At our Rainmaker Retreat in Orange County this past weekend, I fielded several questions from attorneys about keywords – how to find the right ones and how often to use them.

Here are 3 steps to finding the right keywords for your law practice:

Step 1: Make a list of 5-6 words and/or phrases that best describe your practice.

Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and think about what words they would use to find you. Hint: it is not the name of your firm. Choose words or phrases that describe exactly what you do, in laymen’s terms: i.e., Chicago divorce lawyer, car accident attorney, etc.

Step 2: Choose your keywords or key phrases based on relevance and difficulty.

Step 3: Use your keywords and key phrases throughout your website.Competition for the word “lawyer” is about as fierce as it gets, which means it would be very difficult for your site to rank high in search results for that word alone. The smaller you are, the more specific you want to get, choosing keywords that have less competition. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to see what the search volume is for your keywords and key phrases. Look for similar words that have less competition, but are still relevant to your business. Then strike a good balance between relevance and difficulty. Don’t forget to include long-tail keywords – i.e., “Chicago divorce attorney specializing in child custody” – most people are using those for search these days.

Choose the best 3-5 individual keywords and your top 10 key phrases and use them in the content of your website as well as in the page titles and metadata. If you can secure a URL for these keywords, use that as well. Be sure not to “stuff” your content with too many keywords – your site should still be written for a human being, not a search engine.