The Formula That Tells You
Which Keywords to Work On First

When we onboarded Scarsdale Solicitors, they were starting from zero. No organic clicks. No impressions to speak of. Their site existed, but Google wasn’t sending it any traffic. Three months later, they were pulling 1,600 clicks per month from organic search and their impressions had gone from flat zero to over 700,000 per month. That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen by guessing which keywords to target first.

The moment Scarsdale started appearing in GSC with real data — a few weeks into our engagement — we had the same problem every law firm hits: hundreds of keywords showing up, no clear way to decide which ones deserve attention. Sorted by impressions, the top keyword was “solicitor near me” with huge volume but a position nowhere near page one. Sorted by position, the top was some hyper-specific long-tail question with nine impressions a month. Neither sort order was useful.

We’d been running into this across every law firm we work with. GSC gives you two ways to look at your keywords and both of them mislead you. Impressions tell you what people search for but not whether you’re anywhere close to winning those clicks. Position tells you where you rank but not whether anyone actually searches those terms.

So we built a scoring system that combines the two. We call it Potential Rank, and it’s the reason Scarsdale’s growth curve looked the way it did.

How the Formula Works

The idea is dead simple. Impressions represent the size of the opportunity. Position represents how close you are to capturing it. Divide one by the other and you get a single number that tells you where your effort will produce the most traffic in the shortest time.

Potential Rank = Impressions ÷ Average Position

That’s it. Not a machine learning model. Not a proprietary algorithm with 47 inputs. Division.

A keyword with 8,000 impressions at position 6 scores 1,333. A keyword with 40,000 impressions at position 50 scores 800. The first keyword is a better use of your time right now — you’re already close to positions that get clicked, and the demand is real. The second keyword has more total opportunity, but you’d need to climb 40+ positions to capture any of it. That’s months of work with no guarantee.

When we first started using this across our client accounts, the thing that hit us was how obvious it seemed in hindsight. We’d been doing a cruder version manually for years — filter GSC to positions 4-20, sort by impressions, eyeball the list. But the single-score approach is cleaner, faster, and it scales. You can run it across 5,000 keywords in a spreadsheet and have your priority list in ten minutes.

Why This Hits Different for Law Firms

Legal keywords have a characteristic that makes this formula especially useful: the gap between informational and transactional intent is massive, and the revenue per keyword varies wildly.

“What to do after a car accident” might get 30,000 impressions. “Car accident lawyer Houston” might get 4,000. But that second keyword is worth 50 times more per click because the person typing it is ready to hire someone. If you rank 11th for it — just barely off page one — bumping to position 6 or 7 could mean multiple signed cases per month.

Potential Rank surfaces exactly these opportunities. High impressions plus close position equals high score. For law firms, the keywords that score highest tend to be the “[practice area] lawyer [city]” terms and the high-intent question queries where you’re already in striking distance.

Here’s the pattern we see across every law firm GSC account we manage:

The quick wins live in positions 5-15. These keywords get real impressions because Google is already showing your pages for them. You’re close enough that on-page improvements, better internal linking, or a content refresh can push them into the top 3-5 spots where the majority of clicks actually happen. This is where the money is.

The vanity keywords live at position 1 for terms nobody searches. Every law firm has dozens of position-1 rankings for hyper-specific long-tail questions that get searched twice a month. Sorting by position makes these look like victories. Potential Rank correctly pushes them to the bottom of your priority list where they belong.

The moonshot keywords sit at position 40+ with huge impression counts. These are real opportunities — eventually. But working on them now, before you’ve captured the closer wins, is like skipping past four open parking spots to circle the lot looking for one closer to the door. Potential Rank tells you to take the open spot.

What This Looked Like for Scarsdale Solicitors

When Scarsdale’s site started gaining traction — going from zero to 700K monthly impressions within the first three months — we suddenly had thousands of keywords to work with. The question shifted from “how do we get visibility” to “we have visibility everywhere, where do we push hardest?” We ran Potential Rank across the full keyword set and the top 20 scores told us exactly where to spend our effort.

Their employment law page ranked 11th for “unfair dismissal solicitor” — sitting just off page one with 4,800 monthly impressions. Potential Rank score: 436. The page was about 500 words, no FAQ section, no internal links coming in from their blog. It read like it had been written in 2021 and never touched since. We rewrote it to 1,800 words, added a structured FAQ covering the specific questions people ask before calling an employment solicitor, built schema markup into the FAQ, and linked to it from four existing blog posts that mentioned employment disputes in passing. It hit position 5 within five weeks. Position 3 by week nine.

Meanwhile, Scarsdale had been planning to publish a new blog post targeting “constructive dismissal vs unfair dismissal explained” — a term where they ranked 48th. Same amount of effort, fraction of the result. The data told us to fix the page that was already close to winning before chasing something buried on page five. Every time, this is the right call.

Their commercial property page was another one. Three keyword variations — “commercial property solicitor,” “commercial lease solicitor,” and “business property lawyer” — all pointed to the same page and all scored in the top 15 of their Potential Rank list. That was one page optimization, not three separate projects. We expanded the content, tightened the title tag, and added internal links from the commercial services hub page. All three keywords moved.

The keyword their managing partner had been most excited about? “Best solicitor in Scarsdale.” Position 3, 40 impressions a month. It felt like a win. Potential Rank scored it at 13. We didn’t touch it. There was nothing to gain.

How to Run This for Your Firm

You don’t need special software. You need Google Search Console access and a spreadsheet.

Export Your GSC Data

Go to Search Console, then Performance, then Search Results. Set your date range to the last 3 months — enough data to smooth out fluctuations, recent enough to reflect current rankings. Click Export and grab the Queries tab.

