Ep. 54 - Why Most Law Firms Get Keywords Completely Wrong

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor, I break down one of the most misunderstood — and most misused — elements of SEO: keywords.

Many law firms focus so heavily on keyword placement and volume that they lose sight of the most important rule of all — your content has to read naturally. If it doesn’t make sense to a real person, no amount of keyword optimization will save it.

I walk through how to properly structure your keyword strategy, including primary keywords, supporting keywords, and semantic variations, along with practical guidelines for keyword density and placement. We also discuss why keyword stuffing and outdated tactics like cloaking can damage your rankings, and how search engines actually interpret the words and phrases on your page.

If you’ve ever wondered how many keywords is too many — or why your content isn’t performing the way you expected — this episode will give you a clear, practical framework for creating content that ranks well and resonates with real clients.

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. And 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 in Coral Springs. Now, keywords may be one of the most contentious aspects of SEO marketing. The reason for this is because a lot of people want to argue about what the perfect proportion of keywords is, how to get them in there, etc. Now we do need to be concerned with that to a point. However, it's important to recognize that there's one ultimate rule that should guide your keywords. The content has to read naturally. It has to flow naturally, it has to make sense to a native English speaker, or of course, if you're working in Spanish or Russian or whatever your client base's preferred language is, it doesn't matter what language or how you write it, as long as it flows naturally to a native speaker of that language. So for our purposes today, we're going to stick with English, but keep in mind these principles do not just apply to the English language. Any language you can think of or any language you can speak is going to necessarily dictate how you write your content and what keywords you put into it. It has to flow naturally to a speaker. It has to read logically, it has to read coherently, and it has to read smoothly. So that's the first hurdle you have to clear for all of your keywords. Now, none of the keywords can ever save you if the content you're churning out doesn't make any sense or if it's disconnected, if it doesn't flow logically from one thought to the next, to the next, and then the next. So you have to think about that. Once you've established that you've got your flow, now it's time to concern yourself with the keywords. Well, okay, what's a keyword? Let's start with basics. A keyword is any word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine when they're looking for something. Basically, these are the words and ideas that algorithms look for when they decide how to prioritize and rank your content. So the first thing you want to do is you want to identify your primary keyword. Now, since we're sticking in the field of law, let's say that your primary keyword, the keyword you want to rank for is or keywords is top Florida attorney. Okay, you've got that. Next you need to figure out how many times you want to put it into your content. For a long form article, let's say 1,500 words, you would want 15 to 30 iterations of that main keyword. But again, you've got to make sure you're following the golden rule, which is that the content has to make sense in context. You can't just shove keywords uh anywhere and expect them to work. From there, we want a couple of related main keywords. For example, top Miami attorney or and things like this. For each of those, you want to keep it around 1% of the total content. So what that means is if you have a 1,500-word article, you're going to want those to pop up 10 to 15 times. This is only for the main keywords, not the primary keyword. And you should have a couple of keywords that stem off of your main keyword. So you might use top Florida attorney or top Florida lawyer or top Miami attorney. Now you've got to come up with another one that fits with what you're doing. Probably one that relates to your practice area would be ideal in this situation, like top Florida divorce attorney. If you have your primary and main keywords, you're already a good part of the way there. So you want to keep your primary keyword around 1 to 2%, and you want to keep those auxiliary keywords topping out right around 1%. For the sake of a reproducible formula, you want to take the total word count of the content and work out how many times you should use your primary keyword. Next, cut your min max for the primary keyword in half, and that's your target for those main keywords. But now things to get uh start to get really interesting because you have a galaxy of related concepts and keywords that you can put in and use in your content again. Referring back to the golden rule, however, the content has to flow. I'm hammering on this because a lot of people don't understand that. They go, well, why can't we just put all the keywords in one big block of text at the bottom? That used to be done a lot. But you can't do that because a lot of people use that tactic to mask keywords in an effort to make content rank where it shouldn't. So they put it absolutely in every iteration of every keyword they've ever heard that might be related. And then they set up the page so that the keywords don't show up to the human eye. But if you highlight all the text on the page, all of a sudden you see these big blocks of keywords that wouldn't otherwise be visible. A lot of people do this and it's called cloaking. It's a black hat SEO move, and it's a really, really bad idea if you want your site to have any kind of longevity in Google Rankings. So we don't want to do that. What we do want is to have a plan. Let's say we're targeting one primary keyword, two main related keywords, and