Deciding which keywords to target with your law firm Search Engine Optimisation can be tricky. Do you target the main ones and go after stiff competition, with the risk of not making it to page 1? Or do you go after the lower search, “long tail” keywords and risk not getting enough traffic? In this post I will cover some methods you can use which will help to decide.
Many people think that you have to go after the main keywords because they have the most search volume. While that is correct, and that certainly should be the long term goal, going after the main keywords right away is going to be difficult. This is because they are the keywords that have the most competition. Especially in a competitive niche like the legal industry.
Trying to rank for the main keywords is usually going to take a lot of effort and a significant amount of time to get there. The reason for this is:
1. Because of the competition mentioned earlier, and
2. Because Google is very selective of what it shows it’s users, so it’s not just going to show a new website for a main keyword with tons of traffic and risk all those people having a bad experience.
This second point is one almost no one considers, but it’s very important. What that essentially means is that you have to prove yourself to Google that you are providing a good experience to users and are giving them what they want, by doing so with the keywords that have a smaller search volume.
Over time, you will prove that you are providing quality content and can handle larger search volumes, and then you’ll start to rank for the main keywords.
This is where things like good conversion rates, time spent on the page, website loading times etc all come into play.
However, that’s all quite complex if you are just starting out. So here’s what I would recommend doing:
Start by making your main pages of your website as if you were targeting the main keywords. For example, “family law” or “conveyancing”.
Then, use your blogs to target the long tail keywords that relate to those pages, and link back to them from those blogs. What this will do is these blogs are likely to rank for those long tail keywords, and some of their relevance will be pushed to the main page. Over time this will make your main pages more relevant for that topic, and more likely to rank for the main keywords.
As you build up a big collection of blog posts targeting these long tail keywords, what will happen is not only will you get traffic and leads from these keywords through your blogs, but your website will become much more relevant for the main keywords and it’s likely to start ranking for them.