Every firm already has a keyword list. It's sitting on its competitors' websites.
Google's Keyword Planner can read a law firm's site and hand back the searches its pages are built around. In our example market, Las Vegas, we pointed it at 12 sites run by firms with live Google Search ads, and it came back with 13,552 different ideas. Your market's count will differ. The method won't.
Here's the catch. A list like that isn't a keyword list. It's a pile of raw material, and most of the work is deciding what never gets near an ad. This chapter is the sorting: who to study, what to keep, what to block, and how to group what's left so Chapter 4's one-page-per-case structure has something to hold.
Google's Ad Preview Tool Shows Who Bids on Your Searches. Clicking a Rival's Ad Only Spends Their Money.
Start by finding out who is actually advertising for the cases you want. In your account's Troubleshooting menu sits the Ad preview and diagnosis tool. Type a search, set the location to your market, and it shows you the results page, ads included, as someone there would see it.
Google recommends it over simply searching yourself, because it doesn't pile up impressions on your own ads and skew their numbers. Clicking is worse: never tap a competitor's ad to see where it leads. You'll spend their money and learn almost nothing the preview couldn't show you.
Run it on a phone setting as well as a desktop one. In our example market, a phone search for "personal injury lawyer" opened with a block of Google's Local Services ads, three firms with star ratings and call buttons, which our desktop capture of the same search didn't show. Note which firms appear on every case type and which only show up for one, and whether directories are buying the same searches you want. Write down the firms that show up for your main case types. Then open Keyword Planner, choose to start with a website, paste in the first rival's address and set the location to your market. Planner reads that site and suggests the searches it relates to, with monthly volumes and a bid range for each. Repeat for each rival, and once more with your own site. That last pass shows how Google reads your firm, which is not always how you'd describe it.
Twelve Rival Websites Returned 13,552 Ideas. In Bankruptcy, 92% Never Mention a Lawyer.
The first thing to notice about the list is how much of it isn't anyone looking to hire.
We counted how many ideas from each competitor's site contain "lawyer," "attorney," "law firm," "legal" or "abogado." The range was enormous:
- Large injury firm: 91%
- Injury firm with Spanish ads: 89%
- Employment firm: 88%
- Immigration firm: 87%
- Lawyer marketplace: 85%
- Family law firm: 81%
- Multi-practice firm: 80%
- National injury brand: 77%
- Criminal defense and DUI firm: 58%
- Estate and probate firm: 45%
- Workers' compensation firm: 21%
- Bankruptcy firm: 8%
The rest are topic searches. "Las vegas dui laws" draws 2,400 a month in our example market. "Chapter 7 vs 13" and "workers compensation" are in there too. Some of those people will hire a lawyer eventually. Many are reading up, deciding whether they need one, or planning to file on their own.
None of them belong in a launch keyword list. The launch list is for the searches that already ask for a lawyer by case type, the ones Chapter 2 called hiring searches. The topic searches go in a parking lot. Chapter 6 explains how broad match, later in the account's life, finds the ones that convert.
"Free Consultation" Is a Hiring Search. "Pro Bono" and "Legal Aid" Are a Search for Someone Else.
The method says to weed out searches that signal someone shopping for cheap or free. In most industries that's simple. In law it needs a sharper knife, because "free" shows up in two very different kinds of search.
The first is the free consultation. Eight of the 11 law firms we profiled offer one, and searchers know it. "Free consultation lawyer las vegas" draws 210 a month in our example market, and similar searches came back from every one of the 12 competitor sites. That person wants a lawyer and expects to talk to one at no cost first. That's a hiring search. Keep it.
The second is the search for someone who won't charge at all. "Pro bono lawyers las vegas" draws 320 a month, and "legal aid in las vegas nevada" draws 260. Pro bono, legal aid and "free legal advice" searches came back from 10 of the 12 competitor sites, usually in small numbers. Those people are looking for a legal aid office, a clinic or a volunteer lawyer. Unless your firm takes pro bono or legal aid referrals, they can't become your clients, and every click from them is money spent explaining that.
So "pro bono," "legal aid," "free legal advice" and "free lawyer" (when it isn't followed by "consultation") go on the negative list. "Free consultation" stays. If your firm does take pro bono cases or contracts with a legal aid program, treat those words as a deliberate choice rather than an automatic block, the way a medical practice decides for itself whether to chase searches by insurance plan.
