| Do you want a successful website? Of course you do. The foundation for success is laid with complete in depth keyword research. If you have a website now and have not completely researched your keywords it is highly likely you have failed to create a website that generates traffic and good prospective clients for you.
The sad fact is many lawyers have already spent a significant amount of money on a website that has failed to deliver on the promise of the vendors you hired or is costing you way, way too much for way, way to little results.
If you fit this category I know what you mean.
If you are among the dwindling numbers of attorneys without a website (recent research indicates 75% of attorneys have websites) you are in luck for being a late adopter since you can do it the right way from the start and skip going to the school of hard knocks.
I have indeed paid my dues and learned from the school of hard knocks myself over the last 10 years of my Internet marketing experience. I trust I save you some time, money, grief and redesign or design your website into something successful from my experience. If you do or don’t have a website now the very first thing you need to do before you do anything with anyone on your website is to completely research your keywords. End of the story. It is by far the first step before you do anything. Lets get to the heart of the matter with a little Q&A.
What is the purpose of this complete keyword research? Let me list a few:
- You will discover if there is a market at all online for the practice areas you offer and if there is a market how large that market is currently. This information will also enable you to craft your practice areas for the most profits if you have a desire to do so.
- You will discover what are the words your potential clients are using to search online for your practice areas. Using the legal professions words or just the ideas of a few people is unlikely to uncover the words you need to know. In short if folks are not coming to your site from search engines it is because you have not built your site around the words they are using.
- You will learn more about the "psychographics" or the "mind set" of your market that will help you convert them to clients. These words are like an Ink Blot Test used by a psychologist to find out what is going on in the mind of the patient – both conscious and unconscious. You get to look deeper into the psyche of your prospective clients and what is motivating them so you can meet those needs and they naturally want to hire you as their attorney and tell others about you.
- You will discover what your competitors have done to become successful and more importantly, what has caused other of your competitors to fail so you don’t duplicate their failure (tons of failure on the Internet you can be sure of that).
- You will discover what are the top 20 keywords that will serve as the foundation for writing "sticky" content, in words your visitors will identify with and that will enable you to "pull" traffic toward your website as well as convert them to good clients with much more ease. This knowledge will also help you in developing your offline marketing materials as well like yellow pages (which you will almost certainly want to give up any yellow page display ads if you have a good website), brochures, direct mail, etc.
- You will be able to construct the site architecture in the most beneficial manner to facilitate high search engine ranking as well as a persuasive structure that converts your visitors to your most wanted response.
- You will be less likely to over use or under use keywords in your writing.
- You will have the foundation for successful pay per click campaigns that are inexpensive, measurable and extremely effective.
What does a professional do in researching keywords? Let me list the steps:
- They interview you to determine what your goals are with your website, they review your existing website if you have one and ask you some questions about how you view your clients.
- They research your competitors somewhat by looking them up usually via www.Alexa.com to give them some additional data to go on.
- They take a look at the "source code" on successful websites of your competitors to see what your successful competitors are using for keywords around the USA and beyond.
- They probably will take a look at some of the keyword results from www.Overture.com to see what the numbers look like in a preliminary way.
- From the efforts above they will run their first preliminary keyword search using WordTracker software (go to www.WordTracker.com if you want to check that out) or some other proprietary keyword research software.
- They will send the preliminary keyword research which may be hundreds or even thousands of words to you for you to review and select the words from that first pass at the research to determine the words you think will resonate with your clients.
- They will next run the final keyword research using the words you picked and only WordTracker if they used another (generally considered less accurate than WordTracker since WordTracker is the gold standard in keyword research) proprietary keyword software research tool at the preliminary pass. From this combined research will come your top 20 keywords.
- They will then make a recommended architecture for the structure of your site based on the keywords as well as recommend for each of the 20 pages the #1 keyword with at least two other supporting keywords for just that page. Each of these three keywords is a link in the structure of search engine optimization so they are chosen very carefully.
At the conclusion of these steps the job of just the keyword research professional is complete. This information can go to the designers, the copywriters, the SEO optimization professionals and technical people. Now you have the foundation you need for success. If you have done something less than what I have described in creating your website you are setting yourself up for failure or at least seriously limiting any possible positive results from your website.
