Broadest Keywords
Many articles have been written on the value of geo-targeted keywords – search phrases that combine a location with a service. These geo-targeted, long tail keywords like “Montana malpractice attorney” are traditionally what search engine marketers like me and my team pursue for our legal clients. They deliver highly targeted traffic that converts well. But two things sometimes occur that put the broadest keywords possible on my plate to target like “injury lawyer” or “adoption law“. I’d like to present two instances where the broadest keywords were brought to the table and offer them as a way to show how to help your firm succeed when considering these high volume targets.
- Long keywords based on a law firm’s small hometown don’t deliver much traffic. This is true for many small towns. Pascagoula Mississippi family lawyer may not turn up much traffic no matter what your rankings are. The tendency for these law firms may be to target generic keywords like “injury lawyer” in pursuit of pure traffic volume. For those law firms, I instead advise pursuing “General Practice”, geo-targeted keywords on their homepage like “Pascagoula lawyers” or “Pascagoula attorneys“. Sure, you should develop pages about your particular areas of practice and even include them on the homepage, but focus on your city name + lawyer or attorney as the first phrase in your TITLE tag and in your content headers (h1 and h2 tags). It’s also a good idea in this situation to develop content on the areas around your small hometown that may draw traffic.
- Some law firms truly have a multi-state or national practice. Disability attorney Eric Shore helps clients with their social security disability cases. His practice has three physical offices in NJ and PA, but they handle SSD and SSI cases in almost every city in the U.S. For that reason, his firm’s keyword focus is on keywords without a geo-qualifier… straight “disability lawyer”, “social security disability lawyer” and the like. These are a tremendous challenge. When supplied with a relatively new website, no matter how well constructed, a conventional SEO campaign will struggle to succeed at this level of keyword competition. For these firms, I first advise the same strategy as I would for any website: do your keyword research, present your areas of practice in detail and work to include good conversion mechanisms like contact forms on your site. Then, to build national rankings, a large amount of off-page content distribution like press releases, how to articles, blog posts and more should be on a national law firm’s “to do” SEO list. The primary difference between a nationally-focused website with rankings and one without is this level of off-page optimization.
For those who do succeed in getting rankings for high volume, broad keywords, there’s an advanced level of consideration: the tremendous difference in visitors who want to see “disability” purely for base information and those who want to see “disability” in relation to a legal claim. If you are going to target the broadest keywords and actually succeed in capturing one or more of those targets, make sure your site helps those visitors self-select their navigation through your site. In that way, you can also tailor your message to that audience within that special navigation path.
I hope this has helped clarify thinking around the value of a website’s broad vs. geo-targeted keyword targeting strategy. Before targeting this elite group of broad keywords, be prepared to come with lots of content on your site and off… and know what to do with that traffic when it arrives!
Written by jclayc on August 28th, 2009 with
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