The pile is small. That's not a reason to skip it. Small, cheap and wrong is how a budget leaks for a year without anyone noticing.
Eleven of 12 Rival Sites Handed Back Their Own Name. Those Go on the Negative List.
Seed Keyword Planner with a competitor's website and it will hand you that competitor's name. Eleven of our 12 seeds did. One local injury firm's name, in its many variations, drew 2,900 searches a month. A national injury brand's site came back with 282 variations of its own name.
Every one of those is a negative keyword. A person typing a specific firm's name already chose that firm. Showing them your ad wins you a confused click at best. Directories come along too (Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, Super Lawyers), and so do job searches like "[firm name] jobs." Block them all.
Some firms deliberately bid on rivals' names in a separate competitor campaign. That's a big if, and for lawyers it's bigger still: state bars disagree about whether it's allowed, and some that allow it attach conditions. Chapter 14 covers the rules state by state. Until you've read them, competitor names belong on the negative list, not in a campaign.
Your own firm's name, and each of your lawyers' names, go in a separate brand campaign, as Chapter 2 described. They're cheap, they protect the client who already chose you, and they shouldn't share a budget with searches for strangers.
Thirty-Four Ways to Type One Injury Search Still Count as One Search.
Once the junk is out, what's left is the real list, and it's smaller than it looks.
Keyword Planner groups searches that mean the same thing. In our example market, 34 different phrasings of "personal injury lawyer" plus the city, from "injury attorney las vegas nv" to "las vegas personal injury law firms," all show the same 6,600 monthly searches and the same bid range. They're one search typed 34 ways. "Lawyer" and "attorney" share counts the same way. Add them up and you'll think the market is 34 times bigger than it is.
So don't build 34 ad groups. Build one per case type, as Chapter 4 laid out, and put about half a dozen of the clearest phrasings in it, in exact match at launch. Exact match already catches close variants of the same meaning, so you don't need every spelling of every word.
A car accident ad group might hold "car accident lawyer," "car accident attorney," "car accident lawyer near me," "auto accident lawyer" and "car crash lawyer," and nothing else. A truck accident group gets its own handful, and so on. Each group is small enough that a single ad can repeat its words back, which is the whole point of Chapter 4.
The bid range Planner shows next to each keyword deserves a careful read too. By Google's own definition, the two numbers sit near the 20th and 80th percentiles of past top-spot bids: most firms that won a top position paid somewhere between them. It's a range of what others have paid, not a quote for what you'll pay, and in a small market with little data Google warns the estimates get less accurate.
A Negative List Is Never Finished. Broad Match Will Prove It.
The negative list you build before launch is a first draft. A sensible one for most firms starts with:
- Free help: pro bono, legal aid, free legal advice, free lawyer
- Careers: jobs, salary, hiring, paralegal, law school, internship
- Do it yourself: forms, template, how to file, without a lawyer, LegalZoom
- Names: every rival firm, every rival lawyer, and the directories
Adjust it to your practice. A bankruptcy firm that offers paid help with filing might keep "how to file." A firm that hires through Google Ads keeps its job searches in a separate campaign, never in the case campaigns. It works fine while the account runs on exact match, because exact match only reaches searches close to your keywords.
That changes when Exploration launches. Exploration, the name we use for the broad match copy of the account, usually starts a couple of months in and bids toward a target cost per signed case. Broad match reaches searches you'd never have listed, including every rival firm, directory and free clinic in the market. Budget ten minutes every morning of that first month for the search terms report; rival firms, free clinics and job hunters show up fast.
One detail catches firms out. Google's negative keywords don't match close variants, so blocking a rival firm's name doesn't block its misspellings or plurals. If a name gets misspelled in the search terms, add that spelling too.
A Rival's Website Can't List Every Way a Client Searches. Chapter 6 Covers the Rest.
The cleaned-up list now holds two kinds of searches: the predictable ones a firm could write down in an afternoon, and the long tail of odd, specific searches nobody would think to list. Chapter 6 shows how the account handles each, exact match first and broad match once the conversions are flowing.
See every chapter on the guide home. Rather have the list built and cleaned up for you? See our Google Ads management.