let's say seven to ten other keywords. These are called LSIs or latent semantic indicators, which are keywords and phrases that are tangentially related to the primary and main keywords in some way. We want to max our LSAs out at about half a percent of the total word count. So let's say for each of those keywords, you could probably work it in five times in one piece of content, and it will be okay as long as you follow the golden rule. So the magic proportions work like this: your primary keyword that you want to show up uh one to no more than two percent of the time. And truthfully, one and a half percent is probably better still for most applications. You do not want to exceed 2% if at all possible. Because if you start getting into that 3% range, you're going to get into keyword stuffing territory. So if you find yourself using your primary keyword too much, you're going to want to cut back some and see if you can swap some of those usages out for a major keyword or an LSI instead on a case-by-case basis. Now, here's another question. Is it a keyword or a key phrase? Well, each individual word is parsed in Google algorithms, but the sense of that overall phrase is taken into account as well. So for our purposes, we want to say, okay, I want to write 1,500 words on top Florida attorneys for whatever reason. So we've got top Florida attorneys. Then below that, we've got top Miami lawyer or Miami's top attorney, something like that. Now, again, this is just an example. I'm not advocating that anybody put themselves out as the top attorney for your field. That's up to your peers and the public to determine, not you. And that might not even be really good keywords. Uh, and who knows how many people search for those. That's an important factor as well. So, unless you've got like a trophy in your office that says top Florida attorney, uh, you should be careful with that. Now remember, I'm trotting this out only as an example. So your proportions are going to look like this: one primary keyword, two main keywords, and seven to ten LSIs. This is where you could get into Florida injury law, Florida patent law, Florida malpractice law, whatever your field of practice is. LSIs or main keywords are a great place to put that in. Now, of course, you could say top Florida malpractice attorney as a primary keyword, and that's perfectly fine. But it cuts off some options for you in terms of what other keywords and search terms you can put in. Now, here's another thing to remember. Google looks at words from left to right because English, of course, reads from left to right. But if you're writing in, say, Arabic or Hebrew, they read from right to left. So that's a different process. But we have to assume it's a process that Google has taken into account because these languages read differently than English. And it comes back to the golden rule uh write in the way that your users are used to reading things, right in the way that they speak. But by most conventional uh Western languages, they read from left to right. And because that's the majority of what Google's traffic handles, it's going to start with parsing the keywords from left to right. So the keyword top Florida attorney could become top attorney Florida. Now, using a keyword like this is tricky. And I've said this before because when you start playing with word order like that, yes, it gives you another keyword, but it still has to flow naturally in the context of the content. It still has to make sense to a native speaker or a native reader. And if it doesn't, you have a problem. If you read your content and it comes out looking like word salad, something is wrong. Now, of course, most reputable SEO agencies will have content creation specialists whose entire job it is to look at keywords like this and say, okay, you've got this keyword. Now I can do this, I can do this and this, and change the order around in a way that still makes sense for native speakers. Another thing to consider about keywords is that when Google or other search engines parse them, they eliminate what are known as stop words, like a, the, and if. Words like this aren't even looked at. They look at the main ideas in a keyword. So a question like who is the top Florida attorney or who is the top attorney in Florida becomes top Florida attorney or top attorney Florida, as seen by the search engine. So for Google purposes, you want to be aware of that because that gives you some extra restrictions. True, but it also gives you new ways that you can present your content to your audience. It still flows naturally and reads naturally to a native speaker of the language you're using. I think I've belabored that point enough, so let's move on. So we know that you can use your primary keyword in a 1500-word article, say 15 to 30 times, and be okay. Your two major keywords, you want to use those a maximum of 15 times. So you should have no more than 15 mentions of each of those. Now, each of your semantically linked keywords should only be used about seven times apiece, and not all of them are going to get equal airtime, and they shouldn't get equal airtime because otherwise it does look like keyword stuffing. That may not have been your intent, but that's what Google may flag it as. Remember, you have one keyword that you use seven times, and one that you use four times, and one that you use three times, and so on. But the point is you've got them all in there. You're not going crazy with just splattering keywords all over the place. You're also being mindful of how many times these words are showing up in this content and how it all reads when the finished product is complete. Of course, the longer the keyword, the less times you'll want to mention it as well. So here's another question. Where do I want to use this stuff? A general rule of thumb is this you want to use the primary keyword or search term that you're trying to rank for in the headline, in the URL, and you want to use it in the headers as much as you possibly can. Then you want to use it maybe