What is a SEO optimization professional and what do keywords have to do with the SEO process?
A SEO professional is someone whose main work or at least a major part of their work revolves around getting your website to achieve high search engine rankings for all of your top 20 keywords. The SEO professional sees to it that you have keywords in all the right places that at a minimum include:
- title tag
- description tag
- headings and subheadings
- body copy
- links on the page
- alt text (the name of the files of the images on your site)
Can I do the keyword analysis for myself? Let me list my comments on this one:
- Yes it is possible and not a good use of your time. The amount of money it costs to get the job done is way less than the billable hours you will miss trying to do this for yourself. Also your time is better spent in building a relationship based referral network not doing Internet marketing steps.
- Even if you do try to do it yourself you almost certainly can’t get as good an end result as a professional. This "difference" will cost you thousands, tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands over the long haul. I am reminded of the old saying of "penny wise, pound foolish" at this point.
- I did not do my own and I don’t recommend it to others. If you have been to my website then it is highly likely you are reading now is a result of the foundations of the keyword research I invested in.
How much does this keyword research cost?
You can do it in stages or you can do it all at once. It is cheaper to do it in a package and you should expect to spend from $300 to $1,000 on getting it completed depending on how deep you go in the research and if you have the vendor design the site structure based on the research. I would error in doing more work than less work since this aspect is so fundamental to your long term success in so many ways.
Who should I hire to do my keyword research?
I personally used Richard Cannon and his team at 940-668-2145 for my website. You can find his website at
www.CannonFireMarketing.com. Richard will be happy to know you were sent by me and will spend some time talking with you to help you decide if working with him is a good value for you or not. He will also send you some additional white papers that will make you a better educated consumer as well on some of the topics you talk about together if you like.
WordTracker has a really comprehensive e-book on keyword research that Richard can send you if you desire as well. He is not a salesman so don’t expect a sales pitch. Do expect straight talk from a Texas accented, semi retired horse
rancher and water engineer who loves to talk about Internet marketing with people (as well as horses, water and music).
What more can you tell me about keywords?
The material you find below I have taken out of my document
"Internet Marketing Made Understandable For Lawyers" which is available for download. The material is just the section on keywords so it is a bit out of context. There is much, much more in that whole document of 50 pages in length so do go grab it as well.
Some Details On Getting Good Keywords
I trust you have been thinking about this aspect some and building a keyword list. Do know that you do not have to do this on your own.
Let me tell you how you can begin the process of keyword research.
Knowing your visitors’ keywords are crucial for success since that is how they are going to find you and stay on your site. Keywords and keyword phrases are very important to know since they are the key to your market’s "psychographics" and the key to getting them to stay and ultimately become a client.
Declan Dunn gave me a nice example using fishing rods. Lets say you are selling fishing rods. Your keywords might be words like fishing, rod, reel, river, ocean, bait, lure, trout, and fish. More related words might be pond, lake, vacation, camping, stream, travel, tent, boat, salmon, pike, bass, swordfish, dock, beach, rapids, ice fishing, rod and reel, or the name of fishing movies like "The River Runs Through It" perhaps. Think about what you think are the keywords for each of your practice areas much like the fishing rod example above. Once you have exhausted the words you can think of, we go on to the next stage in the process.
For the next stage I would first go to www.teoma.com and put in, for example, "personal injury lawyer". You will get back sponsored links, results, refine, and resources. Now look to your right on the screen and see the refine section and look to the bottom of that column to "show all refinements" and click on that.
Next you will be looking at a bunch of keywords. This should get you going further in thinking of new words. Now go to a couple of major search engines like
Google and Yahoo and just put in the words and phrases from your list and see how many responses you get to those words.
Look at the ads that come up and go look at some of those sites to see what keywords and phrases are on their sites. While you are doing this, be sure to learn more about the psychographics of your clients and what these sites are saying to their visitors to move them through the sales process. Bookmark those that you think are really good for future reference.
