Keyword Question - Metro Suburb
-
My question is about keyword selection for a small divorce law firm located outside of a major city.
My firm focuses only on family law matters, such as divorce, child support, child custody, and paternity. Divorce cases generate the most revenue. We are located outside of the Orlando, Florida metro area, in a small town about 15 miles west of Orlando.
My keyword research shows a significant amount of traffic for keywords including Orlando, such as Orlando Divorce Lawyer, Divorce Attorney Orlando, and Orlando Divorce Attorney. For my location, Winter Garden, Florida, the search volume is reported as "0" using Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool. When I use other tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, the reported volume for my physical location and surrounding cities, other than Orlando, shows a volume of "0."
We do get potential clients contacting us indicating that they found us via a Google search, and I know that we are ranking well in local search results. That's the good news. However, we are trying to increase the volume of potential clients contacting us, and it seems that the way to do that is to rank well for searches including the word "Orlando."
I know that ranking in the local results for Orlando is out of the question because my office is not physically located in Orlando. However, it does not seem to make sense to target keywords for organic search including my location and the surrounding cities because the search volume appears to be next to nothing.
So my questions are as follows:
Even though the search terms with high traffic seem to be quite competitive and my office is not located in Orlando, should I still target keywords including the Orlando location?
How should a small business approach this strategy as far as keyword usage and organization of the website? Should I have a city landing page for Orlando or should I target my main pages using keywords including "Orlando" and build city pages for the smaller, surrounding cities?
Thanks in advance for the help.
My website is located at http://www.thegrossmanlawoffice.com
-
Sounds like a great idea. I would, of course, put some unique static content on the page, as well, explaining what you do in Orlando, and then have a constantly refreshed section of lead-ins for your blog posts. I think that makes sense!
-
Miriam,
Yes, I can write about Orlando cases and other activities in Orlando. Would you recommend doing that on my blog? If I did that, would it be best to have a city page for Orlando to link to from any blog posts that mention/target "orlando?"
-
Hi AJ,
It sounds like there is some potential here. Are these involvements in Orlando something you can creatively write about? If so, I think you've found a resource for highlighting a true association with this city.
-
Thank you all for your responses so far. What you all have provided so far is very helpful for me, so thank you.
Miriam,
My firm represents clients from Central Florida and we regularly appear for hearings, trials, and mediations at the main Orange County courthouse located in downtown Orlando. We also appear at other courthouses in other areas around Orlando, such as Lake County courthouse, Osceola County courthouse, Brevard County courthouse, Seminole County courthouse, etc.
Wherever there is case filed, we appear. So, in a sense, we travel to where our client's cases are handled. Since our attorneys are licensed in Florida, we can represent anyone in the entire State in any State courthouse.
We are members of the Orange County bar association, located in downtown Orlando as well.
Does any of this information help?
-
Hi AJ,
I think of this as a double-whammy situation: you don't have an Orlando office and you're not a service area business that goes to Orlando to serve (like a plumber). If the business had either of these attributes, the solution would be easy. In the absence of this, my question would be to ask if the firm has any connection at all to Orlando. For example, a general practice doctor in the suburbs might:
-
Be on the hospital staff in Orlando
-
Give lectures in Orlando
-
Attend conferences in Orlando
-
Give clinics in Orlando.
-
Sponsor something in Orlando, like a little league team, a women's shelter, etc.
Can the firm come up with some real world connections of these kinds that would provide things to write about/blog about?
If not, then there is no real connection between your firm and the major city, and the website has to reflect this. Obviously, you can state that you are 10 miles from Orlando or something along those lines, but that in and of itself is unlikely to earn extra visibility for the practice.
-
-
We see this exact 'issue' with hotels all of the time. Start with 'near' terms: 'near Orlando' or 'greater Orlando area' you will get those faster - they will drive some traffic and you will increase your relevance for broader 'orlando' terms. Do not do this to the detriment of your 'Winter Garden' terms. I think "Winter Garden Law Firms near Orlando" or similar would be a good start.
Good luck
-
On the Google places front -
You are absolutely right. Since you do not have a physical listing, you cannot rank in Google places. However all is not lost.
On the on page front -
Targeting keywords related to Orlando on your main static pages would not be ethical for the simple reason that you do not have a physical presence in Orlando. However I also understand your perspective of increasing your reach and targeting people from different Geo locations.
