Ep. 46 - The Keyword Mistake Most Law Firms Keep Making

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, I address a question more attorneys are asking as AI reshapes search: Do keywords still matter? The short answer—yes. And they’re not going anywhere.

As long as the internet is built on content, words remain the currency of search. But the way law firms choose and use keywords has to change. Chasing the biggest, most competitive terms may feel logical, but for most firms, it’s a losing strategy that wastes time and resources.

I explain why high-value keywords are often already locked down by competitors, how semantic and related keywords can deliver better results, and how to build content that works for both search engines and real human readers. I also break down keyword density, common SEO mistakes like keyword stuffing, and why readability now plays a critical role in visibility.

If you’re unsure whether your keyword strategy is helping or quietly holding your firm back, this episode will give you a smarter, more realistic framework for using keywords in a way that actually supports long-term growth.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

Hi and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. For my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters. Today, I want to tackle a question that I get a lot, especially as AI starts to take over the SEO spaces and people are gearing more towards AI and intuitive search. They ask me, are keywords still worth chasing? And the answer is yes. The fact of the matter is, as long as we have a content-based internet, words will always be important. They will ultimately be the holy grail of search. There's no getting around that. How we implement those words and how those words are targeted and utilized is going to change. And there's no helping that because these things are continuously evolving. However, words will ultimately be the currency of the internet forever. There's simply no way to get around that. And until we evolve a direct brain to computer link where you can think at a computer and it'll bring up uh whatever you want to know. We're a long, long way away from that. Elon Musk's experiments with Neuralink and so forth, notwithstanding. So, yes, keywords are still important and they're going to continue to be important, and you need to make sure that you understand how keywords and search strings work. One of the mistakes that I see a lot of people making is they try to target high-value keywords. Now you're probably thinking, John, how in the hell is that a mistake? Isn't that what you're supposed to want? You want the big keywords. You want to control those as much as you can, right? Yes, that's true. But here's the problem. Your competitors have already gotten there. Someone else in that space already owns the majority share in all of the big keywords. Now, you can come in under the radar, create some content that puts you ahead of what they're doing, and then you get a bite of that for yourself. But it doesn't happen often at this point. Usually, people and entities who control these high-value keywords, they've put in the time and they've put in the effort and have locked down the content vectors where those keywords are helpful. So that means unless you're doing something truly revolutionary, you're not going to beat them at their own game. It's tempting to try, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't. However, you need to be realistic about what you can expect when you're targeting, say, divorce as a keyword or patents as a keyword if you're not there on the ground floor. If you weren't working on this 30 years ago, when the rules of SEO weren't even really codified as a way of searching, you're behind the times already for those types of keywords. Again, it's not to say that you can't get in on those high-value keywords at all. Those are the ones that everybody in the sector, in your field, in your specialization is going for. But you'd be better off to look for keywords that are related, but not those exact words. In these cases, a good tool to start with is old school. Look at a Thesaurus or a dictionary, and you can look these up online. The digital versions are fine. You don't have to go completely dead tree with this. But you need to understand that semantically related or linked keywords can be a much more effective source of search power. For example, before you go, if say your go-to keyword is divorce, uh and you know that that keyword is saturated and everybody in the world and uh their ex-girlfriend's cat is targeting it. That makes it a very desirable keyword. So what if you say termination of marriage? Uh it's the same thing from a legal perspective, however, it's a different keyword that's not as competitive. Now, of course, you're not going to be able to talk about termination of marriage without using the word divorce because not all of your readers are going to be sophisticated and understand that termination of marriage is the same thing as divorce. What you can do is say how to terminate your marriage in 10 easy steps or something like that. What you want to do then is try to come up with as many keywords as you possibly can that fall under the umbrella of divorce. Termination of marriage, alimony, etc. All of these related concepts need to be considered. But if you want to try and use these high-value keywords, uh, use them sparingly. Go for the lower-hanging fruit, go for the keywords that people aren't looking for as often, but they still have enough of a volume to make it worthwhile. Now, if they're not looking for them as much, the common argument is there's a reason for that, and that's fair. So, yes, you do want to get some of those higher value keywords in divorce alimony, child support, child custody, co-parenting. Uh, I'm picking on the divorce community just because there's so many keywords in that sector uh that are high value, and so many people are going after them. So I'm