When trying to rank any legal sector business’s website on Google, at the core of the SEO that will be required to improve those rankings are keywords. Whether they are a single word, have two words, or are a long-tail keyword of several words, it is for these keywords that almost all your SEO efforts will be trying to rank the pages of your legal website for.
To explain why that is the case, it will help if we look briefly at how Google operates. Someone arrives on Google and types a search term. Let us use the example of “divorce lawyers in Perth, WA”. In an instant, Google will display several pages of results, called Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs.
What Google strives for with the SERPs they generate is that the web pages on the first page of results are those most likely to be what the person searching is looking for. In this case, it is websites of divorce lawyers located in Perth, Western Australia. The way the owners of those websites convince Google to place them on that first page is SEO.
What SEO will do is optimise website pages so that they are seen as the most relevant and authoritative for specific keywords. The task that often defeats legal website owners is establishing which keywords they should and can rank for on that coveted first page of Google. It is this keyword discovery process that we are about to explain in three simple steps.
Before we do so, we must highlight that effective keyword research requires tools. We are not going to endorse a specific one here, but if you search for “keyword tools” or “keyword research tools” on Google, you will see several that are recommended repeatedly by SEO experts. Trying to do all of this manually will take significantly longer without these tools, and you will struggle to acquire much of the data you need for effective keyword research.