Lots of people are talking about virtual law offices these days.  Bar publications, CLE courses, blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn are full of articles jammed with technical terms like cloud computing, software as a service (SAAS), and data encryption.  Read much of this stuff, and you get the impression that all you need to profit online is a secure client portal.

I am a big fan of technology (I would say “geek,” but everyone who can turn on a computer and install WordPress calls themselves that these days).  I believe that the internet age has permanently changed the way law is practiced.  The decomposition of the traditional value chain in legal services, coupled with disintermediation of the supply chain, has created all sorts of new ways for attorneys (and non-attorneys) to add value.  But it is a mistake to focus on the technology itself as the value add. 

When I was first thinking of adding a virtual component to my law firm, I reviewed all of the blog posts on one of the more popular virtual law office platforms.  The blog had a post for each firm that signed up for the platform (these blog posts appear to have been removed in mid-2011).  When I went back to review the websites of each of these hopeful new virtual law firms, a surprising number had gone out of business.  That tells me that not enough attorneys are looking before they leap.  So, at the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to offer a few humble suggestions for those who are considering virtual law practice.

Your Virtual Law Office Will Not Succeed if You Don’t Drive Traffic to Your Website

The simple but often-overlooked truth is that your virtual law office will not succeed if you do not drive traffic to your website.  Period.  Virtual law office technology will help you communicate securely with your clients.  It may even come with a basic website.  But neither of these things will get you clients.  If you want to attract new clients over the internet, you need to be visible in search and convert viewers into customers.

Richard Granat is (along with Stephanie Kimbro) one of the top thought leaders in this field.  Here’s a quote from his excellent white paper on virtual law office success factors:

If [your law firm website] is not findable in the search engines you don’t generate prospects or leads, and without prospects you can’t get conversions to sales or clients, and therefore no new revenues. Many law firm [websites] are poorly designed and don’t contain the elements that will make them findable. They are not incorporating the correct keywords on the pages of the site are the site is not sufficiently focused to get search engine recognition … Don’t even think about adding a virtual law firm component until you fix your front-end web site.

I would add that being “findable in the search engines” is not enough.  The web is littered with well-written, aesthetically pleasing sites that the search engines can find and index. But because potential clients can’t find them, they provide little benefit to the law firm.  They are like stunning billboards in the desert.  No one sees them.  Many attorneys have websites; few have websites that generate business.

Attorney Rania Combs is one attorney who is doing this right.  Her law firm is completely web-based and her site ranks well for keywords related to her practice.  Although she practices Texas law, she lives in North Carolina.  In an interview with the Texas bar, she gave this for advice to attorneys who want to introduce a virtual element into their practice:

You’re going to have to find a way to drive clients to your website. Just like building a traditional brick-and-mortar firm, building a web-based law firm takes time, patience, and hard work. It won’t happen overnight.

If you are thinking of a virtual or mixed practice, don’t add the virtual component until your website has proven that it will generate leads.  Instead, start a blog that focuses on your ideal client’s needs. Do-some-keyword-research.  Write content that people will read. Build a few links.  Get those leads coming in. Ensure the demand before you create the supply.

Your Virtual Law Office Will Not Succeed if You Aren’t Meeting the Needs of Your Target Market

I believe that many virtual law firms fail because attorneys are too focused on themselves instead of their clients.  The virtual law office model does have some client benefits (such as being able to handle legal matters without the hassle of appointments), but that isn’t what lures most attorneys.  Most people who launch a virtual firm are thinking more about their own convenience.

In my practice, I used technology to supplement—but not to replace—my traditional, bricks-and-mortar office.  When a client needed a face-to-face meeting, they got it.

Attorney Jay Fleishman uses a similar model for his New York bankruptcy practice.  In a controversial post, he questions the viability of the virtual law office model:

Those who offer the virtual law firm are selling something most people don’t want.  People want to be able to make a personal connection with other people, to build trust in a lawyer’s expertise.  They don’t want to be met with a password-encrypted firewall and triple-redundant backup systems.

I’m sure that Fleischman is intentionally overstating his case (Fleishman is a sharp marketer who understands that controversial posts can be great linkbait).  If there wasn’t a demand, people like Rania Combs and Stephanie Kimbro wouldn’t be able to support a virtual practice.  Nor would bigger players like Rimon Law.  But his basic point is well-taken.  Any attorney who is considering a virtual law office should take a clear-eyed look at the demand for his services.

