I bet you want to get your law firm website on page 1 of Google for great keywords. I know I did and still do for more keywords my prospective clients use to look for a lawyer. Do you know how much SEO is enough and how much is too much? Are you or your SEO consultant merely guessing about exactly what you must do to rank on page 1 of Google for specific keywords? There are two over-arching approaches to SEO:
- The shotgun approach
- The sniper approach
The Shotgun Approach to SEO
The shotgun approach is doing everything and the kitchen sink hoping you rank well for intended keywords. You don’t aim; instead you fire hoping to hit your mark. You write content, optimize your web page for the keyword, and then randomly build backlinks hoping beyond hope you end up on page 1.
There are two problems with the shotgun SEO approach:
- You miss your target altogether by aimlessly going for keywords that unless you spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of time you will not end up on page 1. In other words, you’re wasting your time.
- You overkill your target. You invest time and resources into ranking a keyword beyond that which is necessary and therefore miss other opportunities.
The Sniper Approach to SEO
The sniper approach involves planning, taking careful aim, and hitting your mark deliberately. The sniper approach involves upfront planning, but once you know what must be done, you deliberately plan and execute a precision-based SEO campaign to rank for select keywords. Once you achieve the ranking desired, you slow or stop that campaign and go after other keyword opportunities.
The benefits of sniper SEO are:
- You seek to rank for keywords you have a chance to rank for rather than guessing and hoping.
- You do just enough smart SEO to rank and then stop. You don’t waste resources.
Because sniper SEO is deliberate, it’s smart SEO in that you can plan your campaign and achieve results with minimum investment and resources. Obviously I’m of the view sniper SEO is the better approach. I’m not saying shotgun SEO doesn’t work, it’s just not as efficient and in some cases not as effective.
How do you do Sniper SEO?
You must select your keywords and decide how high you wish to rank for those keywords. For the remainder of this article, I’ll assume you wish to rank somewhere on page 1 of Google. Selecting keywords is a balancing act. You want to rank high for the most searched-for keywords your prospective clients use. Yet, you don’t want to waste time and money on keywords for which you will not achieve a page 1 ranking. How do you research keywords? I use software that produces the following chart for the keyword “Denver Personal Injury Lawyer”
(click to enlarge)
The main two numbers are:
- Number of monthly searches (for an exact search) which is 590.
- Number of web pages that contain the phrase “Denver personal injury lawyer” which is 672,000
“Denver personal injury lawyer” is a fairly competitive keyword given 672,000 web pages contain the phrase. However, it also receives a decent number of searches and the lawyers who rank on page 1 will gain a decent amount of monthly website traffic for just this keyword. But number of searches and competing web pages is just the start.
Next, you must determine how hard it will be to bump an existing site off of page 1. You see, there could be millions of web pages competing for a keyword, yet the top 10 sites on page 1 of Google aren’t that well SEO’d.
Likewise, there could be a keyword with only 10,000 competing web pages, but the top 10 sites on page 1 are very well SEO’d and therefore strongly entrenched.
Analyzing the SEO Strength of the Top 10 Websites for “Denver Personal Injury Lawyer”
I’ll use my software again for a competitive analysis, which produces the following:
(click to Enlarge)
It turns out ranking on page 1 is moderately difficult. It’s not impossible, but does require effort.
What do the colors mean?
The more green means less competitive and pink means more competitive. The brown is moderately competitive. The most competitive factors for ranking in the top 10 is backlinks. The websites listed have many backlinks. Arguably, backlinks (quality and quantity) are a very strong factor to ranking well.
Therefore, yes, there is a lot of green in the chart, but a lot of pink for a very important ranking factor.
The above screenshot lists the top 8 ranking websites for “Denver personal injury lawyer”. The entries with the small icon and no number to the left are Google Places rankings.
I’m concerned with the entries indicated by a number 1 through 8.
What do all these numbers mean? The following is a legend.
| DA | Age of domain name | the older the better. |
| PR | PageRank | Generally, the higher the PR, the better. |
| IC | Index Count which is the number of pages on the domain indexed with Google | Generally more indexed pages is better. However, you can rank well with fewer pages. |
| BLP | Number of backlinks to the indicated UR | Generally, the more backlinks to the specific web page, the better. |
| BP | Number of backlinks to the entire website | Generally, the more backlinks to your site, the better. |
| BLEG | Number of backlinks to the website from .gov or .edu websites | The more backlinks from .gov and .edu websites, the better. |
| DMZ | Whether the site is listed on the DMOZ.org directory | Getting your yoga studio site listed on DMOZ.org is really good. |
| YAH | Whether the site is listed on the Yahoo! Directory | Apparently a listing in the Yahoo! Directory is good. I don’t list my sites on this directory because it also costs $300 per year. |
| Title | Whether the web page contains the keyword in the meta title. | You want your keyword in the meta title of the web page you’re trying to rank. |
| URL | Whether the web page contains the keyword URL | If it’s the best keyword, you want it in your root domain if possible. |
| Desc | Whether the keyword is in the meta description | It’s good to place your keyword in the first 160 characters of your meta description. |
| Head | Whether the keyword is in <h> tags on the web page | Don’t overdo this, but the keyword phrase in one set of <h> tags in the body is good. |
| CA | The number of days since Google reindexed the indicated web page | Generally, if you add content more often, your site will be reindexed by Google more often. |
The items in the chart are many factors that contribute to ranking well in the search engines for a particular keyword. The hardest part of ranking in the top 10 for “Denver personal injury lawyer” will be amassing enough backlinks.
