SEO for Lawyers Part 8 – How to Use the Google Keyword External Tool for Attorney Search Research

In part seven of “SEO for Lawyers: The Attorney’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization for Law Firms” we discussed keyword research formulas that will be used in our keyword research and selection method. In this lesson we will cover how to use the Google Keyword External Tool to gather keyword data for our upcoming research and analysis.

Preparing to Do Your Free Keyword Research

Using the method for Keyword Research that will be presented in this lesson and those immediately following it will only cost you time. However, it is an effective way of finding where the keyword opportunity is without investing in professional tools to assist you. Note, however, that many professional tools will automate parts of the method you are about to learn.

A number of the exercises in this series will require a Google account. Getting a Google account is easy, free, and absolutely necessary for search marketing. Thus, you should create one for yourself if you do not have one already. Creating a Google account is easy, you can start by clicking here.

If you plan to engage in web marketing, it is recommended that you install the Firefox web browser for Windows because it has a number of free web marketing plugins available for it that will be utilized in this series.

After getting Firefox, install the free Google Toolbar for Firefox so that you can have easy access to Google PageRank data.

The following exercise will span across several posts in this SEO for Lawyers Series. If you follow along with the lesson and want to do some keyword research for yourself, you can simply replace the practice area used in the lesson with your own and replicate the steps accordingly.

SEO for Lawyers Exercise – Keyword Research for a Chicago Divorce Lawyer

For this exercise, lets say I wanted to start a Divorce Practice in Chicago and that I have already checked out my competition and acquired some keyword data for later reference.

Step 1 – Getting Keyword Data from Google

The Google Keyword External Tool is a very frequented place for conducting Adword related keyword research and even SEO research.

We will start our research by visiting the tool and entering in a search phrase, and then hitting enter. Make sure you select match “phrase” at the bottom left corner so that you don’t return a broad match.

When Google returns the information you want, you will then want to download it as CSV or “CSV for Excel” so that we can use the data in our keyword formulas. For better efficiency, you may want to reduce the number of results by only selecting those that are directly relevant to your research before downloading the data.

The following video will show you how I use the Google Keyword External Tool for Attorney related keyword research.

Stay Tuned for Part 9 of this Series

In the next post of this series, we will use the data that we downloaded from Google’s Keyword External Tool in our Keyword Formulas to help us analyze potential Keywords for a Chicago Divorce Lawyer. Click here to subscribe to this series and blog by email using Google Feedburner.