You will definitely need to create new pages for targeting geo specific keywords. Three types of pages need to be created -
- Primary Page - This page will talk about your services for a specific location
- Secondary Pages - The aim of these pages would be to support your primary page, for example how laws in orlando differ from other location, Case studies of cases in orlando etc
- Fresh Content - I noticed that you have a blog section, need to leverage this section by writing orlando specific content (can be a news, can be an article etc)
- Cross Promotion on various platforms - Once you have the on page side of things settled, focus on promoting the new sections via other channels that you might own (Facebook, Twitter etc)
The combination of all the above techniques should help you achieve a decent standing on the organic front. Unfortunately without a physical location, Google places will be a lost cause.
- Sajeet
-
Yes target Orlando. At the very least you will pick up some long tail search. I would target Orlando on the home page.
I would also set up pages for every single town/village/region that surrounds you. Google reporting is not 100% accurate - it is likely there are searches for obscure towns despite google reporting none. You may only be optimising a page for one or two searchs per 6 months but if you convert that customer surely it would be worth the investment (given legal fees are typically high)?
l
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
2 Websites Targeting Similar Keywords
One of my clients is set on setting up another website targeting some of the keywords/services on the main site. One of the services they offer gets traffic from natural search and also Adwords but doesn't convert well for this service. For other services (which are often utilized at the same time by the customers) the site converts well. My client feels that... "people are not converting on the main site because they click on the page and realise that we are a wider company. From this they probably work out that we don’t actually produce Green Widgets and we just buy them in. Therefore we will be more expensive than a company who does manufacture Green Widgets (although there are only a few in the country who actually make them)." The new site "...will have more of a manufacturer and specialist feel. There will be a small mention of other services. People visiting will think we are specialists and that we make them, whereas at the moment they may feel that they are just being cross sold a product. We have also noticed that we are not being found earlier enough and we are contacted to do other work only to find that another company is providing the Green Widgets." I did something similar back in the day, but here we ran a local website and a national website covering the same products. We tried hard not to duplicate the keywords we targeted minimising this as much as possible. I don't think we cared much about the local site as the national one went crazy busy. In essence, my client wants to do the following: Main Site...
Local SEO | | GrouchyKids
Blue Widgets Bristol
Red Widgets Bristol
Green Widgets Bristol (This would be retained) New Site...
The new site would focus on Green Widgets In time the new site would include content for...
Green Widgets
Green Widgets Bristol (As per the main site)
Green Widgets Cardiff It would also make mention of Blue Widgets and Red Widgets as possible addons. The new site would be at the same address but have its own companies house registration, emails and phone numbers. My feeling is that we should take an above-board, risk-free approach and remove the Green Widgets service from the main site to ensure it doesn't upset Google. In other words go out of our way to minimise targeting of similar/same keywords across the 2 sites. My client strongly disagrees showing evidence of others using similar tactics (we have had the EMD debate as well). I am also concerned about Google Places and how this might be viewed here. Opinions please, also any idea of what if any action Google would take if we push forwards?0 -
Keyword rich domain names -> Point to sales funnel sites or to landing pages on primary domain?
Hey everyone,
Local SEO | | Transpera
We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in. So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page.
We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only.
If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.0 -
Variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Descriptive TLDs
Hi there, We have a variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Our business has two monetising areas, a clinic and a shop. To market them, we do recipes, blogs and social media, rather than relying primarily on SEO, but we do want to up our SEO game. Our primary site is www.example.co.uk This is Wordpress and where we market the clinic, host the recipes and blogs, and is our main email domain. Our second site is Woocommerce, at www.example.shop Our shop market is primarily in the UK, but we seem to pick up a fair amount of international business, partly because the clinic does virtual consultations to many countries. The shop is online only. We have physical clinics across the UK. Both sites cross link extensively, eg with blogs advertising products in the shop. The branding is intentionally related yet different, because they have very distinct functions, and eg. I don’t want to clutter the interface or distract people with blog or clinic once we have funnelled them to the shop checkout. I would also like to separate the blog and recipe elements from the clinic, using a slightly different theme with different functions. We use a lot of plugins, and the more we aggregate functions on the same Wordpress instance, the more likely something is to go wrong. I like the new TLDs because they are more “human”, and they identify where you are and what you are doing more clearly. We do email footers with links to example.clinic (redirected to www.example.co.uk) and example.shop. They are simple and explain what is going on. Conversely, shop.example.co.uk is not so easy to write or read out. www.example.co.uk/shop looks like an afterthought, rather than a shop in its own right with its own home page. So there would have to be a really good SEO reason for me to merge the shop into the main site with reverse proxy or multisite. Do you think that there is such a good reason? If not, by the same token, would it make sense to separate out example.blog or even naturedoc.recipes from example.clinic and use .co.uk as a single page portal to the three separate sites? My instinct, for what it is worth is that Google is smart enough to have started thinking that domains linked by topic TLDs can be equivalent to subdomains, and to recognise that we are not trying to build links from spammy unrelated sites. My last area is about human behaviour... Are people are as happy to click on or type in a new TLD like .clinic as a local .co.uk one? ...when (a) it is not a discredited TLD like .biz, and (b) it gives them more insight into what they will get when they arrive. And since we have the .uk domain, should we switch to this shorter version at the same time? I already use it for custom shortcodes (eg. example.uk/fte6 for people to type in from printed material or instagram). I can’t help feeling .uk has been unsuccessful, and its use now looks bad, even if it is shorter. Many thanks in advance.