It’s possible and fairly easy to get backlinks so I deem going after this keyword is doable with time and effort.
A brief note about backlinks. The lowest ranking website in our chart has 1,582 links to the entire site. That does not mean getting 1,583 backlinks will punt that site from it’s spot.
Not all backlinks are created equal. Generally links from higher PR sites are better.
With my software I did backlink analysis and the results showed that this site has the following backlink distribution:
- PR 5: 4
- PR 4: 14
- PR 3: 13
- PR 2: 13
- PR 1: 22
- Remainder PR 0 or PR -.
What this backlinks distribution tells me is that if a Denver law firm website managed to get 10, 20, 30 or more backlinks from PR 5 or higher websites, then there’s a really good chance it could outrank the existing site in spot #8. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s likely.
This is part of being a sniper SEO. All this data tells me exactly what must be done in order to rank in the top 10.
Rather than blindly going after “Denver personal injury lawyer” now you could methodically go for a top ranking. Note that just because you take the sniper approach does not mean you can rank without effort. You still need to optimize your website properly, publish content, and build quality backlinks to your site.
Moreover, simply doing the above analysis, you can decide quickly whether it’s even worth trying to rank for a particular keyword. In fact, you might decide to simply rank for a slew of low-competition keywords rather than going for a few or one highly competitive keywords.
Understand you do not need to limit targeting only one or two keywords on your website. Each web page is an opportunity to rank for a different keyword. Go for the most searched, yet attainable keyword on your home page, and then go after many other keywords on other pages and blog posts on your site.
Also, in my experience it’s best to go after 5 to 10 keywords at a time rather than 50 or 100 at a time. You can focus your campaign more effectively on 5 to 10 keywords rather than 50 or 100 keywords. Once you rank for your first 10 chosen keywords, go for another 10. In time, you’ll be ranking well for many keywords and enjoying a great deal of website traffic.
What software does the above keyword analyses?
It’s Market Samurai. I find it probably the most useful SEO tool in my arsenal. However, if you prefer to go the free route, you can using an amalgamation of free online tools. It takes longer going the free route … but it is free. Those tools are as follows:
- Google Keyword Tool to determine search volume.
- Keyword Spy (a Firefox browser addon) to check domain age, number of backlinks and type of backlinks.
- Yahoo! Site Explorer for checking the number and type of backlinks.
- Search in Google with “” surrounding your keyword to see the number of competing websites.
- Go to each of the top 10 websites and right click your mouse and select “view page source.” Look for the <title>, <description> and <h> tags to determine if the web page has the keyword in these meta elements.
- Go to DMOZ.org and Yahoo! Directory to see if the other studios are listed with these directories (arguably the two best directories from which to receive backlinks).
There’s no need to guess what needs to be done to rank well in Google. Stop guessing and get scientific with your SEO. The scientific approach means you’ll only do the bare minimum to rank well and you’ll be able to know when ranking on page 1 is not going to happen (like trying to rank on page 1 for “yoga” – you’d need a lot of time and resources to make that happen).
3 caveats when doing SEO:
- There are no guarantees with SEO. You could do everything the numbers indicate and still not achieve a top ranking. It’s likely you succeed, but not guaranteed.
- Using this scientific approach does not mean you’ll be able to achieve top rankings for every keyword. In fact, when you analyze the competition in this manner, you’ll discover the keywords for which you have very little chance of achieving a page 1 Google listing. This helps you avoid wasting time on a hopeless endeavor. That said, no keyword is bullet proof. With enough time, money, persistence, and dedication, you can rank well for any keyword. However, you must assess whether it’s worth it and more to the point, whether you have the time and resources.
- The number of backlinks listed by Yahoo! Site Explorer and Market Samurai are approximated. There is no software I’m aware of that is 100% accurate in revealing the number and type of backlinks to a particular website.
- There are many ways to get backlinks. Some are white hat, some grey hat, and some black hat. I won’t get into these methods here, but in the long run you’re best-served taking the white hat approach.
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