In other words, forget about working in your jammy jams.  Focus on your client’s needs instead of your convenience.  These two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but they often are.  If you are an elder law attorney serving mostly octogenarians, don’t expect them to be wild about your new secure client portal.  They are from a generation that needs expects face-to-face contact.  You need to either give it to them or switch to a different practice area.

What do you think?  Is the virtual law firm a viable business model?  Speak your mind in the comments below.

Before I critique his post, let me say that I think that Kevin is a sharp guy. He has done a lot to help attorneys use the internet to bring in business and has been one of the more prominent voices in the discussion about internet strategy and social media for attorneys.  I’d recommend following him on Twitter or subscribing to his RSS if you don’t already.

But in this post, Kevin misses the mark.  He begins by noting that he has seen a “flurry of blog posts and articles” about how to use law firm websites to bring in business.  Although he decided to share some of those articles with his network (out of a sense of noblesse oblige to the misguided but “good folks” that wrote the articles), he contends that “websites are not where good [my emphasis] lawyers and law firms get their work.”

That sort of condescension colors the entire post.  People who rely on website marketing are “too lazy to build relationships” and “don’t believe [that they] can create [a] positive word of mouth reputation.”  They are likened to the kind of people who advertise on “signs at airports, billboards on the sides of busses [sic], and late night television.”  They “foolishly” believe that their firm website is “a measure of relationship building and reputation enhancement.”  They are “looking for an easy way out.”

Kevin believes that the internet simply provides more efficient way to do the sorts of things that attorneys have traditionally done offline:  “Lawyers and law firms get their work via relationships and word of mouth. Period.”  But is that always true?

A Case Study

I could point out a number of examples from my own experience that shows that good attorneys can do very well with a law firm website.  But let me use a firm that I have had nothing to do with (and which also has a blog on the LexBlog network).

The law firm of Clark Skatoff is one of the more visible Florida probate law firms on the internet.  They currently rank number 2 for “Florida probate attorney” (just behind an exact match domain) and number 3 for “Florida probate lawyer.”  Their website is pretty much a static site of the kind that Kevin denigrates.  It was developed by PaperStreet, which I consider to be one of the better design companies in our industry. Here’s what the firm had to say about their website:

We are getting 3 to 6 new web inquiries per day and are signing up about one new client per day. We have to turn away business because we are so busy. Rankings look pretty good in Google. Good enough so that when the Nancy Grace show on CNN was looking for a Florida commentator on the Anna Nicole Smith case, they Googled Florida probate lawyer and found me. I have been on air the last several nights. It never would have happened without your [PaperStreet’s] help.

How did they get those results?  Not with a blog, but with a static website that is optimized to rank well in search.  Although (as I mentioned) the firm now has a sporadically-updated blog on the LexBlog network, that review was written before Clark Skatoff started the blog (the earliest blog post is from 2010 and Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007).  If the firm had to choose between giving up the blog or giving up the website, which do you think they would choose?

The Truth About the Website vs. Blog Debate

So which is better: a law firm website or a law firm blog?  The answer, unsatisfying though it may be, is “it depends.”  More specifically, it depends on the nature of the practice and the time and money that the firm has to invest.

The truth is that word of mouth and reputation are not as important for some practice areas as they are for others.  If you want to build an employment law practice, for example, most of your work will come from relationships you build with HR departments and businesses in your state.  This type of client doesn’t usually do a Google search and call the firm that shows up at the top of the search results.  For this type of practice, attorneys should focus their energies on all of the things that Kevin advocates (networking, relationship building, thought leadership, etc.).

But not all practices are like this.  The person who is looking for a DUI, bankruptcy, or divorce lawyer may not be interested in a long-term relationship and probably doesn’t care whether their local attorney is a thought leader. He just wants to know that the attorney understands and can solve his problem.

Consumer-oriented practices of this nature can do very well with a website, as long as it (a) shows prospective clients that the firm can solve their problem and (b) is visible to those prospective clients in search.  Of course, not many websites do this (which is probably why Kevin has a low view of them).  Too many law firm websites focus too much on aesthetics without regard to quality content and search visibility.  Law firms are so jaded with all of the bad SEO advice out there that they think that it’s all snake oil. So they slap up a quick brochure website that doesn’t produce results.  But, as the above example proves, this failure doesn’t mean that there isn’t opportunity.

