a bad guess… according to Google, about 3 million people search for information using the word “bankruptcy” every month. The problem is, there are nearly 59 million other web pages out there that contain that keyword. That makes it pretty tough to make it to the top 20 results for “bankruptcy” – and as a veteran internet marketer, I can tell you that the top 20 results are the only ones that matter.

Now, let’s look at another keyword – “debt consolidation”. It gets about 1.9 million searches a month, and there are about 22 million pages using this keyword. The odds of getting into the coveted top 20 for “debt consolidation” aren’t great, but they’re better than for “bankruptcy”. Can you think of ways to write about “debt consolidation” that are relevant to your practice? How about comparing it to bankruptcy as a solution for crushing debt?

On to lower-hanging fruit – Google reports that “foreclosure stop”, for whatever reason, gets about 100,000 searches a month. The number of web pages using this keyword? Less than half a million. “Foreclosure stop” might be a little harder to work into a blog post, but you’ll stand a much better chance of grabbing some traffic with this phrase than you will with a high-competition keyword like “bankruptcy”.

Thinking like a consumer, and finding out how your potential clients are searching for information, gives you a valuable advantage over your online competition. Sprinkling your articles and blog posts with the right keywords will help you attract interested visitors to your site… and convert them into paying clients.

Of course, it helps to have the right tools if you expect to figure out what potential clients are looking for. Google’s Keyword Tool is an excellent (and FREE!) resource for finding low-competition keywords to use in your content, so you can start bringing traffic to your website.

Photo by c@rljones.