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.

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Effective Lawyer Content Marketing

When it comes to distributing legal content online, lawyers have a variety of options ranging from article syndication sites like ArticlesBase.com and Ezinearticles.com, how-to sites like ehow, legal oriented sites like Avvo and FreeAdvice.com, or blog platforms. Which of these provides the most effective distribution?

Defining "Effectiveness" of Content Distribution

How do you measure effectiveness of content distribution? Is it page views, unique visitors, SEO valued links or leads? It's all of these, but ultimately, the goal for lawyers is to get new people to find and see the value of their legal practice, and make contact.
In order to provide value, the distribution platform an attorney chooses to use has to drive traffic to the published content. To do that, the content pages must get linked to from other relevant pages, get crawled by the major search engines, and get ranked for relevant keywords. Alternatively, the platform itself can deliver visitors from it's existing traffic base by providing an easy way for them to browse or search for content.

Measuring the Performance of Content Marketing

Having access to page view and lead data is critical for any content marketing effort. Without it, there is no way to make decisions about what and where to publish. Whichever platform you use, make sure you have direct access to traffic and lead data.

Links and SEO Value

The other benefit of publishing content online, is the links from that page will provide SEO value to your profile page or website. For this reason, having your legal content published on multiple websites is best, in order to maximize the "global link popularity" of you profile page or website.

The LawFirms.com Network Delivers on all These Aspects

Law Firms has proven to be one of the most effective means of content marketing for lawyers, and now that more sites, like US Immigration Lawyers, Personal Injury Lawyer, Employment Lawfirms and Auto Accident Lawyers, have been opened up to LawFirms.com subscribers, it just got more interesting and more effective. Having content across multiple sites can deliver enormous value for attorneys looking to increase their business.
One attorney, Rodney Mesriani, has taken full advantage of this platform, with many pages published across several, relevant sites. Some examples:
Employment Lawfirms: Severance packages
Personal Injury Lawyer: Amusement Park Injury Claims
Auto Accident Lawyers: Liability in Multiple Vehicle Accidents
Law Firms: Common Workplace Issues
So far this month, his articles have received, 1,875 page views! More importantly, his effort has increased his business. One example of this starts with the amusement park injury article listed above. About a half hour after the page went up, the following inquiry was sent to Mr. Mesriani's inbox from his profile page:
"my son was on a ride at six flags (kong) and broke his back he was out of school for 3 months as a 10th grader. we had to pay for toutoring and online coarses to keep him with good grades. $6000 later and his back is still giving him problems. They never called to even see how he was doing. What can we do?"
There is no better example of how effective content marketing can grow a law firms business. This person was searching for help, found the page relevant to her legal problem, and clicked to contact the author. That's effective content marketing.

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Marketing your Law Firm in a Weak Economy

Money is getting tighter, and your retainers may be getting smaller, but that doesn't mean that lawyers should ease up on their online marketing efforts. If anything, now is the time to increase your exposure online.

Adapting your Online Content for the Economy

Normally, you would focus the content on your website or profile around the types of cases that you focus on. Nowadays though, it may be worthwhile to modify your approach a bit. One of the core shifts is to start publishing useful, informative content that actually allows potential clients to solve their situatiuation without hiring an attorney...

Why would a lawyer want to waste time publishing free advice?

The bottom line is, if someone can't afford to hire you right now, they're not going to. What they are going to do is spend some time researching online to find out what they need to do to solve their problem on their own. Whether it's immigration applications, bankruptcy forms, employment filings, etc, they're going to find out how to do it themselves. So why not help them by making some common problems easier for them to handle on their own?
Now I'm not talking about going on Q/A forums and posting answers to legal questions. I'm talking about publishing helpful, comprehensive how-to's, forms, process overviews, etc for searchers to find on your site, blog or profile page(s).

The Benefit for You: Branding

The economy will come back, and so will your retainer fees. If you've built up some trust/authority/likeability with consumers during the down economy, you will be rewarded when dispoable incomes return.
Whether they like it or not, branding works, and people want to work with a lawyer they like. If they've stumbled accross your site before, and stuck around long enough to research, your name will register. They may have even bookmarked the content they found so they don't lose it.
Sooner or later some of these visitors are going to have another legal problem, or a friend will. Since you've made that impression however many months ago, you'll have a leg up on everyone else.
Finding and choosing a lawyer is not easy, and if someone's already made a positive connection with your firm, it makes it much easier for them to choose yours over all the other available practices.

Just a little free advice, in case you ever have some extra income lying around for legal marketing services.

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