At each website that you think is good, take a look at their Meta Tags, Meta Description and Keywords (see definitions below). How do you "take a look" you ask? While you are on this good website at the homepage, look up at your browser’s menu for "View," which pulls down the menu, and then click on "Source" and up pops a window. You may have to scroll down a bit to see the HTML that says <title> and then the title of the page; <Meta name "description" = and then the description; <meta name "keywords" = and then find the list of keywords.
(I am looking at my Microsoft Internet Explorer and describing how to do this process. If you have a different browser, you can do the same, just look around.)
Write down the keywords you find since you will want to have it later for your use in making your keyword list. If you find some of the keywords are misspelled, don’t think that is necessarily a mistake by the web builder. Often people searching misspell words and you want to catch them with the misspelled words as well as the correctly spelled words.
One last hint here. The "good websites" are likely to be those that are already in the top three of the search engines when you search each keyword. You probably want to be sure to keep the keywords listed after Meta name= "keywords" content = in the source code since that tells you what keywords that website thought was important to their market. This does not mean all of them are or any of them are. What it means is they thought they were and it at least gives you clues for you to think about.
Next we go to www.Yahoo.com. Click on the "Groups" icon found on the top of the page, which takes you to a search page for Yahoo Groups, and put in the name of your prime general keyword.
For example, I put in "fishing" at Yahoo and received 1862 responses of fishing groups of all kinds. Go to some of the bigger groups (some have hundreds of members), and look around a bit so you learn more about your market. I found 124 for the term "car accident" for example. I think there is a group for almost anything out there on the Internet. You might even want to join some of these groups at least for a while to learn more about your market. We will be talking more about groups later in this document.
Another way to learn about your market and your competitors is to go back to some of the really good sites of your competitors and sign up for their newsletters and/or download the articles they may be offering. You will learn a great deal this way.
An excellent way to learn about your market is to ask your past or current clients questions. Do some market research. Ask them straight out if they were going to be looking for your services online what words or phrases would they be likely to search under? What would they like to see on a website? What would they be willing to buy on a website if they were going to a lawyer’s website (books, e-books, teleclasses, seminars, etc.)? What would be the right pricing in their minds for your products or services? If you were to offer e-books, teleclasses or seminars online what topics would they like to see?
Lets get high tech for keywords. Go to www.GoodKeywords.com and download their free keyword finder. Read the information on their website and once having downloaded the software, install it and read the help section first. Then play around with this for a while. I don’t think this is the best vehicle for keyword searching but it is one step up in the process of keyword research.
The next step in the process is achieved by going to the following site:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/index.php
In the middle of the page to the right of the screen, see the section labeled "Tools" in gray? This is similar to "Good Keywords," but it only just pulls data from the Yahoo/Overture system. This
web page is the location of the "behind the scenes" mechanism for much of what happens on several major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, and InfoSpace among other lesser search engines) and drives the advertising as well.
Over 80% of the eyeballs on the Internet search are on this system’s search engines. You will want to click on the "Keyword Selector Tool" inside that gray box, which will open a new small box. Put in what you think from your research to date will be your top keyword for your practice area like say "personal injury lawyer," which on this date in June 2005 I get 99,502 searches.
Look below at all of the other related terms that come up like "new york personal injury lawyer" with 13,827 searching for that term in June. "Personal injury attorney" got 113,537 searches in the month of June 2005, and look at the related terms listed below that. Write down the numbers you find for what you think will be your top 20 keywords.
You now have counts of how many people searched for the keywords you thought up for yourself or found via your market research. Some may be a surprise to you and some may confirm what you already have found. Either way, you have some hard data now about what people are actually searching on the Internet for in the last month or so, which will serve you well in building your site or making over your site.
Additionally, it tells you what articles people would like to read about since you will probably want to write articles around the keywords. You also have learned a great deal about your competitors and what the psychographics are of your prospective clients. You can stop here with your keyword research and you have only done the background level of research.
At this point, you are probably way, way ahead of your competitors just with this data. This particular information is critical to the success of your Internet marketing efforts from a foundational perspective. You can skip all of the steps above if you plan to use the services of a good keyword research professional, since they will handle all of this work above on keywords for you as well as use the software tools used for the deepest cut on keyword research.
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