You’ll get five columns: Query, Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position.

Add the Potential Rank Column

In a new column, divide Impressions by Position for each row. That’s your Potential Rank score. Sort descending. Done.

If you want to get slightly more sophisticated, you can weight the formula:

Weighted Potential Rank = Impressions ÷ (Position ^ 0.8)

The exponent softens the position penalty slightly, giving more credit to keywords where you rank 15th-20th with very high impressions. Honestly, the basic division works fine for most firms. Don’t overcomplicate it until you’ve run the basic version and acted on the results.

Filter Out the Noise

Before you start optimizing, clean the list:

Remove branded terms. Your firm name, your attorneys’ names, variations of your brand — these will often score high because you rank well and get decent impressions, but they don’t need optimization. You already own them.

Remove irrelevant queries. GSC sometimes attributes impressions to queries that don’t match your services. A family law firm might show impressions for criminal defense terms if Google tested their site briefly. Remove anything that isn’t a real target for your practice.

What you’re left with is a ranked list of keywords where your optimization effort will produce the most traffic growth, in order.

Map Keywords to Pages

For each high-scoring keyword, figure out which page on your site currently ranks for it. GSC’s Pages tab shows this, or use the page filter in the Performance report for each keyword.

This matters because the action item usually isn’t “write new content.” Most of the time the page already exists — it just needs work. A practice area page ranking 8th might need a sharper title tag, a more complete FAQ section, stronger internal links from your blog, or updated information. That’s a focused optimization task, not a from-scratch writing project.

Audit Each Priority Page

Group your high-scoring keywords by page. Then look at each one:

Is the keyword in the title tag and H1? Sounds basic. You’d be surprised how often a page ranks 8th for a keyword that doesn’t appear in the title. This was the case with two of Scarsdale’s top-scoring pages. Fixed in five minutes, moved two positions within a month.

Does the content match search intent? Look at what’s ranking in positions 1-3 for that keyword. If the top results are 2,500-word guides and your page is a 400-word service description, the gap is obvious.

Is the page receiving internal links? Blog posts, other practice area pages, your homepage — internal links tell Google which pages matter most. A page with high Potential Rank keywords but few internal links is leaving free ranking improvements on the table.

Are there technical gaps? Missing schema markup, no FAQ section, thin meta description, images without alt text. Quick fixes that can move a page from position 8 to position 5 without a content overhaul. Our technical SEO guide covers the full checklist.

Where the Formula Stops Being Useful

Potential Rank is a prioritization tool, not a strategy. It answers “what should I work on first?” but it doesn’t answer everything.

It doesn’t know what a keyword is worth to your firm. A keyword scoring 500 for “estate planning attorney” might generate more revenue than a keyword scoring 800 for “free legal advice online” because the first one converts to paying clients and the second one never will. You still need to layer business context on top.

It doesn’t account for competition. Two keywords might score the same, but one sits in a market where the top 5 results are national firms with massive link profiles, and the other is a local market with weaker competition. The formula doesn’t know this. You do.

It won’t catch cannibalization. If two pages on your site compete for the same keyword, Potential Rank will surface that keyword but won’t tell you the problem is internal competition. You need to identify which page should own the term and consolidate.

It only works on keywords you already rank for. By definition, if you’ve never appeared in search results for a keyword, it won’t be in your GSC data, so it won’t get a score. You still need keyword research to find net-new opportunities. Potential Rank handles the “optimize what you have” side of the equation.

These aren’t flaws. They’re boundaries. The formula does one thing well — prioritization — and you pair it with your own judgment for everything else.

How We Use This Every Month

Here’s how Potential Rank fits into our ongoing workflow across law firm clients:

First week: Export GSC data for the prior 3 months. Run the formula. Compare to last month’s scores to see what moved and what stalled. Keywords that improved in position will score differently now — some move up the priority list, some fall off because they’ve already been captured.

Priority review: Take the top 15-20 non-branded keywords. Map them to pages. Sort them into three buckets: pages that need content updates, pages that need technical fixes, and pages that need link building support.

Content calendar: The Potential Rank list directly drives what we write and what we update that month. New blog posts get planned to support the pages that rank for high-scoring keywords. Page refreshes go to the pages with the most upside. Nothing gets written on a whim.

End of month: Check whether the pages we optimized moved. If a page went from position 9 to position 5 for a keyword that had a Potential Rank score of 700, we can estimate the traffic impact and connect it to actual ROI. This closes the loop between “we optimized this” and “here’s what it was worth.”

Two hours per client for the analysis. The optimization work after that is where the real time goes — but every hour of it is pointed at the right target.

The Problem with Gut-Feel SEO

Most law firms feel like they’re guessing with SEO because they are. They look at a wall of GSC data and pick keywords based on instinct, or they let their agency decide based on whatever seems important that month, or they just write about whatever topic comes to mind and hope it lands.

That approach wastes time and budget. Scarsdale went from zero clicks to 1,600 per month in three months not because we published more content than their competitors, but because every piece of optimization was aimed at a keyword the data told us was ready to move. When you’re growing fast and impressions are climbing, the window to capture those clicks is narrow — you need to know exactly where to push.

Potential Rank replaces the guessing with arithmetic. It doesn’t tell you everything, but it answers the question that every firm with limited time and budget needs answered first: what should I focus on right now to get the biggest return?

The formula is simple. The results are not subtle. Run it once and you’ll see opportunities in your own data that you’ve been walking past for months.

For the full picture on tracking whether your optimization work actually pays off, our guide on measuring law firm SEO ROI walks through attribution setup. And if you’re still building out your local SEO foundation, get that in place first — Potential Rank works best when your site already has a baseline of rankings to work from.