Keyword Research for SEO & PPC

We offer a comprehensive keyword research report offering to serve as a first step in any search engine optimization or pay-per-click search marketing campaign. Quality keyword research is absolutely essential, lest you spend large amounts of time and money effectively targeting all the wrong keywords.

Keyword Research is a step that is skipped over or given very little attention by many fly-by-night firms. Why is it so important? Its important because proper research helps you identify which terms to target.

Lets say you are a law firm embarking upon a new search engine optimization campaign. What terms should you tell your SEO firm you wish to rank for? You might say:

* lawyers
* law firms
* attorneys

Fair enough. BUT there are two major issues with those phrases:

1. there is a ton of competition
2. they won’t convert very well

Issue 1 (above) means that every law firm in the world wants to have their legal website ranked #1 for those terms. More competition means it will take longer and cost more to get ranked well.

Issue 2 (above) is perhaps even more important. While it will cost a fortune and take a long while, once you are able to achieve those rankings you might not notice anything different on your bottom line. If your firm only represents residents in Maryland or corporations in the greater DC area than someone searching for “attorneys” in California won’t be likely to retain your services. You’ve just spent a ton of time and money targeting terms where less than 5% of the users are even in your target market.

Let’s refine a bit more, shall we?

* maryland lawyers
* baltimore attorneys
* california law firms
* medical malpractice law firms
* real estate attorneys

Now we’re starting to get somewhere. We’ve qualified the visitors alot more. We now know in the first three cases immediately above that the prospect is in our geographical region. Even if your firm is national, this geographic targeting of search engine traffic still makes a big difference. You are much more likely to convert traffic in the regions where you have an office or some physical presence. Someone in Idaho has no interest in flying several hours to meet an attorney they might be interested in retaining.

The last two cases (bulleted list above) switch from regional to practice area targeting. Now – while we no longer know the prospect is in our geographic region – we do know they are interested in medical malpractice representation of some sort. If your firm does only taxation law than why target “medical malpractice law firms” or even just “attorneys” when the chances are very small that you’ll even reach your target market?

Let’s take one last shot:

* real estate attorneys in maryland
* medical malpractice lawyers in virginia
* tax attorney in miami, florida

The above search phrase or keyword phrase combinations are sometimes referred to as practice + location targeting. Essentially the formula is:

(your practice area) + (your city and/or state) + attorney/lawyer

We don’t quite believe in such as hard-lined approach, but generally speaking we do believe that effective keyword research and keyword targeting will steer in such a direction.

In general, the more targeted and specific your keywords (really should be called keyword phrases), the better the chances they’ll produce visitors who actually buy or become clients. The more generic your keywords, the less the chance they’ll help your bottom line. The tough part is balancing this desire to have ultra-targeted keyword phrases with the need to generate an acceptable sheer volume. Effective keyword research helps you do that.