Mesothelioma keywords are among the most competitive legal keywords there are, and ranking for mesothelioma-related keywords will be slow, hard, and expensive no matter where you live.
Mesothelioma lawyers pay more than $100 per click to have their ads appear on Google, and you can bet they’re spending just as much to boost their organic rankings.
Unless you have very deep pockets, don’t even bother with general keywords like “mesothelioma lawyer” and “mesothelioma attorney.” Let your competitors throw their money down that pit. You don’t have to outspend them if you can outthink them.
Estimating Traffic for Mesothelioma Keywords
Most search engine optimizers (including those at James Attorney Marketing) use a website called Wordtracker for keyword research, but it costs $69 a month. If you’re just researching keywords for your own site, Google offers a free tool that’s good enough: Google AdWords Traffic Estimator.
I ran 13 mesothelioma keywords through the Traffic Estimator and copied the results to the chart below.
The first column shows the keywords I used. The second column shows how much you’d pay for Google to show your ad. The third column shows the monthly searches in the U.S. for each keyword.[1] The fourth column shows what you get when you divide the third column by the second column (I’ve called this “Search/CPC”).
| Keyword |
Estimated Avg. CPC |
Local Monthly Searches |
Search/CPC |
| Attorneys mesothelioma |
$110.48 |
22,200 |
200.94 |
| Attorney mesothelioma |
$90.82 |
27,100 |
298.39 |
| Mesothelioma attorneys |
$77.81 |
22,200 |
285.31 |
| Lawyer mesothelioma |
$76.82 |
27,100 |
352.77 |
| Mesothelioma attorney |
$65.33 |
27,100 |
414.82 |
| Lawyers mesothelioma |
$58.99 |
22,200 |
376.33 |
| Mesothelioma lawyers |
$58.85 |
22,200 |
377.23 |
| Mesothelioma lawyer |
$55.37 |
27,100 |
489.43 |
| Mesothelioma lawsuits |
$52.81 |
1,300 |
24.62 |
| Mesothelioma lawsuit |
$31.85 |
4,400 |
138.15 |
| Lawsuit mesothelioma |
$24.97 |
4,400 |
176.21 |
| Mesothelioma |
$20.81 |
135,000 |
6487.27 |
| Lawsuits mesothelioma |
$0.00 |
1,300 |
Undefined |
Search/CPC is not a widely used metric, but I like it because it goes up as search volume increases and down as competitiveness (measured by how much people are willing to pay[2]) increases. The higher this number, the more people I can reach with less difficulty.
Refining the Keyword List
Keyword selection is a science and an art, so although I could just put my list in descending order based on Search/CPC, I’m going to make a few refinements based on my experience.
Using Local Variants
Search/CPC is very low for all of these keywords (except “mesothelioma” and “lawsuits mesothelioma”). To give you some perspective, “car accident lawyer” has a Search/CPC of 5849.02, and “injury lawyer” has a Search/CPC of 29595.43. This confirms what I already knew: that mesothelioma keywords are especially competitive.
Therefore, I’m not going to go after the generic version of any of these keywords, Instead, I’m going to preface each with the name of my city (“Irvine”).[3]
Minimizing Irrelevant Traffic
Next, I’ll demote any keywords that are likely to get mostly irrelevant traffic. Someone searching for “mesothelioma” might want a list of mesothelioma symptoms, a doctor that treats mesothelioma, or a mesothelioma charity to donate to. I’m not going to waste my limited resources on these searchers.
Keywords including the word “lawsuit” are more relevant, but I have a feeling that a lot of people searching for “lawsuits mesothelioma” are looking for news about mesothelioma lawsuits, wondering why there are so many mesothelioma lawsuits, etc.
The national search volume is pretty low for these “lawsuit” keywords, so the number of people searching for the local variant (“Irvine lawsuits mesothelioma”) is probably also low. I’ll bump these keywords to the bottom of the list, but I’ll still put them above “mesothelioma.”[4]
Suggested Mesothelioma Keywords
From favorite to least favorite, here are the 13 mesothelioma keywords I’d suggest. Replace “Irvine” with the name of your city.
- Irvine mesothelioma lawyer
- Irvine mesothelioma attorney
- Irvine mesothelioma lawyers
- Irvine lawyers mesothelioma
- Irvine lawyer mesothelioma
- Irvine attorney mesothelioma
- Irvine mesothelioma attorneys
- Irvine attorneys mesothelioma
- Irvine lawsuits mesothelioma
- Irvine lawsuit mesothelioma
- Irvine mesothelioma lawsuit
- Irvine mesothelioma lawsuits
- Irvine mesothelioma
Is This the Best We Can Do?
This list is different than what we’d get if we just ranked the keywords based on search volume, but we still attacked the problem more or less head-on (all of our keywords contained the word “mesothelioma”).
In 13 More Mesothelioma Keywords, I discuss thinking laterally to come up with even better keywords and how to incorporate misspellings in our keyword strategy (if at all).
Endnotes
[1] Some SEOs think Google’s Traffic Estimator inflates search volumes. I think they’re right, but it doesn’t bother me much. As long as Google’s numbers are inflated across the board, I can tell how popular each keyword is relative to the others, which is what I really care about. Back to text.
[2] I’m not running a pay-per-click ad campaign, but how much people are bidding gives me a rough estimate of how hard it is to rank organically for a keyword. Back to text.
[3] Google will tell me there are no searches for these local keywords, but that just means search volume is low. I’d rather be on page one for a low-volume keyword than page 20 for a high-volume one, so I’ll take my chances and assume there are some searches. Back to text.
[4] What I’d actually do is put some resources into ranking for the most highly searched of these keywords (“Irvine lawsuit mesothelioma”) and keep a close eye on its performance using conversion tracking. Back to text.
