Keyword research and search demand in legal

Three kinds of legal search, which need three different pages

Whitespark once ran 540 searches by hand in Houston, Phoenix and Denver and published a report. The report blends together six industries, just one of which is personal injury lawyers¹.

I would recommend that you file your keyword list under these three rows yourself, if you are able to judge each term's intent.

• Row one. Your result there will be determined by your Business Profile and your reviews (more on the local SEO page).
• Rows two and three. Your pages should be able to accurately explain the answers to these questions well enough to be quoted (see the AI search section).

Why volume is the wrong column to sort by

I ended up pulling the six head terms for this subject from Ahrefs in September 2026².

Those are the terms that agencies really want in their rankings, but the cost on client-side legal terms is a lot higher. Case in point, Ahrefs' list of the most expensive keywords in Google Ads has a whole tier of terms that cap at $100 a click. Virtually all of that tier is legal search terms like mesothelioma attorney Chicago, Los Angeles slip and fall attorney and Houston injury attorney³.

Hennessey Digital's legal keywords went up to $670 per click in some markets⁴.

In legal the economic incentives are the other way around.

A lot of the 9,000-search, $2 terms out there sound fabulous, but are mostly searched by students, rubberneckers and people in other states.

The questions no keyword tool will ever show you

This is the part that should change a firm's keyword research. If you think about it, when you ask an AI system something, you get the results of several related searches under one answer. Google specifically documents this as query fan-out⁷.

Those sub-queries were traced at scale by AirOps and their search volumes were checked⁵.

It doesn't help to have someone eagerly building a content plan from tool exports that only tell 5% of the story and ignoring the other 95% as if it's not relevant.

Clients probably search the way they speak.

"The adjuster called me the next day and offered me money."

"My landlord changed the locks while I was at work."

"My ex took the kids out of state without telling me."

So no keyword tool is going to show you these phrases. Collectively this language is carrying most of your demand.

The three sources below are free, provided you're willing to do the reading.

1. Your own intake notes and form submissions. Look at the last hundred notes and submissions. You are sitting on a goldmine having that file.
2. The questions your attorneys answer every week. Ask each attorney for ten questions that apply to your clients, and write them down. Google wants to make sure your readers are getting these questions answered.
3. Search Console, sorted by impressions where clicks are low. A lot of people see your page (impressions), but only a couple click through (clicks). So obviously Google thinks your site is nearly relevant for these searches.

Webris's guide is correct that intent beats volume and that bottom-funnel terms convert¹³, but it and the other three leading guides are silent about where the language should come from. The language comes from the firm, both its intake notes and its attorneys¹⁴.

How to group what you collect into pages

There is a lot that can go wrong at the grouping stage, and it usually does. Now how's all of that going to fit on one enormous page per practice area?

So here is how grouping works in practice.

• One page per question, with the question as the heading and the answer in the first two sentences
• A practice area page as the hub, answering the main commercial question and linking out to the question pages
• City pages only where something is true of that city (the test on the content page)
• Cross-links between the question pages, for the breadth these systems reward when they merge results⁶

Which questions to take first

Notice the speed of legal consumers acting on a problem in FindLaw's survey⁹.

• 56% acted within a week of realising they had a legal issue, and 16% within a day
• Of those who found an attorney online, 82% used reviews
• 40% said reviews were their primary source when deciding who to contact
• One in six searched for video, and of those 79% used YouTube

What changes is the order of the work.

1. Urgency questions first. The client acting within a day reads the first page and calls the firm. Deadlines, what to do first and whether to speak to the insurer.
2. The review profile is part of the keyword plan. If reviews aren't a top source of trust for you, then I'd say don't bother ranking.
3. Video answers to the same questions, the strongest off-site AI signal measured so far (see the off-site page).

In general a lot of the best keyword work is not a keyword task at all.

One rules check that belongs inside keyword research

Florida lawyers answer to the Bar's rules, which prohibit lawyers from advertising for legal work outside their current practice¹².

The rule kicks in and starts limiting the pages that we've proposed from our expansion into adjacent areas.

How I build a keyword plan for a firm

1. Find out what cases the partners do want more of. Frequent cases and profitable cases are different and require different priorities. But partners struggle to agree on an exact list.
2. Cost per click pulled alongside volume, with the list sorted by value.
3. Find out what sites are ranking well in Google for each term.
4. Read the last hundred intake notes and lift the client phrasing.
5. Ten questions from each attorney, cross-checked against Search Console impressions and Bing's grounding queries.
6. Everything grouped into questions, with one page per question and one job per page.
7. Each group sorted into ready to hire, working it out or researching. The three kinds themselves decide which answer to build (profile and reviews, a practice page or a short quotable page), and how to build it.
8. The expansion list checked against the state's rules before anything gets written.

But the plan that comes out is usually shorter than most firms expect. It brings up pages with fees, timelines, next steps and other questions the attorneys answer every week.