Any good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company will tell you that it is not possible to adequately optimize your site for every possible keyword that someone may type into a search engine to find your law firm.  However, a good company will help you choose the most effective keywords and focus your optimization around that.  While law firm internet marketing may not be an exact science, it sure does help to have a good place to start!

Just to give you an idea: Let’s say you are a Dallas personal injury attorney.  Some of the initial, basic words that come to mind are Dallas personal injury attorney,  Dallas personal injury attorneys, Dallas personal injury lawyer, Dallas personal injury lawyer, Dallas personal injury law firm, Dallas personal injury law firms, Dallas personal injury lawsuit, lawsuits, Dallas injury attorney, Dallas injury lawyer, Dallas injury law firm, etc.  And all of those words don’t even include the specific areas you want to focus on, such as medical malpractice or birth traumas.  You add in all of those and you can come up with thousands.

But, the search engines only read about the first 10 meta keywords per page (roughly 3 – 4 keyword phrases).  So, “Dallas personal injury lawyer” counts as words; thus, you can see how quickly those 10 words can go!  So, it is important to focus on words that are likely to result in business for you.  For example, yes, it is great to come up under your firm name; however, why waste keywords on that?  If someone already knows your firm name, they are going to call you anyway (and it is likely you come up under your firm name without optimizing specifically for it because your firm name is mentioned so many times on the site).

So, when we research words for our clients, we take into account keyword history (based on our clients past results), niche practice focus (focus on car accidents instead of general PI if that is your focus), geographic location (if your office is in a small town and you wouldn’t be willing to drive 5 hours to a bigger city, why waste words with that city name), area of the country (in some parts of the country “attorney” is searched for more than “lawyer”), and more.  All of these things are going to help you choose the right words.  Because of this, we recommend going with an SEO company that has a lot of experience with law firm marketing; otherwise, it is going to be a lot of trial and error.