Could a blog help the consumer-oriented law practice?  Absolutely.  I would even go so far as to say that most solos and small firms should have a blog … if the attorneys have the time to do all of the work that is required to make a blog work.  This point is sometimes glossed over by the blogging advocates.  The blogosphere is awfully noisy these days.  It is becoming harder and harder to be heard. Just having a blog — even a frequently-updated blog with great content — isn’t the panacea it may have been 5 years ago.  To reach your goals, your blogging should be combined with commenting, content curation, and social media strategy.

In other words, there is no “turn key solution” for law blogs.  Blogging can be a real time drain.  And (unlike SEO), blogging is not easily outsourced.  The attorney needs to be prepared to put in hours of work per week (I spend about 6 to 10 hours per week on this blog).  And even if the attorney does all this work, the attorney may still find that the blog just doesn’t work due to market conditions.  At the end of the day, the blog may underperform a search-optimized website.  Both a firm website and a blog would be best, but in some cases the website may be the better choice if the attorney had to choose only one.

And let’s not forget that the line between blogs and websites is blurring every year.  As search engines give increasing attention to fresh content and social signals, I believe that the blog-website distinction will no longer be relevant in several years.  To use Hugo Guzman’s line, eventually all marketing will be interactive marketing. The question shouldn’t be, “do I focus on a blog or on a website?”, but “how can I best show my clients that I can meet their needs?”  Interactivity is simply one way to add value to prospective clients.

You can increase your chances of success by understanding what motivates the type of person you are targeting.  Like all communication, your link-building outreach should be directed to a specific audience. Knowing your audience will help you in all phases of link-building:

• When you are creating content designed to attract links (linkbait), you need to have a feel for whether there is an audience that will link to the content.
• When you are ready to promote your content, you need to craft your messages to appeal to a specific type of person that may link to the content.
• If you are using a guest posting strategy, you need to know what types of people are most likely to post on their blogs.

Do not start your link-building campaign without a clearly-defined audience in mind.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking of the link-building market as “websites that link to content.”  Websites don’t link to content; people do.  Your goal is to identify the shared characteristics of people that are most likely to link to or share your content.

Using Personas to Identify Your Audience

I wrote about personas in my article on how to write content that people will read.  These fictional characters can be helpful in link-building as well.  A persona gives you a mental representative of your audience that you can focus on as you think about link-building.  In the link-building arena, focus on identifying two key personas:

1. The Sharer – This is the person who is well-connected in social media (large follower lists, friends, etc., coupled with frequent updates) and who shares other people’s content regularly.
2. The Linker – This is the person with a quality site who generously links to the content of others if it is relevant to his or her audience.

You will often find that one person wears both of these hats (i.e., many people who are sharers are also linkers, and vice versa).  But this is not always the case, and you shouldn’t focus on one type of person to the exclusion of the other.  Both are necessary for a well-rounded link-building strategy.

Here are a few techniques I use to create personas for link-building:

Using Google Reader to Develop a Persona

1. In your Google Reader account, click on the Subscribe button.  You will get a prompt that allows you to enter a search term to find feeds related to your topic.
2. Browse the first 3 to 5 pages of the search results and pick the top 5 blogs in terms of subscribers (the subscriber account will be displayed in the column to the left).
3. Visit each of these top 5 blogs and identify any similarities between them.  Are their blog categories similar?  Is their writing style informal or formal?  Are they graphic or text based? What common interests do they share?

Using Follower Wonk to Develop a Persona

1. Browse to www.followerwonk.com.  In the main screen, click on the button to search Twitter bios.  Enter your search term, and click “Do It!”
2. You will get a list of Twitter users, along with some valuable metrics about them.  By default, the information will be sorted by follower.  Don’t change it.
3. Take a look at the Twitter bios of a handful of the most popular users.  Use the same analysis as above to see if you can develop a list of characteristics about these users.

