The Art of Keyword Development

One of the most critical, fundamental and effective (when done right) aspects of any SEO effort is the keyword research necessary prior to writing your content. Unfortunately, it's also a time consuming task that most people don't know how to do properly.
Too often lawyers, and anyone else marketing themselves online, focus on a handful of highly competitive keywords and nothing else. It's not there fault; I've seen some of the "keyword analysis" provided by legal marketing companies like FindLaw. To say that it wasn't very good is an understatement of English Mastiffian proportions. It consisted of a few head terms like car accident, auto accident and truck accident, followed by a list of "tail" terms like attorney, lawyers and law firms, then finally regional terms. The idea was that all you had to do was mix up the head and tail terms, sprinkle in the regional terms and viola: Your keyword list.
The results look something like this:
California Truck Accident Lawyer
San Francisco Car Accident Attorney
Sacramento Auto Accident Law Firms
Great. Now write some crummy content, stuff these keywords in the title, and watch the leads come flying in!

You have to be kidding me.

The fact that lawyers pay for this "keyword research" makes me cringe. First of all, trying to rank for all these regional keywords is a waste of time. Unless you have a serious, long-term, very well funded SEO effort, it's just not going to happen. Furthermore, local search is evolving rapidly, and search algorithms are treating regional search terms much differently than "normal" search terms. It's not about matching up title tags anymore.

A Primer on Keyword Development

To develop a great keyword list, and in turn, effective web content, you have to be able to find a breadth of contextually related keywords (or more specifically, search terms). Think about the English language as a map. Every word is connected to hundreds or thousands of other words. Instead of just picking five, ten, or twenty highly competitive keywords, focus on finding the thousands of keywords that are one step removed from the keywords that every other lawyer is stuffing in their title tags.
An interesting tool that I use a lot when beginning a new keyword library, is Googles "wonder wheel". Here is a good video on how it works. It's a great way to get started getting out the the same old keyword "rut".

Applying What You've Found

Once you've found some keywords that merit a page of content, begin by creating an outline of what you think would be a helpful, informative page for someone searching for the term(s) you've selected. In this outline, try to naturally include your search term in the title and subtitles of your outline.
Once you're happy with your outline, FORGET ABOUT THE KEYWORDS, and begin writing. We've all seen what a keyword stuffed page reads like. It's terrible. If you're going to bother writing content to generate consumer traffic, you should have something that impresses them once they find it right? The body of your content should serve the sole purpose of getting your idea across effectively, not just more keyword fluff. As long as your target keyword is in your title and subtitles, you're set. More to come in another post.

Ruf ruf