The Rainmaker Blog : Law Firm Marketing and Business Development : The Rainmaker Institute : Stephen Fairley : Professional Legal Marketing

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

At our Rainmaker Retreat in San Francisco this past weekend, I fielded several questions from attorneys about keywords – how to find the right ones and how often to use them. 

Here are 3 steps to finding the right keywords for your law practice:

Step 1:  Make a list of 5-6 words and/or phrases that best describe your practice.

Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and think about what words they would use to find you.  Hint:  it is not the name of your firm.  Choose words or phrases that describe exactly what you do, in laymen’s terms:  i.e., Phoenix divorce lawyer, car accident attorney, etc.

Step 2:  Choose your keywords or key phrases based on relevance and difficulty.

As you saw in my Tuesday blog, competition for the word “lawyer” is about as fierce as it gets, which means it would be very difficult for your site to rank high in search results for that word alone.  The smaller you are, the more specific you want to get, choosing keywords that have less competition.  Use Google’s Keyword Tool to see what the search volume is for your keywords and key phrases. Look for similar words that have less competition, but are still relevant to your business.  Then strike a good balance between relevance and difficulty. 

Step 3:  Use your keywords and key phrases throughout your website.

Choose the best 3-5 individual keywords and your top 10 key phrases and use them in the content of your website as well as in the page titles and metadata.  If you can secure a URL for these keywords, use that as well.  Be sure not to “stuff” your content with too many keywords – your site should still be written for a human being, not a search engine. 

If you would like to learn more about online marketing for law firms, sign up to attend one of our upcoming Rainmaker Retreats – we’ve got one coming up in two weeks in Livingston, New Jersey (Oct. 21-22), one next month in Chicago (Nov. 11-12) and one in December in Los Angeles (Dec. 2-3). 

For more information, visit www.rainmakerretreat.com or call 888-588-5891.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Looking for more proven tactics from The Rainmaker Institute?

Then subscribe to our FREE monthly e-newsletter. One click of your mouse will take you to our site where you can see the current issue and subscribe to our complimentary monthly e-newsletter that will be delivered to your inbox.  Each issue is chock-full of legal marketing information you can put to use right away. I think you will find the information in every newsletter something you will want to share with your staff to maximize the effectiveness of your legal marketing plan.