Using Tag Cloud to Broaden Search

1. Go back to your search results from www.followerwonk.com.  Copy the URL from the address bar.
2. Browse to www.tagcloud.com.  Under “Choose your text source,” select the “Web Page URL” option.
3. Paste the followerwonk.com URL that you copied in step 1 into the Web Page URL field and click “Visualize.”  This will give you a visual representation of the other topics that interest your personas.
4. Use the results to help develop your list of characteristics.

Characterize Your Audience

After going through this process, you should have a fuzzy mental picture of the type of person you are targeting.  Now it’s time to bring that picture into focus.  You need to create a bullet-point list to help you identify what motivates the personas you are targeting.  Think about questions like these:

• What common interests are shared among your audience?
• Do members of your audience share a common enemy?
• What has motivated them to provide links or share content in the past?
• What can you offer them that will be of sufficient value to prompt a link or a share?

Information like this will help you target your content to the audience and drastically increase your likelihood of landing the link.

Write it Down!

You should now have a clear mental picture of the type of person you are targeting.  Unless you have the memory of Ron White, this picture will quickly fade. Do yourself a favor and jot down a detailed description of your personas.  Any time you find your campaign losing focus, take a look at your notes to get back on track.

This third party involvement is the cornerstone of the search engines’ philosophy that links are an indicator of the value or usefulness of content. Because of this, links are still the primary factor that influences search engine rankings.  Although the search engines’ list of ranking factors is ever expanding, quality links to your website will affect your rankings more than any other ranking factor.

In Google’s ideal world, these third party links would occur naturally.  A person would link to your site for no other reason than that he found your content useful.  Any other reason would damage the underlying assumption that links are a good indicator of value.  Because of this, Google would have you focus solely on building useful content and wait for the links to come pouring in.

But the real world doesn’t work like that. In spite of what so many sycophantic internet marketers are saying today, good content is necessary but not sufficient.  Too many well-designed, useful websites are sitting out there without any traffic.  You need to help your content along.  When it comes to promoting your site content, you have two choices:

1. You can be proactive in acquiring links to your content and watch it move up in the search results; or
2. You can sit idly by and watch your competitors trump you in the search results.

In other words, most law firm need to take a proactive approach to link-building.

But here’s the problem:  Where do you get these links?

Most internet marketers are very protective of their link sources. This isn’t just a matter of selfishness. If each of these link sources were publicly known, they would be flooded with link requests and quickly lose their value.

I’ve decided on a compromise. Instead of baring everything on my blog (and risking devaluation of the links), I’m going to share one valuable link resource per month to my newsletter subscribers.  My plan is to publish one link per month, beginning on the first month that a person becomes a subscriber and ending on the one-year anniversary of the subscription.

Big Caveat: I can’t guarantee what the future will hold. I want to make sure that these resources are not devalued.  I’m going to monitor this program over time.  If I see that it is harming the link sources, I will stop it.  But for the time being, you can sign up for my newsletter to start receiving free link placement resources every month.

The Link O’ the Month will only be sent to people who subscribe to my newsletter.  Because my blog is visible to the public, people who subscribe to the blog alone (whether via RSS or e-mail) will not receive the Link O’ the Month.  To be sure to receive links, be sure to use this link to subscribe to my newsletter.

• A linking community—a group of webmasters or social media users that will link to or share your content.
• Enough potential clients in your geographic area that are using search to locate an attorney and basing purchasing decisions on what they find.

I already wrote about how to find out whether there is a linking community for your law firm blog.  This post will focus on the second ingredient:  How to tell whether there are potential clients searching for your legal services on the internet.

Note:  Based on the questions you are most-often asked, you should know your clients’ needs.  If you develop your content around their needs, chances are that someone is looking for it.  Even if this person is not likely to purchase based solely on the blog (as is the case with more specialized legal services), the blog will at least incline them in that direction.  Your task is to determine how many people are looking so that you can evaluate whether the blog will be worth your efforts.

Determine the Search Volume for Your Keywords

Your first step in evaluating your potential audience is to research the search volume for the terms that your potential clients would use to search for your blog.  I just finished a series on how to do just that, so I won’t repeat myself here.  If you missed that, you should take a look before moving on.

When researching search volume, keep in mind that much depends on whether your practice is location-specific.  For example, a divorce attorney in Toledo needs to know how many people in Toledo (or the surrounding areas) are using the internet to search for a divorce attorney.  A patent attorney, on the other hand, has a much broader reach since his practice is based on federal law and therefore is not tied to a geographic location.

