Keyword research for law firms: finding the searches that bring clients

SEO9 min readReviewed 11 September 2026

Everything below is the long version, with a complete worked example. If you want the wider context first, start with our law firm SEO guide.

Why most law firm keyword lists are wrong

The typical list is generated by typing "lawyer" into a keyword tool, sorting by search volume and taking the top thirty rows. It produces a spreadsheet that looks impressive and is close to useless, for three reasons.

• It is sorted by the wrong column. Volume is the least important of the three variables that matter. A term searched 1,000 times a month by law students, journalists and people trying to represent themselves is worth less to a firm than one searched 30 times a month by someone who has just been served.
• It ignores who you are. "Compensation lawyer" is a fine keyword and a terrible target for a two-partner suburban firm competing against national personal injury advertisers with seven-figure media budgets.
• It is written in American. More on this next, because it is the single most common fault in guides imported from the US.

Australians search "lawyer" and "solicitor", not "attorney"

Almost every keyword guide you’ll find on this topic was written for the American market, and it quietly poisons the output. "Attorney" has effectively no Australian search volume outside people looking for a power of attorney, which is a completely different intent and will pull your page toward wills and estates whether you meant it to or not.

The Australian vocabulary splits in ways worth knowing:

• "Lawyer" and "solicitor" are both used heavily and are not interchangeable in search behaviour. In our experience "lawyer" skews toward consumer matters (family, criminal, injury) and "solicitor" skews toward transactional and professional ones (conveyancing, wills, commercial). Check both; often you need both, on the same page.
• "Barrister" is a distinct search with distinct intent. Unless you take direct briefs, it is usually the wrong target.
• Practice-area names differ. Australians search "conveyancing", not "real estate closing". They search "AVO" in NSW and "intervention order" in Victoria for the same underlying matter. They search "workers comp" far more than "workers’ compensation".
• State and territory qualifiers carry real weight, because the law genuinely differs. "Divorce NSW" and "divorce Queensland" are separate searches by people who know their state matters.

Start with your matter files, not a keyword tool

The most valuable input is already in your practice management system. Before opening any tool, pull the last hundred matters and answer three questions:

• Which matter types were most profitable? Not most numerous, most profitable. These are what you want more of.
• Where did those clients come from geographically? Not where your office is, where the clients are. These are frequently different suburbs, and the difference is your real service area.
• What did they actually say when they called? Intake notes are a goldmine. People search using the words they use on the phone, and those words are almost never the words on your service pages. Someone rings about "my ex won’t let me see the kids", not about "parenting arrangements and child custody disputes".

That last point is the whole game. The gap between how firms describe their services and how clients describe their problems is where the winnable keywords live.

The four keyword types a law firm needs

Every useful legal keyword falls into one of four buckets. A healthy site covers all four, on different pages.

The middle row is where most Australian firms should concentrate first. Suburb-qualified hiring terms have modest volume, low competition relative to the broad term, and the highest proportion of searchers who will actually pick up the phone. This is also why local SEO and keyword research are really the same exercise for a firm with a physical catchment, our local SEO guide covers the map-pack side of it.

How to read volume, difficulty and intent without over-thinking it

You need three judgements per keyword, in this order of importance.

Intent. Would someone searching this hire a lawyer today? Read the current page-one results, not the keyword itself, Google has already decided what the term means. If page one is government pages and legal aid factsheets, Google thinks the searcher wants free information, and your service page will not rank there no matter how well written it is.

Winnability. Look at who currently ranks. If it is firms roughly your size and shape, you can compete. If it is LawAccess, Legal Aid, a state court, or a national firm with a decade of links, you cannot, not yet. Keyword difficulty scores from tools are a rough proxy for this, but actually looking at the SERP is faster and more accurate.

Volume. Last, and treat it loosely. Tool volumes are estimates and are frequently wrong at the suburb level, often reporting zero for terms that demonstrably produce enquiries. For a law firm, where a single matter can be worth thousands, a keyword with "10-100 searches per month" is not a rounding error. It is a page worth writing.

Which tools are worth paying for

Honestly: none of them, if you are doing this once for your own firm.

• Google Keyword Planner, free with a Google Ads account, gives Australian volume ranges and, critically, cost-per-click data. CPC is the most underrated signal in the whole exercise: advertisers only bid high on terms that convert, so a high CPC is direct evidence of commercial intent. See our Google Ads guide for what those numbers mean in legal.
• Google itself, autocomplete, "People also ask" and "Related searches" at the bottom of the page will hand you the question-shaped terms your clients actually type. Free, and sourced from real searches rather than a model.
• Google Search Console, once your site has been live a few months, this shows the terms you are already appearing for. Terms sitting on page two or three are the cheapest wins available to any firm.
• Semrush or Ahrefs, worth it if you want to see which keywords your competitors rank for and where they are weak. That competitor visibility is the real product; the volume data is broadly comparable to the free options.

Mapping keywords to pages so you stop competing with yourself

The most common technical fault we see on law firm sites is two or three pages targeting the same search. A firm writes a family law service page, then a divorce page, then a blog article about divorce, all optimised for "divorce lawyer". Google has to choose one, usually picks the weakest, and all three underperform.

The fix is a keyword map: a single document assigning one primary keyword to each page, with its close variants listed underneath. Rules that keep it clean:

• One primary keyword per page. Variants that mean the same thing share the page; different intents get different pages.
• If two pages would target near-identical terms, merge them. One strong page beats two thin ones, every time.
• Commercial terms go on service and location pages. Question terms go on blog articles. Do not put hiring intent on a blog post or research intent on a service page.
• Every blog article should link up to the commercial page it supports. That is how research traffic eventually turns into enquiries, and how the article passes authority to the page that converts.

A worked example: a two-partner family firm in Parramatta

Here is what this looks like finished. Fictional firm, realistic map. Note that the useful part is not the keywords we kept, it is the reasoning for the ones we rejected.

Six pages, a clear reason for each, and five explicit rejections so nobody re-litigates them in three months. That is a finished keyword map. The same exercise runs identically for conveyancing, wills and estates or any other practice area, only the vocabulary changes.

When to stop researching and start writing

Keyword research has sharply diminishing returns. Once you have one solid primary term for each page you intend to build over the next quarter, stop. A map of twenty well-chosen keywords that gets built is worth more than a spreadsheet of four hundred that sits in a drawer.

Revisit it every six months, and check Search Console in between, the terms you are already appearing for on page two are almost always a better next move than anything a tool will suggest. If you would rather have someone do this against your actual market and competitors, a free growth plan includes the keyword map for your practice areas and region, or our marketing plan template gives you the structure to do it yourself.