Law Firm SEO is About More Than Keywords

Law Firm SEO Market Research

While keyword research is one of the most important aspects of good search engine optimization (SEO) for any law firm, to start there is like starting to read a book from the second chapter.

Keyword research is a fundamental part of SEO, but it is not the first step. Before any relevant information can be gathered about keywords or phrases, you need to decide which words and phrases are worth looking into. That decision should be based on solid market research. That is the beginning of an effective SEO strategy for your law practice.

Following are several ways that market research can impact your firm’s SEO:

Finding What People Are Searching For

In every market, there are general keywords that are easy to come up with. They are also generally worthless.

Optimizing for words like “lawyer”, “attorney” or “corporate law” isn’t going to do much to add to your client list. The terms are too general and don’t really reflect what a member of your target market might be searching for.

By conducting market research, your firm can close in on the real words and phrases that people use when they search for the services you offer. By doing the market research before the keyword research, you’ll see that people aren’t searching for a “personal injury lawyer”, they’re asking Google, “What are the California laws about being injured in a public place?” The difference in the content needed to target each of those two searches is significant.

Improve Your Linking Strategies

A large part of SEO work is building a network of good links from the right sites to improve your own site’s authority and search result rankings. Good market research should lead you to sites that can offer the most valuable links.

By finding the places where your target audience is doing their research, you find authoritative sites like directories, popular forums or legal reference sites. If your firm can obtain links from these high authority sites, not only will your search result ranks improve, you’ll get the extra bonus of some organic traffic coming directly through those links.

Learn From The Experience Of Others

Market research, of course, involves looking at your competitors and analyzing their successes and failures. You want to emulate and improve upon the successes while avoiding the mistakes that lead to failure. By looking over the content your competitors produce and how it ranks in the search engines, you can gather a lot of information that helps with forming an SEO strategy for your own firm.

If they are getting first page results for a term that’s relevant to your practice, a thorough analysis of that page can reveal how your firm might attain the same, or better, results. On the other side of the coin, if someone is producing a lot of content but not ranking well anywhere, you should be able to spot patterns you’ll want to avoid in your own SEO strategies.

Achieve More Social Shares

When someone shares your content through social media, it’s like a personal word-of-mouth endorsement, which is good for business, and for your law firm’s SEO.

One person sharing an article you’ve published might not do a whole lot, but when many people share and re-share your content it does two things. First, it’s a signal to search engines that your content is useful, valuable and authoritative. Second, every one of those shares generates another link on the web pointing back to your firm’s domain, which adds up to more clout in the search results.

By doing proper market research, and getting to know as much as you can about your target audience, you will naturally create content that is better suited to that audience and more valuable to its members. This, in turn, will prompt more sharing on the various social media channels and help boost the SEO results of both individual pieces of content and your law firm’s overall site.

No Reason For No Research

There was a time when market research was both difficult and expensive, but times have changed. There’s no excuse for not doing proper research these days. Everything you need is available on the Internet. All you have to do is look for it.

Taking the extra time to perform market research, or finding the right team to do it for you, will make a world of difference in both your SEO and overall marketing results.

Do you need help optimizing your law firm website for search engines? Have you worked with other SEO consultants and are unhappy with the results? We can help! Contact us today for a free evaluation and SEO audit of your site.