photo courtesy BJN

When a person searches for “Kentucky fried chicken“, Google’s primary goal is to try to understand whether you’re in Kentucky looking for fried chicken or in New Jersey (like I am) looking for the local KFC. In a nutshell, that’s an example of how a searcher’s environment… their associations and place in the world give context to the search that’s taking place.

With that goal firmly in their sights, Google has helped move us from the world where rankings are driven by keyword density to one where context is king. They are looking for cues of what the searcher (you and I) is really looking for when they search for Kentucky fried chicken. Take that same kind of richness of context and apply it to the text itself on your website. It has become increasingly important to ensure your website’s copy not only addresses your visitors’ core search, but their motivations and environment as well. What do I mean? In a simple example, when a person is interested in immigration, they also are likely to have questions or ideas about becoming a citizen, the naturalization process, getting a green card… legally, work in the US, visas, worker status, help and more. For both your user and your search engine rankings, this sort of in-depth understanding of the words and concepts related to your topic is key as we move into 2010 and 2011.

Great, Clay. You’ve proven you’re a nerd and like tangents (like Google does???). How can you put this sort of Latent Semantic Analysis (“LSA”) to work for me? I’ve found LSA is great for rankings but, more practically, it’s great for giving you ideas on where to go with your web content development. If you can tap in to the relationships and concepts associated with your topic, it makes it much easier to produce interesting copy that’s useful to your visitors.

Here’s how you can put LSA to work for you using “motorcycle accidents” as an example. Search for the phrase and note the first web URL they return that has good content on the landing page. Take that URL, copy it, and visit the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Under “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” select the Website content radio button. Paste the URL into the input box and check the “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL” checkbox. Click to search and Google will go out and gather LSA ideas for you! The results returned include grouped keywords centered around concepts.

The first URL returned is http://accident-law.freeadvice.com/auto/motorcycle_accident_statistics.htm. Analysis shows related concepts like personal injury, motorcycle helmets, safety, learning to ride, head on crash, motor bike crashes, etc. Note those LSA keywords.

Move on to another top URL returned by Google: http://www.vtwinmama.com/accident_survivors.htm. Using the Google Keyword Tool on this URL, we get more keyword concepts like Harley Davidson, motorcycle safety, leather motorcycle jacket, motorcycle class and more. Each URL you research will return variants that are often useful. Of course, there is a lot of repetition of concepts like motorcycle accident attorneys and motorcycle safety but there are always gems in the results.

Thoughts?

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.

1. 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.

 

2. 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!

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.


Google’s keyword research results

• 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.


KeywordDiscovery

• 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.


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…

[tags]keyword research[/tags]