using that as kind of a test case for explaining why keywords still matter and why you shouldn't waste a lot of time chasing the big ones. Now, your SEO agency, if they're any good at what they do, can help you with this. Uh they will have tools for this kind of thing, and you can do your own research as well in Google Ads, Google Search Console, uh, SEMrush. There's a number of tools out there that'll let you check this out. Okay, my working title is Termination of Marriage in Ten Easy Steps. So you feed that into the system and it will spit out a bunch of words. And I'll bet you, in fact, I'll just about guarantee that divorce will be at the top of uh those results. But then you look at how many people are using it. How many articles include that word as a keyword? And you'll see it's saturated because it's a high value, desirable keyword. The sheer volume of people using it by definition makes it a lower value keyword. Now that sounds counterintuitive. If it's the highest value keyword out there, how can it also be a low-value keyword? Well, it's a low value keyword because everybody's using it. You need to get creative so you look down more towards the middle of the range of results that your program pops up and you look at what terms are there. You want to pick four or five of those and you want to put them in your content. You want to pick out maybe six or seven less desirable, less valuable keywords from the top, and you want to use those a little more sparingly. Uh here it comes back to some back of the napkin math. Your main keyword should never be more than one to one and a half percent of your total content. So if you're doing a 1,000-word article, your main keyword should not represent more than 10 to 15 words in the entire article. This same thing applies to all your other keywords. You should max out at 1 to 1.5% for your top keywords and about uh 0.5% for your lower value keywords. You want to try to get as many of them in as you can without doing what's known as keyword stuffing. Now, this is where a lot of people get it wrong. They focus exactly and exclusively on getting the keywords in and cramming them in in any old way that they can, whether they make linguistic sense or not, and whether it reads naturally to a reader or not. They just sit there and throw out these words and hope that something sticks. That doesn't work anymore, uh, even if it ever did. It doesn't work because the algorithms are looking for behavior like that. Now you can find a way to work in all of these keywords naturally, reasonably, and without it sounding repetitive or robotic. You can get away with a lot more in terms of plugging in keywords and search strings than you can if you just throw the keywords in in any old way that you want. And your readability score on Google is going to impact how many readers you get exposed to in the first place. This is the sort of thing that you need to be thinking about when you're planning your keyword approach. Keywords, search strings, uh, the best patent attorney in South Florida, the best estate attorney in North Dakota, whatever. Doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing. You know, if your practice is in Moose Snout, Minnesota, and you go with uh divorce attorney and Moose Snout, Minnesota, you can do this. That's perfectly legal. The key with keywords has always been and always will be that they have to lend themselves naturally to the content. This can be very difficult because some of the keywords and search strings, uh, for example, the Google Search Console will suggest don't read naturally. They're not uh constructions that we think of intuitively when we're speaking or when we're writing. We have to get a little creative with those to put them together in a way that they do read naturally. Google has a hook to those keywords, but it doesn't come off as artificial. That's where things get a little more complicated, and that's where you need a good content creator on your side. Not just anybody can make a search string like moose snout, Minnesota, divorce attorney, read naturally. Or the individual words, divorce, attorney, moose snout, and Minnesota. That's an even better one because it's not a natural usage for our purposes. It is, however, how potential clients and internet users may enter it into their search engine of choice. That's why we do things that way. That's why we want to make sure that we have as many variants of that keyword as possible or that search string. But we don't want the content to be so saturated with keywords that it becomes unreadable. For example, divorce attorney, Moose Snout, Minnesota. I might write something like, when you're looking for a divorce attorney in Moose Snout, uh, Minnesota, uh, residents uh look, let me try that again. When you're looking for a divorce attorney that Moose Snout, Minnesota residents trust to handle their best interests, these are the things you should look for. It reads better that way, and it makes more sense to the reader. And it's not obviously a search string, but it is, and Google will see it as a search string. And now you have a keyword. Wonderful. That's just a little trick that your content creator should know how to do. And if they don't, you need to be looking for a new content creator. All content creation is not created equally, and you definitely don't want somebody who relies too heavily heavily on AI or at all on spun content. And you definitely don't want that because keywords, they're not going away. What I suggest you do first is make a list just off the top of your head of, say, 20 to 50 keywords. Now count them down and compare them against the list that your SEO provider gives you or that you find in Google Search Console. Take a look and see how your list and their list stacks up. Where did you rank these keywords? Where does Google rank these keywords? What's the difference between the two? This matters. And it's really, really important that you understand this. Because