SEO for Lawyers Part 6 – Finding Keywords the Easy Way

In part five of “SEO for Lawyers: The Attorney’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization for Law Firms” we discussed how to perform a preliminary competitive analysis for an attorney search. In this lesson, we will start discussing a simple method for performing keyword research.

How to Examine a Website’s Keywords

As discussed in previous posts, in order to properly optimize a lawyer website for search you will first need to know what phrases you will be optimizing for. In order to do this effectively, you will need to do some keyword research before launching an SEO marketing campaign.

An easy place to begin your research is by examining your competitors’ websites to see what their actual keyword usage is by looking for the once popular keyword meta-tag for suggestions.

The keyword meta tag looks as follows:

Some webmasters no longer list keywords in their website’s meta tags since Google and other search engines started to put less weight on the tags importance in rankings calculations due to irrelevant use of the tag by certain web designers. However, some web designers still do use the meta keyword tag for the benefit of less popular search engines, and many other web designers still use the tag just in case.

One of the easiest ways to examine a competitors keyword usage is by viewing the code of your competitor’s website. The following youtube video illustrates how to view a website’s code in Internet Explorer 8. If your a Firefox or Chrome user, you can click the preceding links to see how to examine code in your respective browsers.

As an exercise, visit lawconsuls.com and examine the source code. Do you see the meta keywords tag?

Analysing Your Competitors’ Keywords to Get Started

If your going to do keyword research, you should first find out what your competitors’ keywords are. Perform an attorney search as described in the previous lesson of SEO for lawyers and get out a piece of paper to record some information for later use. Visit the top listing site for the search and examine it’s code for the meta keyword tag. If you find the keyword meta tag, record the keywords in a spreadsheet, document, or on a piece of paper for later reference.

Don’t Get Discouraged by the Competition

When you do a popular lawyer search, you may get discouraged by the amount of competition your up against — especially when your search returns millions of results. However, in truth, your real competition is composed of a much more limited group.

Usually, this group consists of attorneys that have invested in SEO for lawyers by hiring companies like LawConsuls to optimize their websites and perform an off-site SEO campaign on their behalf. Thus, your real competitors are only those that actually optimized for a particular keyword phrase. These are the organizations you need to out perform to achieve the high rankings.

The above is one reason why keyword research is so important for law firms. By performing the research before you launch an online marketing campaign, you will be able to find which keywords you can compete effectively for.

By knowing what keyword phrases to optimize for and then taking action to rank for those keyword phrases, you will be in a better position to achieve such rankings.

The secret to success with search is to be specific and focused with your strategy.

Stay Tuned for Part 7 of this Series

Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis will be covered in more detail in upcoming posts in this SEO for lawyers series. In the next post of this series, however, we will discuss keyword research for lawyers in more detail. Click here to subscribe to this blog by email using Google Feedburner.