five or six times in the body of your content, because this is where you get your major and semantically related keywords into play. The point of this is to break up the text and make sure that primary keyword really shines through, but you're giving all the other keywords a chance to come out and play, as it were. The more you do this and the more you get used to thinking of different ways to put the keywords together in your content, the better off you're going to be. Now, of course, you also want to have these keywords readily available and know that uh where they are and when to use them so you can add them to your metadata, and that tells Google and other search engines uh this is what this is, this is what my article is about, and they can then readily see that in the meta tags themselves. And they also see it on the page in high profile positions. They see it in the content, and they know that these are the keywords that it should be responding to. That's another point to consider because a lot of people don't understand metadata or how it works or why it works. Metadata is basically your website signaling Google, hey, I've got this article about these terms. So it takes a look at the metadata. It takes a look at the page URL. Okay, the page URL says this is about uh whatever it is about. We're good. The headline includes that keyword. Now we know for a fact that this is the subject and it shows up in the headers. So the search engines know this is a primary keyword. The more of that you do, the easier it becomes. Now, of course, you know a lot of attorneys don't have time to do their own content creation and they don't want to. They don't have the interest. They say, if I wanted to write a novel, I'd be a novelist. I became an attorney for reasons, and that's fair. But some people do. And if you're one of those people who prefers to write your own content every once in a while, which by the way, I highly recommend because it helps make sure that your voice and that of your SEO agency are aligned and calibrated properly, then you'll find this information incredibly helpful. Your SEO agency should already know this. And in fact, it's a great, easy way to vet your SEO agency right off the bat by just saying, This is the primary keyword I want to use. What would you do with it? And let's see what they say. I've seen SEO agencies generate lists of up to 500 keywords that you could potentially use. This is not always a good thing because too much information can be worse than none at all. You wind up with analysis paralysis. So then it becomes a question of well, which keywords do I use? Having that primary keyword in place right off the top, and ideally your two major keywords will help guide what semantic indicators you want to put in. And you'd be surprised at what all uh can be a semantic indicator. For example, your geography, your practice area, your location in town, Supreme Court cases or other cases that are relevant uh to your practice, all of these can be keywords and LSIs that you could incorporate into your content. Now, like I said, your SEO agency will know how to do this largely without any input, uh, or they should know how to do this. But if they're presenting you with keywords that are completely off the wall or have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of your field of law or the primary subject that you want uh to talk about in your content, this should be a warning sign that you may be dealing with people who are over their skill set. The final most critical thing to keep in mind is that when your content's done, ask yourself, would I send this article to someone else who needs help with this particular issue if I wasn't the one who wrote it? If you can honestly say yes, then great, you're good to go. If you cannot honestly say yes, then you need to find out why. Does it come off uh as being too salesy? Is it too pushy, too aggressive, or not informative enough? All of these are factors which could cause you problems with Google. That's not to say that they will. Uh Lord knows there's there's lots of poorly written content that manages to get through the algorithms. We've all seen it. But if and when possible, you need to be aware of this and you need to make sure that what you're putting out for public consumption is actually content that you're interested in and which would be of interest to your prospective clients. Again, you want to be writing to your ideal client. You want to be speaking to their needs and their interests and their location and their specific situation whenever possible. So you need to remember that while keywords are still very important and Google does place a lot uh of uh relevance to them, ultimately it's the content in which the keywords are embedded that's going to make or break you as far as whether or not your keywords are good enough and whether or not your content is good or not. And of course, good content versus bad content is a very subjective thing. But if your content just reads like word salad and is uh seen as keyword stuffing, you're out of there. You don't stand a chance. So following these guidelines and these parameters is a great way to make sure that you're getting enough keywords in to get Google's attention, but you're not stuffing it with so many keywords that it doesn't mean anything, and and that's just going to end up getting you penalized or blacklisted for poor content. So I feel like this is a great time for me to ask a question of you. What's the strangest keyword you've ever found in your specific field? How was it used? Why was it unusual or strange? And did it work? Did it get you the results you were looking for? I'm curious to have a dialogue about that. So the comments, of course, are open, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you and what you have to say about your experience with keywords. Again, I'm John Rizby, 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 for making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you all next week. Thank you.