Also note that your audience of potential clients may have a different scope from your linking audience.  A Toledo divorce attorney may be able to attract links from across Ohio or even nationally. But her clients will come from the Toledo area—a much smaller market than her linking audience.

Using Google Insights for Audience Research

Google Insights is a great (and free) tool that can give you insight (yep) into your audience.  Specifically, Google Insights can provide you with the following information:

• Topics that your audience may interest your audience;
• Recent news that may affect your audience; and
• Ideas to help guide your blogging content.

Google Insights can be particularly useful if your initial research indicates that there is a low volume of searches relating to your topic.  But using the information you get from Google Insights, you can better position your blog to get broader exposure.

To get started, go to Google Insights and enter your search terms in the search box. Use a general search term for the first box.

Before you click search, adjust the options to the right of the search box to hone in on your state.  Someone thinking of blogging on Ohio divorce law might choose “United States” and “Ohio” to focus on that geographic area.

Click “Search” and take a look at the data.  At the time that I did this search, I could tell within a few minutes that:

• Since 2005, there has been a general downward trend in the number of Ohioans looking for information on divorce law.
• Most Ohioans who are looking for that information are in Columbus and Cleveland.
• Most of them are using the word “Ohio” in their search queries (instead of a more general term like “divorce law”).

Insights like these let you know what people in what geographic areas are looking for what information.  A healthy search volume in your geographic area may indicate that there are enough people in that area to justify the effort required to create a blog.  A weak interest may tell you to shift to a different topic or focus on other efforts.

Note:  Keep in mind that our purpose in doing research of this nature is to make informed decisions regarding our marketing efforts.  If your research indicates that a law blog may not be a good marketing strategy, you may want to focus your energy on more productive marketing techniques, such as local search.  Or, if you are really passionate about the topic, you may decide to blog for the joy of it, with an understanding that you may not hit a home run in the search engines.  Either way, you will have made an informed decision.

In response to her question, the attorney was advised to be careful not to give away too much.  Instead, she was urged to “whet the appetite but not feed.” The focus should not be on “how to,” but on “what you need and why you need it.”  In other words, the attorney was told to bait her visitors by offering enough information to convince them that the attorneys’ services were needed, then push for the consultation.

Let me show you why this sort of thinking is bass-ackwards.

Apparently there are still a few folks who haven’t noticed that the internet has forever changed our economy.  The primary way that it has done this is by removing barriers to the creation and dissemination of information.  Because of the internet, anyone with access to the internet can find information in 10 minutes that may have taken months only a decade ago.  Obscurantist business models are (thankfully) quickly deteriorating.

Law firms are not insulated from the changes in the economy and the competitive landscape.  There are more opportunities now than ever before, but people who cling to outdated paradigms are already behind the curve.  The winners in this new economy will be firms that can recognize and adapt to change.

If that sounds a little abstract or futuristic, let’s bring it down to a practical level with a few questions:

What is the purpose of your website?

I wrote recently that the purpose of any law firm website is to convince a defined audience that you can solve their problem and do it better than your competitors.

If you want to make more money with your law firm website, focus on the value that you deliver to your clients instead of the economic benefit you receive from your clients.

When attorneys restrict information out of fear that they may lose clients, who are they focusing on?  Themselves.  They are placing their profit above the needs of their clients.  The primary profit motive overshadows the secondary interests of the client.

Compare that philosophy to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter to potential shareholders, issued in advance of Facebook’s much-hyped IPO.  Here are a few quotes:

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term …. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

There is a reason that Facebook pulled in $3.7 billion in 2011.  The entire business philosophy is built around putting customers first. They understand that if they get that right, the money will follow.

Of course, your law firm won’t be the next Facebook.  But you can still learn from Facebook’s business model, because that is what your potential clients are coming to expect.  This is a new economy.  Success comes by putting your clients’ needs first.  Attorneys who understand and integrate this sort of thinking into their practice will do better than those that don’t.

And speaking of the value you deliver to clients:

What are you selling?

