Small Law Firms

Keyword Clustering And Law Firm Marketing

When utilized efficiently, keyword clustering can prompt many benefits for your law firm.

By ANNETTE CHOTI  
on

apps-ga1d3c25ac_1920The legal industry is an incredibly competitive market. If you want your web pages to rank high on Google, you need to consider all aspects of your digital marketing strategy, including keywords. Keyword clustering is a popular strategy to consider if you want to boost rankings and overall website visibility.

Keyword Clusters: The Basics

Keyword clustering involves grouping keywords your clients are likely to search when seeking legal guidance or representation. Your keyword clusters can incorporate short-tail, long-tail, geo-targeting, and latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords.

Developing quality content often takes a significant amount of time, effort, and money. With keyword clustering, you may be able to simplify the process while improving your website’s visibility, rankings, and traffic.

The Process of Creating Keyword Clusters
Keyword clustering is the process of grouping like search terms together. The process can seem intimidating at first, but as with any other keyword strategy, you start with research. After you have a list of potential keywords that group well together, you can determine how you want to use them in your content.

Keyword Research
When researching your keywords, there are a number of factors you want to keep in mind, including query intent, competition use, keyword difficulty, and volume. When you choose the best keywords for your potential clients, you can incorporate those phrases and words into your content to show Google that you have the answers those searchers are looking for. Whether you have researched keywords before or this is your first time, you will want to consider using a keyword tool or planner. Some of the most popular include the following:

  • Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
  • Google Ads Keyword Planner
  • SEMrush
  • Google Trends
  • Google Suggest

Depending on the type of date you are hoping to collect, you may only need one research tool to find all of your answers. However, note that it may be beneficial to use multiple tools to gather as much information as possible before deciding on specific keyword clusters.

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Additionally, remember that keyword research does not only come from online tools and databases. There are other ways to can develop keyword clusters. You may consider evaluating your competitors’ keywords, analyzing autocomplete suggestions to queries that potential clients are likely to ask, or brainstorming your own ideas based on what you know about the legal industry, client retention, and your specific legal niche.

Clustering Keywords
After compelling a comprehensive keyword list, you can start grouping them. There are a number of different clustering strategies to consider; however, you can get started by simply looking for patterns between phrases, like similar word usage. After you have made a basic comparison, you can look at more specific criteria like semantic relevance, search volume, and organic difficulty.

In terms of semantic relevance, you want to consider searcher intent when grouping keywords. If you use a keyword cluster with words that are not closely related enough, it is unlikely you will see SEO improvements. For search volume, you want to make sure the words you choose for your clusters have a reasonable search volume. If you include terms that are rarely queried, the cluster is less likely to be effective. Finally, you want to include keywords of varying organic difficulty. Whether you choose mostly easier or harder keywords depends on your website’s authority and your backlinking strategy.

How to Optimize Keyword Cluster Usage
After clustering your keywords, it is time to consider how you plan to incorporate them into your website’s content. To start, you should focus primarily on your specific practice area pages, as well as blogs.

Practice Area Pages
If you are working with multiple clusters, pull out the ones that most focus on your primary practice areas. Whether you are revising content or creating new pages, you want to consider page experience, the structure of your content, and how in-depth you want to go with your content.

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Blog Content
You can supplement your practice area pages with blog content that includes those same primary keyword clusters. When doing so, remember to internally link your blogs to those practice area pages to give readers a clear path to more information.

Improving Law Firm SEO With Keyword Clustering
Keyword clustering has the potential to improve your law firm website’s overall SEO and performance. When implemented successfully, keyword clustering can have the following positive effects:

    • Improved Rankings. Remember that most users will not leave the first page of their Google search results page when searching for answers. When you use keyword clustering, you can boost rankings for specific queries that will help potential clients find you faster.
    • More Organic Traffic. When you rank high for certain keywords or queries, you are likely to receive more organic website traffic. If you see your organic traffic rates climbing after implementing keyword clusters, you can safely assume that the strategy is working for your law firm.
    • Improved PPC Campaigns. When you incorporate your keyword clusterings into your PPC campaigns on Google or social media, you can potentially strengthen the connection between your ads and website content.
    • Faster Content Planning. Content planning often requires a significant amount of time. Not only do you need to choose your topics carefully, but you also need to craft the content in an SEO-friendly manner. When you have keyword clusters to work from, you can reduce the time it takes to plan your content.
    • Establish thought leadership. Thought leadership is conveyed by demonstrating your level of skill or expertise in a particular area of law. As keyword clustering boosts your rankings and website traffic, your website will gain more authority, and potential clients will form trusting relationships with you faster.

Digital Marketing: Next Steps
When utilized efficiently, keyword clustering can prompt many benefits for your law firm. While it can take practice and a bit of trial and error to find a grouping strategy that works for your website, the time and effort spent will pay off in the end, resulting in a stronger online presence and increased website traffic.

Annette Choti, Esq. graduated from law school 20 years ago, and is the Founder of Law Quill, a legal digital marketing agency focused on small and solo law firms. Annette wrote the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide For Law Firms, and hosts the podcast Legal Marketing Lounge. She is a sought-after keynote and CLE speaker throughout the United States and Canada. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or at annette@lawquill.com.

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