Part of my job when working with a client is to find out what keywords are bringing in traffic in their local market, to see where the client is ranking, and then to look at the competition to see what kinds of opportunities there are for the client website to rank higher, and therefore receive more traffic.
The organic search market for lawyers isn’t very competitive, and is fairly low traffic. However, if you’re a Rancho Cordova lawyer – you want to make sure you’re occupying the top spots in the Google SERPs.
How to Determine Which Rancho Cordova Lawyer keywords Are Getting Traffic:
The first thing I do is come up with a list of the keywords that I think *could* be potential ranking keywords. Here’s what I came up with for Rancho Cordova lawyers:
- rancho cordova lawyer
- rancho cordova attorney
- rancho cordova law firm
- lawyer in rancho cordova
- attorney in rancho cordova
Then, I take these keywords, and put them in the keyword explorer in ahrefs.com, as that will give me an estimate in the amount of monthly traffic these keywords are getting.
As you can see in the graphic above, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of traffic for these specific keywords. Is this a huge deal? Not necessarily. These keywords are “geo-modified”, which means the keyword has the location included in it. A non geo-modified keyword would be more generic, like “attorney” or “lawyer”. Many times, people do search for non geo-modified keywords even though they’re searching for local results.
However, we have to work within the constraints of ahrefs when establishing search intent. If we searched for “lawyers” or “attorneys” in ahrefs, it would show a LOT more results – but those results would be spread out over the entire US, and wouldn’t distinguish between someone searching for a lawyer in Dallas, vs someone searching for a lawyer in Rancho Cordova.
So we’re stuck with using geo-modified keywords to help determine what keywords to focus on.
Then we want to check top results for “rancho cordova attorneys” (since it was the one showing the most volume), to see what competitors are ranking. When doing this search, here were the top rankings:
- Google Map Pack
- https://www.justia.com/lawyers/california/rancho-cordova
- https://www.justia.com/lawyers/business-law/california/rancho-cordova
- https://lawyers.findlaw.com/lawyer/statepractice/california/rancho-cordova
- https://lawyers.law.cornell.edu/lawyers/california/rancho-cordova
- https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Lawyers&find_loc=Rancho+Cordova%2C+CA
- https://www.yellowpages.com/rancho-cordova-ca/attorneys
- https://www.lawyers.com/all-legal-issues/rancho-cordova/california/law-firms/
- https://www.aclawyers.com/personal-injury/rancho-cordova-severe-injury-attorney-lawyer/
- https://www.ozlaw.com/rancho-cordova/
- https://attorneys.superlawyers.com/personal-injury-defense/california/rancho-cordova/
- https://attorneys.superlawyers.com/employment-and-labor/california/rancho-cordova/
- https://mayeryoung.com/folsom-attorneys-rancho-cordova/
- https://www.lawinfo.com/emotional-distress/california/rancho-cordova/
- https://www.hg.org/lawfirms/usa/california/rancho-cordova
- https://www.heidarilawgroup.com/locations/rancho-cordova-attorneys/
- https://www.thefamilyattorneys.com/
- https://www.cityofranchocordova.org/departments/leadership-team/adam-lindgren
- https://www.autoaccident.com/rancho-cordova.html
- https://www.norcalplanners.com/communities-serve-rancho-cordova/
I listed all on the first 2 pages of Google, because I wanted to see more than just 1 competitor. So here are the competitors we’ll look at.
- #10 – https://www.ozlaw.com/rancho-cordova/
- #13 – https://mayeryoung.com/folsom-attorneys-rancho-cordova/
- #16 – https://www.heidarilawgroup.com/locations/rancho-cordova-attorneys/
- #17 – https://www.thefamilyattorneys.com/
We’ll want to take each one of these and put them into ahrefs to see what keywords they find for those pages, as we may have completely overlooked a keyword. (It happens more often than you’d think.)
SEO keywords for Oz Law’s Rancho Cordova page:
https://www.ozlaw.com/rancho-cordova/
- no keywords were found in ahrefs.
SEO Keywords for Mayer Young’s Rancho Cordova page:
Folsom Attorneys Rancho Cordova
- keywords were found, but none were relevant to the keywords we’re looking for.
SEO Keywords for Heidari Law Group’s Rancho Cordova page:
https://www.heidarilawgroup.com/locations/rancho-cordova-attorneys/
- 5 keywords were found, but they were more specific types of law than we were looking for.
SEO Keywords for The Family Attorney’s Rancho Cordova page:
https://www.thefamilyattorneys.com/
- 13 keywords were found, but they were more specific types of law than we were looking for.
What Did We Learn About the “Rancho Cordova Lawyer” Organic Search Market?
Overall, I thought this was a fun market to look at because there are many businesses out there in this particular situation. They’re in a smaller market where there isn’t a lot of identifiable traffic, but they can still benefit from SEO! A skilled rancho cordova seo consultant can help you navigate the local search market to help your business improve their rankings and increase their website traffic.
- There isn’t a lot of geo-modified search traffic for this particular market. In other words, there aren’t very many people searching for “rancho cordova lawyer”. Does this mean that people in Rancho Cordova aren’t looking for a lawyer? Absolutely not! However, they’re likely using different keywords – potentially non geo-modified keywords like “lawyer” and “attorney”.
- The specific local market may be too small. It may be beneficial to expand out and target a nearby market that has a higher search volume. In this specific case, it might be useful to target the Folsom, CA market because it’s larger, more prominent, and is right next to Rancho Cordova.
- The keywords we looked at may be too broad. This is particularly true in the legal market. Not many people are looking for generic laywers – they’re looking for a specific kind of lawyer, like a personal injury lawyer, a real estate lawyer, a divorce lawyer, a tax lawyer, a corporate lawyer, etc. The “rancho cordova lawyer” keyword has a lower buyers intent than something like “rancho cordova personal injury lawyer” or even more specifically “rancho cordova car accident lawyer”. You can look at the keywords on thefamilyattorneys.com website to see the different keyword combinations for both different geographic areas, as well as different practice areas.
If you’re a rancho cordova lawyer looking to increase your rankings and website traffic, it’s good to take an audit of they keywords for each of your practice areas, and make sure each practice area is optimized for the highest volume (and relevant) keywords.
Hire a Rancho Cordova SEO Consultant
If you’re a local business and you want a local business seo consultant to help you improve your website rankings and traffic – reach out to us! We’ll audit your website for technical issues, research your priority pages for relevant keywords, and create a plan to help your website achieve the results you’re looking for.