Are you selling your knowledge, or are you selling the ability to apply that knowledge to a particular client’s circumstances.  If you view yourself as selling your knowledge, consider this:

• If you are selling knowledge (or legal forms), you are competing in an industry with a ton of big players and a profit margin that is fast approaching zero.  If you are selling your legal skill (your ability to apply knowledge to the client’s circumstances), you are competing in a much smaller market and need not worry about giving away too much information.
• Do you really think that you can stop the flow of information?  People who are looking for free answers will find them, whether on Avvo, JustAnswer, or any number of free Q&A sites.  They may even find them on your competitor’s website.  The only question is whether they will find the answers on your site or someone else’s.
• Internet marketing is all about building rapport and trust with potential clients.  Give your clients something of real value (information) up front, and they will be more likely to contact you when there is a need for your services (legal skill).  Withhold information, and you look like a greedy attorney trying to squeeze a $250.00 consultation out of a $2.00 answer.

I can tell you from experience that this approach works.  When building my own law firm websites, I gave away as much information as I had time to write.  I put myself in the shoes of my prospective clients: If I were looking for information on a topic, what would I want to see?  I then wrote to that need.  This sort of thinking was the foundation of my success online.  It made me a trusted resource for potential clients, attracted natural links from other websites, and gave me a ton of long-tail keywords to rank for.

I do the same thing with this blog.  I am not concerned that some attorneys will apply what they learn here to boost their own rankings.  In fact, I hope that they do.  That is the whole purpose of the blog.

The times are a-changin.’  Attorneys who recognize this and capitalize this will come out on top.  Those who hold to outdated paradigms that rely on the restriction of knowledge will fall by the wayside.  It’s up to you to decide what category you will be in.

Choosing your top keywords is all about good old-fashioned economics—the interplay between supply and demand.  Your best keywords will have a higher demand relative to supply.  Demand is measured by the search volume; supply by the number of other sites competing for the same term.  The amount that people are willing to pay for a term usually correlates with supply and demand.

Keyword Research Using Google Adwords Keyword Tool

All of this data (search volume, competition, and price) is available in the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  To use the tool, log in to your Google account in the top right.  Then paste your keyword list into the “Word or phrase” box and click Search.

You will get four columns of information for each keywords: Competition, Global Monthly Searches, Local Monthly Searches, and Approximate Cost-per-Click:

• Competition – This column gives you the 0 to 1 score of how competitive a particular keyword is.
• Global Monthly Searches – This column gives you the approximate 12-month average of searches for the keyword on Google search.
• Local Monthly Searches – This column gives you the approximate 12-month average for the number of searches in your country (if you specified a country or language for your search).
• Approximate CPC – This column gives you the approximate cost-per-click that you might pay if you were to bid on the keyword in Google’s advertising platform.

You should look at these results using all three of the match types on the left.  The three match types are:

• Broad Match – The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words.  For example, data for “Florida bankruptcy lawyer” may also include data for “Florida bankruptcy attorney” since “lawyer” and “attorney” are synonyms.
• Phrase Match – The sum of the search volumes for all terms that include the whole keyword phrase.  For example, “Florida bankruptcy attorney” may include “Orlando Florida bankruptcy attorney” and “Miami Florida bankruptcy attorney” since each of these terms include the phrase “Florida bankruptcy attorney.”
• Exact Match – The search volume for that keyword idea only.  “Florida bankruptcy attorney” will return data for “Florida bankruptcy attorney” only.

Running your keyword data through these queries will help you pinpoint which terms are most likely to work well for your site.  If your website has a high domain authority, you may be able to rank for competitive keywords without much work.  Most sites will need to either choose lower-competition keywords or be prepared for link-building.

Keyword Research Using Google Adwords Testing

In some situations, you may want to know exactly how much traffic a keyword will bring to your site.  You can find this out by setting up a Google Adwords campaign, then using your web analytics to test how much traffic the keyword is sending.

If you have the budget and have more than one keyword to evaluate, you may want to set up the campaign for a broad match.  You can then test from there to narrow down to your best exact match keywords.  But if you have done all of the steps mentioned so far, this may not be necessary.  Instead, just set the campaign up for an exact match and direct the traffic to the most relevant page of your website for that term.

Once the campaign is set up, monitor the traffic to your site and the conversion rate (the number of visitors who take a predefined action, such as e-mailing you or downloading a white paper).  This will give you a more accurate picture of the type of traffic you can expect for that keyword.  Once you have the data you are looking for, you can cancel the Adwords campaign.

