New Tool for In-house SEOs
Many law firms don’t have someone in-house doing SEO, but for those that do, I have a new tool to pass along.
A couple days ago, Google altered a very important feature in their public Keyword Research Tool. They began showing keyword search volumes! Which to some, might not sound all that impressive. But for those of us in the trade, it’s huge!
Why, you might ask? Well, most people know Google is the search king with more than 70% of the monthly search share. And you might also know about keyword tools, like wordtracker, or Aaron Wall’s SEO Book keyword tool. Both of which estimate the number of times a search is conducted; and have been considered the best gauge of search phrase order & quantity received on a monthly bassis. The best, that is, until a few days ago; when Google removed the ‘green bars’ that represented a 1-10 volume scale (percentiles), and replaced those bars with hard numbers!
Google have traditionally guarded this window into search behaviour very closely. And really, it hasn’t been since Overture’s tool that we’ve had this kind of sampling to get to know a search market like this. Guys like me have been forced to extrapolate or estimate where the search frequency was.
As an example of how this feature has changed things, the graphic below shows the estimated frequency for the term ‘lawyer’ (including synonyms):
Broad phrasing like this might not seem all that useful, at least at first blush… But when you’re mining the long tail, and looking for regional phrases or niche service based phrasing to target, applying a number to that brainstorming process is a very welcome addition.
Angela Harms said,
Wrote on July 11, 2008 @ 9:03 am
I am working on understanding this long tail stuff better. How do you determine, when advertiser competition is so strong, what keywords it makes sense to pursue?
Steve Matthews said,
Wrote on July 11, 2008 @ 1:23 pm
That’s a big question Angela. My general answer would be to say that it’s a balance. You must have enough search volume to make it worth investing the time; but the target phrase must also be niche enough to define a serviceable need.
I would also qualify, that while the Google tool is intended for ‘paid’ search, my interest is more on the natural search results. The difference, in my experience, is you can generate more visitors via the natural results. And the likely reason for that is that most studies (not all) show some amount of distrust with the paid search results.
Law Practice Matters » Blog Archive » If You Build It, They Will Come… If They Can Find You said,
Wrote on July 17, 2008 @ 6:38 am
[...] however, you do feel comfortable trying your hand at SEO on your own, here is a start. There is a new SEO tool available to you: Google has recently altered their keyword research tool, showing actual search [...]
Law Firm Web Strategy : Avg Cost per 'Lawyer' Search in Google said,
Wrote on August 13, 2008 @ 2:49 pm
[...] the word ‘lawyer’. Using Google’s keyword research tool, an item I blogged about back in July, I was able to turn synonyms off and then export those terms into a CSV file, and then import them [...]