Justia Article: SEO Basics for Lawyers: Keyword Research

Search engine optimization helps lawyers strengthen their digital marketing strategy by focusing on visibility in Google Search results and other search engine results too! Check out this post to learn more about basic law firm keyword research for SEO beginners.

Effectively optimizing your law firm website for Google and other search engines helps your practice grow by connecting with clients looking for legal information and representation online. However, a sound SEO (search engine optimization) strategy is more than just a one-time effort of putting together a website with basic optimization techniques.

Instead, effective SEO strategies consist of many building blocks working together to create a robust plan for improving visibility in search engine results. Just as a car requires ongoing inspections and maintenance, SEO is also a continuous process of revisiting these building blocks to ensure they remain aligned with the best practices required to succeed in the face of continuously changing search engine algorithms.

Related Post: Optimizing Your Law Firm Website Practice Area Page for Google

If you are new to SEO, this can seem like an overwhelming process. However, there are resources available to help guide you! In this post, we are helping demystify some SEO basics of keyword research for lawyers and law firms.

A Short Intro to Search Engines & SEO

Man Typing on The Keyboard

Not too long ago, information was not readily available at our fingertips. People had to go to libraries for research. Home computers, much less home internet, were not commonplace. However, in the past 25 or so years, that has all changed.

Now, “googling it” has become common, and 85% of American adults have a smartphone. As such, the idea of a search engine no longer requires in-depth explanation, and you are undoubtedly familiar with utilizing Google, Bing, or another search engine to locate information.

However, are you familiar with how search engines determine what information to display in your search results? In short, Google and other search engines utilize a process of crawling, indexing, and ranking to evaluate all of the content online and determine which results are relevant to searchers for each query. This is a highly complex technical process.

Related Post: The Basics of Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

Put very simply, crawlers are bots navigating online information and collecting data to be indexed by search engines. You want these bots to crawl your website.

Indexing is, in essence, a categorization process. At this stage of the process, Google (and other search engines) analyze the information gathered by the bots to better understand a website’s content and sort it accordingly.

After the crawling and indexing process, search engines rank webpages by evaluating and weighing numerous pieces of data. The search engines’ goal in this process is to ultimately serve unique, relevant content on the search engine results pages in response to user search queries.

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