Keyword Research Using SEOmoz Data

If you have an SEOmoz Pro account, you can use SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool to get some nice data regarding keyword competition.  This tool gives you a percentage measurement of keyword difficulty so that you have a better estimate of how hard it will be to rank for the term.

But perhaps the bigger benefit is the competitor data that comes with the keyword difficulty report.  The competitor data lets you know who you are trying to beat for the term. It also gives you actionable metrics so that you know what to do in order to land that top spot.

Note:  If you are not a Pro member, you can take advantage of the free 30-day trial to check out the tool and the other benefits offered by SEOmoz, including their other SEO tools, forums and educational materials.

Important Note:  The Long Tail

Keyword research is a critical part of your website strategy.  It lets you understand your audience better and design your flagship content around what they are searching for.  This can help guide your site architecture and let you know where to focus your link-building and other SEO efforts.

But even though keyword research is important, it must be kept in perspective.  Your top-level keywords (things like “Florida foreclosure attorney”) will probably make up less than 25 percent of your overall traffic.  The remainder will come from thousand or even millions of “long-tail” keywords that are impossible to predict because they are seldom used.  As a group, these long tail keywords make up the bulk of online searches.

This means that you should resist the tendency to focus on the most profitable keywords to the exclusion of other topics.  View keyword as a tool to help you focus on your potential clients’ needs.  Your content should ultimately be written for people, not search engines.  If you think a topic will be useful to your potential clients, write about it—even if it doesn’t involve profitable keywords.  This will help you land those long tail keywords and help the search engines identify your site as an authority on your topic.  But most importantly, it will give your potential clients the information they are seeking.

Expanding Your Keyword List with Ubersuggest

Once you have an idea of your basic terms, you can use the free tool at ubersuggest.org to expand your list.  This is a great tool that can save you hours of manual work.  It scrapes Google’s suggestion feature (the words that auto-populate when you start typing a term in Google) to give you an expanded list of related keyword terms.

To use ubersuggest, simply type in your base keyword term into the box and click “Suggest.”

Ubersuggest will return a list of keyword suggestions organized by the base keyword and the letters of the alphabet. Clicking the green plus button by a term will add it to a keyword list on the right.

Once you have worked your way through the results, you should have a healthy group of keywords.  Click the “Download” button on top of the keyword list to produce a tidy little list of keywords.

Expanding Your List with Keyword Eye

To further expand your list, hop on over to the keyword visualization tool at Keyword Eye.  You do have to register to use this tool, but it only takes a few seconds.  The basic edition (Keyword Eye Basic) is currently free and should work just fine.

Once you are registered and logged in,  select “New,” they “Keyword Suggestion Report.” from the top left corner of the screen.  In the search box, enter your keyword term.  Be sure to select Google US for the search engine if you are a US attorney (it defaults to Google UK).

Click “Run Report.”  You should get a pretty keyword cloud, with the most popular keywords indicated by larger font.

Be sure to toggle between the Keywords, Visualization, and Grid View tabs at the top.  (The Grid View tab in particular will give you a lot of useful information about search volume and competition, topics that we will discuss in the next section.) If you run across any terms that you failed to include, add them to your list.

By now, you should have a healthy list of keywords.  In fact, the list might be so large that it seems unworkable.  Don’t worry, the next post in this series will teach you how to hone in on the money keywords for your website.

Putting Together a Seed List for Provider-Based Terms

Putting together your seed list of provider-based terms is fairly straightforward.  It will involve a combination of your practice area and descriptive terms that people use to look for lawyers.  The formula for a basic provider-based seed list would look like this:

Practice Area + Provider (e.g., Bankruptcy Attorney, Bankruptcy Attorney, Bankruptcy Lawyers, Bankruptcy Law Firm)

If your practice is limited to a specific geographic area, your seed list could also incorporate those geographic terms.  A local seed list would be structured around one or more of these formulas:

State + Area of Law + Provider (Louisiana Bankruptcy Attorney, etc.)

City + State + Practice Area + Provider (New Orleans Louisiana Bankruptcy Attorney, etc.)

