If you are fortunate enough to have reached and maintained your legal web page ranking goal, the next step is to commit to a certain level of maintenance to keep them at their present coveted position.   It can be said with reasonable assurance that throughout your attorney SEO campaign you will notice three stages, or three critical areas of importance as they relate to keywords. Occasionally you may see an initial surge or spike soon after your legal pages are published, crawled, indexed and scored. If your pages demonstrate an authority in your particular niche (and they certainly should) they may well remain buoyant, however if your legal site’s keywords have millions of competing sites with the same keywords, that initial spike can spiral downward quickly.

Managing the Rollover Effect

Following the initial spike of your legal pages ranking, you could also see something known as the roll-over effect. This is relatively common especially in legal blog sites in which there are a set number of posts on a page, then the results roll off the page into an archive, or into pages further down the line. The problem lies in those important links on your legal site; when the page rolls into an archive or a page 2, 3 or 4, the links roll over as well, causing your pages to take a significant dip in search engine ratings.

And Finally—the Comeback

Once your legal website has firmly established trust, stability, quality and relevancy, that roll-over dip which likely filled you with dismay will be relegated to only a dim memory. When you are considered an authority on your subject, and those who are searching for answers to critical questions find them in spades on your legal sites, you have likely passed the search engine algorithm litmus test.

Your Ultimate Goal

The goal you should be shooting for is to naturally attract more of the quality potential clients you want, and less traffic you don’t want, and one of the best ways to accomplish this is to consistently focus on keyword selection on an ongoing basis. Keyword management is fast becoming critical to your overall bottom line, therefore each and every keyword in your arsenal must deliver maximum bang for the buck. Be ruthless when you find under-performing keywords which are not delivering conversions. Add new keywords, but only after you have done some in-depth keyword research. Raw query logs and reports are helpful in showing you which terms your potential clients are actually searching for, so take advantage of them. Refine any broad-match keywords or phrases with exact matches; you will see your traffic refined, your conversion rates increased, and your search engine ranking climbing quickly.

Don’t Forget Negative Keywords

Many people are unfamiliar with negative keywords, which are essentially keywords that you don’t want to be found under. Again, check the raw query logs and reports, but look for queries which are really irrelevant to your legal website or legal blog, and add the terms to your negative keyword list. It’s extremely important that you monitor your keywords on a regular basis in order to gauge their continued effectiveness.

Check Out Your Competition

Just as you need to monitor your keywords, you also need to continuously monitor your closest competitors. Although you may be king of the mountain today, other law firms can gain dominance through SEO as well, toppling you from your throne without warning. Because 42% of all searchers click on the top search engine result, it is certainly a position worth fighting for and constant tending to. In the end, just as anything worthwhile requires ongoing attention, so will your legal website and legal blog. Monitor your keywords, add quality content often, strive to include quality links, and soon you will have achieved organic search engine nirvana.