How to Use Keywords Effectively on Your Law Firm Website

Keywords are the crucial link between what people are searching for and the content you provide to meet their needs. Essentially, correct keyword use means more visibility.

Keywords, key phrases, or key terms refer to the words people use when searching for information on a search engine. You want to use keywords on your website relevant to what people are searching for, giving them a better chance of finding your content among their search results.

For example, someone searching for a divorce attorney in New York with experience in high-net-worth divorces would likely use some combination of the following as keywords:

• New York divorce attorney
• High net-worth divorce attorney New York
• New York high-net-worth divorce 

If you are a high-net-worth divorce attorney in the New York area, you want your website to land at or near the top of their search engine results. Accomplishing this often involves a lot of search engine optimization (SEO), but for writing purposes, it involves using these keywords. Using the keywords, your potential clients use in their searches within your website copy will help you rank higher in their search results. 

Effective Keyword Practices

You know you need to use keywords to attract the right audience to your website, but do you know how to use keywords effectively? Familiarity with good keyword practices is necessary; otherwise, your keywords might not matter at all. Consider the following effective keyword practices:

One Keyword Per Page

Try focusing on only one keyword per page, as this will demonstrate your page’s relevance to search engines. Using too many keywords can confuse the search engine and your reader as to what your page might be about. However, feel free to use variations of the same keyword. For example, if your keyword is “New York divorce attorney,” you could also use “divorce attorney in NY” or “New York divorce lawyer.”

Write Naturally

Use your keywords naturally; remember you are writing for humans, not search bots. Unnatural keyword placement or those that don’t sound grammatically correct will rank lower in search engine results. 

Along the same lines, don’t keyword stuff or overload your page with your keywords. While this used to be standard practice for SEO, search engine algorithms have long changed. Keyword stuffing will hinder your SEO efforts and won’t look good to readers.

Provide Helpful, Honest Information

If someone is looking for an attorney or legal advice, they don’t want misinformation or fluff. So no matter what keywords you use or how you use them, be sure you are only providing helpful, honest information to your audience. This type of information ranks and looks better to your audience. 

Be Mindful of Keyword Competition

You should also be mindful of the competitive nature of some keywords. Generic keywords like “personal injury lawyer Denver” are more challenging to rank for than more specific keywords like “Grand Junction motorcycle wreck lawyer.” It’s a good rule of thumb to be as specific as possible with your keywords, as this decreases your competition and helps those who need you find you more easily. For instance, suppose you are writing a blog about high-net-worth divorce in New York. In that case, you might want to use the keywords “New York high-net-worth divorce lawyer” and not simply “New York divorce lawyer.”

Use SEO Tools

Finally, utilize various online SEO tools to ensure you are incorporating the right keywords into your copy with the optimal keyword density and to determine other valuable SEO data. Plugins such as Yoast SEO and others can be used to cross-check your SEO work and help you use your words effectively. Other tools can help you decide which keywords to use for your pages based on recent search engine queries for your location and legal practice niche.