if you do it right and if you do it carefully, you've already got the basis of your next piece of content, and you've got content with a whole lot of keyword anchors and content that reads naturally. That's what you want, and that's what you have to have in order to survive on Google. So now that you've got your list and you've compared it against Google, you've said, okay, Google, this is a high value keyword, uh, which we've already discussed. Uh, it's also a low-value keyword. So you want to start looking at other related semantic terms that give you the same effect and that say the same thing and that people are going to look for without overusing those high dollar keywords that, let's face it, are probably already under rigid control anyway. It's unlikely you're going to get in on the ground floor with that. Yeah, it's like I said, every once in a while you might get lucky and uh uh and you have content and your content creator may come up with something that just blows the algorithm out of the water, and then all of a sudden you're at the top of the results for a keyword term that uh that you would have said based on the list you couldn't have gotten. And yet you did. And you didn't use any tricks, you didn't do anything fancy, you did exactly what Google expects you to do. You created great content that includes the keyword and educates and informs your user and gives them something of value that they can take with them. This is always the key to any form of communication. The key is always offering and exchanging ideas until we figure out uh telepathy or neural linking to computers. We're going to be stuck with words as stand-ins for concepts and ideas. And of course, physical things. Words are just symbols, and we all know this. And because we know this, uh, we went to law school. We took rhetoric, and most of us have already taken at least one creative writing class uh somewhere in our career. So we understand the function of words. What we have to do now is put those words into the right order to convince and persuade someone who knows nothing about us or uh little about the subject matter, but when they see it on the page, they know that we're doing it and they know that we have a good bet to back them up on their legal needs. We can do this, it's not difficult. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is, but every time you draft a letter to a client or draft a cease and desist demand, you're using those skills. This is just a different application of that same skill set and the same process. You're trying to convince somebody to do something or to not do something. You're explaining this is why you want to do this or why you don't want to do this. These are the things you need to be thinking about. So this should not be scary or intimidating. What's strange to me is that for a lot of attorneys that I deal with, this is strange and intimidating. They look at it and they say, This is weird, this is scary, this is not an application of the things in a way that I've ever thought of them before, and I've never had to. Well, that's not true. Every single time you write a text message, you're using these skills. You're just applying them in a slightly different way for a slightly different outcome. Ultimately, you're doing this to market yourself. Words are never ever going away. They're the bedrock of our profession and they're the bedrock of the internet. So get comfortable with using them. If you find a weird construction, like the one that I threw out earlier, like divorce attorney, Moose Snout, Minnesota. If you find that kind of situation in your Google keywords list, play with it. Think about it a little bit. How can it make this read smoothly to a human reader? Machines don't have that problem. Machines don't care whether it reads smoothly or not. Machines are faking it when they say this looks good. This reads at a fifth grade level, and it's very clear and easy to understand. Machines think that they get it, but they don't. The real arbiter and the real test of whether or not your content is successful and whether or not your keyword plan is successful is does your intended reader get it? Does your intended reader find value in it? Does your intended reader go from there to contact you to pursue the issue further? If the answer to all of these is yes, then guess what? You've nailed it and you already understand this. But people get scared about keywords, they get worried about them, they get nervous, they go, I'm not sure I understand how keywords work. Well, sure you do. You've been using the internet, I assume, long enough to know how to research Supreme Court cases where the best bakery near you is, or maybe you're looking for a lounge or a night spot. We use this stuff every single day and we don't even realize it. It's become such an integral part of our society and our daily lives that we do it literally without thinking about it. So don't be scared of keywords. Keywords are our friends, they're the building block for literally everything we do online. It's just a question of getting them right and using the right keywords in the right way and then putting those keywords together in the right way. For your prospective clients, you if you can do that, you have no problems. And a lot of people who've done this a few times will tell you it's not as scary as it sounds. It's not as hard as it sounds, and it's really more intuitive than a lot of people make it out to be. So be sure to keep that in mind when you're thinking about your keyword campaign and how you're going to apply these points to your broader marketing for your firm. Again, I'm John Risvie, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any updates from this channel. And don't forget to share with your friends and colleagues who may find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today. And be sure to tune in next week for more tips and ideas on making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you.