Competitor Keyword Research for Law Firms: What Your Rivals Are Actually Ranking For

To find the keywords your competitor law firms rank for, you need three things: the right tools, their domain names, and about two hours. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz will export every keyword a competitor ranks for — positions, search volume, traffic estimates, and the specific URLs doing the ranking. That’s your starting inventory. A proper law firm competitor keyword analysis doesn’t stop at “what are they ranking for” — it answers the more useful question: where are they weak, and can I be stronger there? This post walks through that process step by step, from pulling the data to deciding what to build.

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Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors (Not Who You Think They Are)

Your competitive set for SEO purposes is not necessarily who you compete with in the courtroom or at referral lunches. It’s whoever is taking up the first-page real estate for the searches your potential clients are running.

Start with a handful of your most important practice area searches — “Tampa personal injury attorney,” “divorce lawyer Hillsborough County,” whatever fits your practice. Look at page one. Note the domains that appear repeatedly across multiple queries. Those are your SEO competitors.

You’ll often find a mix of: individual firm websites, aggregator directories like FindLaw or Avvo, and sometimes law school or bar association pages. For this exercise, focus on the individual firm websites. Directories are a different problem — if you want the full picture on whether those listings are worth your time, FindLaw and Martindale: Are Directory Listings Still Worth It? is worth reading separately.

Once you have three to five competitor domains, you’re ready to pull data.

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Step 2: Pull Their Full Keyword Profile

In Semrush or Ahrefs, run an Organic Research report on each competitor domain. Export everything. You’re looking at:

• Every keyword they rank for in positions 1–20
• Which page on their site ranks for each keyword
• Estimated monthly search volume for each term
• Their ranking position and a rough traffic estimate

This list will be long — often thousands of rows for an established firm. Don’t panic. You’re going to filter it.

Sort by estimated traffic first, then by position. The keywords driving actual visits are in positions one through ten and have at least some search volume. Anything below position 20 is noise for now.

Also look at the page-level breakdown. If one competitor’s personal injury practice area page ranks for 40 different keyword variations and yours ranks for four, that’s a content gap that has nothing to do with luck.

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Step 3: Run a Keyword Gap Analysis

This is where the law firm competitor keyword analysis gets actionable. Most tools have a dedicated Keyword Gap or Content Gap feature. You input your domain and two or three competitor domains, and it returns keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t — filtered by volume and difficulty.

What you’re hunting for:

High-value gaps: Practice area terms with real search volume where you have no page at all. If a competitor ranks for “truck accident attorney Tampa” and you don’t have a dedicated truck accident page, that’s a gap you can close with a single well-built landing page.

Topic gaps: Informational queries where competitors have FAQ pages, blog posts, or guides and you have nothing. “How long does a personal injury case take in Florida” might not be a direct client-acquisition keyword, but it puts you in front of people at the beginning of their research process.

Geographic gaps: Competitors often build out county-level or city-level pages for surrounding markets and rank for terms you haven’t even targeted. If you serve Pinellas and Pasco counties but your site only mentions Tampa, you’re invisible to a significant search audience. Local Search Dominance: How Law Firms Win Their County covers the mechanics of this in detail.

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Step 4: Assess Their Content Quality — Not Just Coverage

Ranking for a keyword doesn’t mean a competitor has that topic locked up forever. Pull the actual pages that are ranking and read them critically.

Ask:

• Is the page thin? Generic? Could it have been written by someone who has never handled this type of case?
• Does it actually address what someone searching that term needs to know?
• Is it years old with no updates?
• Does it convert, or does it just exist?

If a competitor ranks for a high-value term with a mediocre 400-word page, that’s a displacement opportunity. You don’t copy their page — you build a substantially better one. More depth, better structure, real answers to real questions, and a clear path to contact. If you need a framework for what “better” actually means at the conversion level, Practice Area Landing Pages That Convert (Not Just Rank) is a good reference.

This is how you out-content a competitor without copying them. You’re not matching what they published — you’re publishing what they should have published.

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Step 5: Look at Their Technical and Local Signals Too

Keyword coverage explains a lot. It doesn’t explain everything.

If a competitor consistently outranks you despite thinner content, there are usually a few other factors at play:

Domain authority and backlinks: Older firms with more history often have more referring domains. Check their backlink profile — you may find citation opportunities and local links you’re missing.

Google Business Profile: For local searches, the map pack often appears above organic results. A well-optimized GBP can dominate even when the underlying website is mediocre. If you haven’t gone deep on GBP optimization, Google Business Profile Optimization for Law Firms: Beyond the Basics is worth your time.

Technical health: A faster, cleaner, mobile-optimized site gets the benefit of the doubt from Google. If your site has technical issues — crawl errors, slow load times, or mobile usability problems — competitor keyword research won’t save you. Check Mobile-First Indexing and Law Firm Websites: Is Yours Actually Mobile-Friendly? if you haven’t confirmed your site is in good shape.

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Step 6: Prioritize What to Build First

You now have a list of gaps. You cannot close all of them at once, and you shouldn’t try. Prioritize by:

1. Search volume × conversion intent: Direct practice area terms with clear commercial intent come before informational queries.
2. Competitive difficulty: Start with gaps where competitors are weakest — thin pages, low-authority domains, outdated content.
3. Revenue alignment: Close gaps in the practice areas that drive the most retained clients first. There’s no point ranking for a high-volume term in a practice area you barely staff.

If you’re tracking this work properly, you’ll want a system for measuring whether the content you build actually moves the needle. Measuring Real Marketing ROI: Metrics That Matter (Not Vanity Metrics) gives you the framework for that.

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One More Thing: Do This Quarterly

Competitor keyword analysis is not a one-time project. Rankings shift, competitors publish new content, and Google’s algorithm updates reshuffle the deck regularly. If a firm that was ranking below you suddenly surges past you, you want to catch it early — not six months later when they’ve built a lead. Set a reminder to re-run this analysis every quarter. It takes less time once you have a baseline.

If your site has already lost ground and you’re trying to understand why, The SEO Graveyard: Why Law Firm Websites Stop Ranking (And How to Resurrect Them) covers the most common causes and the recovery path.

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If you’d like help running a law firm competitor keyword analysis for your market — pulling the data, identifying the real gaps, and building a content plan that targets them — get in touch. This is a defined process with defined outputs, and it’s considerably faster when you’re not starting from scratch.

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Related: Practice Area Landing Pages That Convert (Not Just Rank) | Local Search Dominance: How Law Firms Win Their County