When putting together compound keyword phrases like this, I like to use SEO Book’s free keyword list generator.  This tool allows you to separate out the variations of each component of your keyword, then combines them into a comprehensive list.  (If have been doing this manually using find-and-replace, you will probably want to send me chocolate for letting you know about this tool.)

To use the tool, simply enter your keywords into the various Word List boxes (be sure to follow the directions—comma separated with no new spaces or lines between keywords), then click Generate.

This will give your initial seed keyword list. Don’t worry about being comprehensive at this stage.  You will have opportunity to flesh out and refine your list using the tools described in the next sections.

Note:  Later, we will learn how to identify top keywords based on actual search volume.  Depending on your local area, there may not be enough local search volume to give you any actionable data.  In other words, incorporating the city and state-specific keywords may be too restrictive.  If that is the case, simply eliminate those Word Lists from the Keyword List Generator.

Putting Together a Seed List of Information-Based Terms

Your list of information-based terms will require a bit of good old-fashioned brainstorming.  Think about the types of questions that clients most often ask, the subspecialties of your practice area, and the names of the court proceedings or documents most often used in your practice.  This should give you a basic list.

Again, don’t be too concerned at this point about missing a term or two.  You will have opportunities to expand your list as the process moves on.

It’s almost time to start putting together our initial keyword list.  But before we do, I want make a distinction between keyword types that will help you think strategically about your keyword research and your overall website design.

Categorical Seed Lists

Keyword research begins with a seed list—a collection of keyword phrases that may be important to your website. Your keyword phrases can be composed of root (attorney), secondary (bankruptcy attorney), and tertiary terms (Louisiana bankruptcy attorney) terms, and so on.

When I am putting together a seed list, I group keyword phrases into two broad categories: Provider-based terms and information-based terms.  An understanding of each of these type of terms will help you to develop an effective keyword strategy.

Provider-Based Terms

Provider-based terms are keywords that people use to look specifically for attorneys.  Louisiana bankruptcy attorney is an example of a provider-based term.  Searchers who use provider-based terms aren’t just looking for information.  They already know that they need help and are looking for an attorney.  In other words, searchers using provider-based terms are already in buying mode.

Because people who are looking for a buyer are already in purchasing mode, provider-based terms tend to be high-converting keywords.  In other words, people who use provider-based search terms are more likely to convert to paying clients than people who are just looking for information.  But because your competitors realize this too, the highest-converting keywords will often be the most competitive.

Information-Based Terms

People use information-based terms when they are looking for information on a topic.  They may not know whether they need an attorney, but they have questions they need answered.

For example, a person searching for bankruptcy auto loans is probably wants to know whether she will be able to keep her car if she files for bankruptcy.  She may or may not decide to hire an attorney or file for bankruptcy.  She simply has an immediate question and is looking for an answer.

As you may guess, information-based terms tend to have much lower conversion rates than provider-based terms.  A high percentage of information seekers will find their answer and move on.  But this doesn’t mean that you should ignore information-based terms.  In fact, I believe that information-based terms are more important to your overall website strategy than provider-based terms.  Here’s why:

• Depending on your practice area, there is probably a much higher volume of searches for information-based terms.  The higher traffic volume will often make up for the lower conversion rate.
• There is usually less competition for information-based terms.  Grab the low-hanging fruit.
• Using information-based terms helps you build your content around your clients’ needs.  Answer your potential clients’ questions.  When they do need an attorney, they will be much more likely to call you.
• Because informational pages are not overtly commercial, they are more likely to naturally attract links than provider-based terms.
• It is much easier to develop content to support pages that are optimized for information-based terms.  There are only so many ways you can naturally incorporate “bankruptcy attorney” without drifting into keyword-stuffing.
• Building a site around information-based terms is the right thing to do.  Don’t make your clients pay for a consultation just to get a basic answer to a simple question. Answer their question up-front and save the consultations for clients that really need your services.

When I was building my own law firm websites, I focused almost exclusively on information-based terms.  I started with my clients’ needs and worked out from there.  This attracted more traffic and garnered more links.  As a result, the pages that were focused on provider-based terms naturally shot up in the rankings.  I ended up ranking well for both information-based keywords and provider-based keywords—a win/win.

The next post will get to the specifics of how to put together your provider-based and information-based keyword lists.