Legal Keyword Research
Ever since the Overture keyword tool went offline, everyone I know in the SEO industry has the same question, “What are you doing about keyword research?” It’s a good question. For all the faults of the Overture tool, it was a quick and easy way to get actual, monthly search occurrence numbers. Now that it’s gone, what’s the average lawyer to do to find good legal keyword research? This isn’t about suggestions for keywords - we’re looking for quantified, actionable search numbers.
The bad news: no matter what tool you use, there are problems. I’ll mention those in my summaries below.
- Google Keyword Suggestion Tool - the best place to start your information collection. Enter a keyword and it will show you the competitiveness and search volume for that and related keywords. The “problem”? Keyword research returns non-quantified comparisons: the equivalent of a bar chart with no numbers.
- Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery Tool offers a free trial but, ultimately, you’ll need to pay around $50/month for full access to their service. Once you’re a member, there are a number of keyword databases they have available for researching your topic. The Global Premium and Historical datasets are the most useful, but there is often search “noise” (bad or spammy results, obviously outside a normal searcher’s use) and I seriously question the cited period for their results. Meaning: their Global Premium database will tell you there were 25 searches for “baltimore attorney” in 2007. To me, this nullifies the advantage of this service having quantified results. I do find the historical database has good comparative results.
- SEOBook.com’s Keyword Tool (based on WordTracker) - this site was formerly based upon Overture data. Now, they’ve developed a relationship with WordTracker to take their data, apply search engine user volume to it and deliver a daily count of searches for a given keyword and related terms. Overall, this is a very good FREE keyword research tool that lawyers and non-lawyers alike will find useful. The numbers appear to be (roughly) accurate. There is often search “noise” returned with relevant results, but a discriminating eye can easily spot and ignore these.
- DigitalPoint’s Keyword Research Tool has always been a good place to check but the data returned is not comprehensive. The site says it uses/used Overture and WordTracker data, but a search for “baltimore attorney” shows no results.
- Wordze.com is new on my radar. You must pay for membership but, once inside, they offer a comprehensive set of tools. The Keyword Research Tool doesn’t do much to offer related keywords, but the quantified search count numbers appear to be accurate, citing over 600 searches for “baltimore attorneys” in a 30 day period.
Google’s keyword research results
KeywordDiscovery
Wordze’s keyword research interface
Thank you to the article at SEO Round Table for the motivation to put together this comparison. Anyone with any other suggestions? I know I’ve GOT to be missing something…
Technorati Tags: keyword research
whew… …soo many tools not enough time to play with them all. Ranksense and KeyWordSpy are new to the market, I am still wanting to test. also, I am looking over in-depth industry search data from Hitwise & compete.com
but spyfu kinda crosses into this arena as well, making them even more useful
i think they could have done something with the overture tool, it would be a complete waste of online real estate to just drop it.
by adding some speed to it and basic features, they could have capitalized on the thousands of people who use it daily
i used if for years and wouldnt mind seeing an ad or two there if the freaking thing didnt take a month to load and then three months to render results. and i estimate it only worked a third of the time i used it anyway.