One of the most common questions I get when talking to a potential client is “How do I know if my website can compete in my market?”

It’s a great question…and I want to show you how to find out.

All you need to do is enter your town or city, your practice area and follow it up with lawyer and attorney. For example, let’s say you are a criminal attorney that practices is Waco, Texas.

So you hop on the big G and enter ‘waco texas criminal lawyer’ and the top 10 results pop-up like so.

Now look up at the top right of the image of this image – it’s a cut-out of the top right of the Google search page results for his term. See the ‘118,000 for waco texas criminal lawyer’. That means that there are 118,000 web pages he’s competing with (by the way, Google will give you this info on every search you ever do – and the number changes every day).

Now that looks like a lot of competition, right? Wrong.

If that number is less than 500,000, it’s a term you can compete for….and with a bit of effort and time – dominate the search engines for that particular term.

Now let’s say this attorney in Waco is ambitious and wants to target criminal searches for the entire State of Texas. He plans on offering free consultations and pick and choose the cases he wants (Federal) and refer the rest out (which is smart).

So he hops back online and types in ‘texas criminal lawyer’ and sees 1,470,000 results for this term. See the image below.

Damn, there goes his statewide plan. Conventional thinking says the number is to big to challenge.

Not so fast. There’s one more piece of information G will give us that will let us see how competitive this term really is.

So this attorney types in “texas criminal lawyer” – just like I show here with double quotes.

Now it shows 13,300 results. See the image below – top right.

These results are web pages that have that EXACT TERM. And this number is a more accurate figure of the actual number of competitors.

Anything less than 20,000….can be dominated as well. Again, with a little time and effort. So go ahead and do a search in your neck-of-the-woods and see what the competition looks like.