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Search engine tools for lawyers

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: February 5, 2021

Content is king on websites, blogs or wherever Google search can penetrate. The more original your post, the more Google search likes you.
And if you’re creating content that you want potential clients to see, you need to have Google search like it.
Nevertheless, search engine optimization (SEO) is still the key to getting Google to pay attention to your page in the first place and SEO optimization is the key to that.
There are several online services that help with basic SEO by checking or suggesting key words. Here they are explained thanks to Good2BSocial.
The first two are, as you may imagine, from Google itself.
Google Keyword Planner is a part of your Google Ads account (if you don’t have one of those, you need to sign up for one). The premise of this service is simple: perform a simple word search, and all of the metrics of that word show up. You’ll get stats like search volume, number of monthly searches, and the cost of each click. It finds the best matching search words for your original search term. It is free with your Google ads account.
The extremely annoying Google Autocomplete can actually be used as a SEO tool. Typing any term into the search window creates a drop-down menu that will list similar terms. Of course, many of those terms will reflect recent searches, so the pro tip to obviate that is to use the Chrome browser in incognito mode. This will not engage your cookies.
Next up is Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest (https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest). As of this writing this is still free. It gives powerful tools and suggestions for both key words and Pay Per Click (PPC) terms. Since it is outside Google’s ecosystem, it can allow you to find terms that are not yet worn out in Google search.
Online ad company WordStream has a more sophisticated tool that can search within a context of specific market niches. First 20 searches are free; after that, it’ll cost you.
Finally, if you’re just getting started with all this, SEMRush (https://www.semrush.com) is specifically designed for startups as a one-stop shop for all search engine and social media marketing.


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