Local SEO | | MizRabble0 -
Adwords Express Keyword Ranking Hack
I heard a rumor that Adwords Express offers a tool that lets you check real time Marketing Google ranking results (colleague brought this up) Has anybody heard of this?
Local SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Strategy for [list of keywords] + hundreds of cities
Hi, hoping to get some suggestions on strategy in terms of building out my site as I'm a bit overwhelmed. We provide home services throughout hundreds of locations - some major cities, others smaller yet affluent towns where demand is sufficient, though have no physical presence in the majority. My question is really regarding ranking organically (given local listings will be so difficult). I am new to Moz and have been using the Keyword Explorer to generate a long list of keywords, which I've refined to those which offer the most opportunity. Do I simply now take this list and append [city_name] to each keyword/phrase? If so, working in [list_of_keywords] + [city] into hundreds of location pages is surely going to be a nightmare to make unique, and most likely a horrible user experience. All my customers really want to see is: that we service their area, some info on how we operate, that we are trustworthy (reviews/site quality etc) clear pricing/information (across mobile/desktop) and an easy way of contacting us. If I was searching for a lawn care service in Manchester for example, I couldn't care less about anything else other than the above information. So is padding out pages with content like 'Things to do in Manchester' etc. really the way forward? Would I be better off focusing on building relationships/links with other local complimentary businesses/influencers rather than building out tons of content (on the assumption of course that what content is there is high quality, contains a smattering of keyword + city, and optimised very well)? Any help hugely appreciated!
Local SEO | | Cleanily1 -
Keywords & Domain
I need some advice. We are a real estate company that offers real estate sales and rentals. I have a domain (for example lets pretend there is an imaginary island called Pumpkin Island) - pumpkinrealestate.com (as many people just refer to pumpkin island as pumpkin eg. I am going down to pumpkin this weekend). pumpkinrealestate.com will be a website that offers all the properties for sale, local real estate community information, buying process, selling process, etc for the Pumpkin Island real estate market (we are a brokerage). I am also beginning to build out a new website that will be for our vacation rentals at "pumpkin island". I have a domain called "vacationrentalspumpkinisland.com" Question taking this factors in account: EMDs work well in our area IF the content is good. So assuming I will have a good link profile and good content, on page seo and offpage - - - pumpkinrealestate.com will have a decent amount of traffic naturally while vacationrentalspumpkinisland.com will have very dramatic increases of traffic during the winter, spring and summer (due to people planning vacations) would it be best to have the vacation rental website under its own domain vacationrentalspumpkinisland.com and the sales site under pumpkinrealestate.com OR have the sales site as pumpkinrealestate.com and the vacation website a subdomain of it for example: vacationrentals.pumpkinrealestate.com?? (maybe helping to leverage the traffic for both sites for benefit of one domain). Puzzled and need some thoughts, advice or suggestions. Thanks!!!! CHris
Local SEO | | topsailislander0 -
Google's rel=publisher tag question
Hi, i have a question about the use of rel=publisher tag on a large retail website with multiple local stores. There is 1 e-commerce website where i want to put the rel publisher tag from the main Google + businesspage. There are also 60 local google+businesspages, And on the main website every store has his own store-page. Is it good to put on all the 60 storepages their own rel=publishertag connected with the localbusinesspages on google? Or should i Stick at the main rel=publisher tag connected with the main google+page? Thanx, Leonie
Local SEO | | Leonie-Kramer0 -
Niche Keyword Opportunities in Canada when US Market Dominates
Hey, I have an interesting question. I am the owner of a Canadian E-Commerce site, and I have been brainstorming ways to find opportunities and niches for Canadian online shoppers in an industry that is dominated by American E-commerce sites. I looked around at another Canadian e-commerce site, and I wanted to get some advice on whether this strategy is sound. Here is an example. Well.ca is a large e-commerce site in Canada. They take a competitive product like a "KONG Goodie Bone" (a dog toy) and include local and intent terms in their title. For example "Buy KONG Goodie Bone from Canada at Well.ca - Free Shipping". If a Canadian shopper searches for "Kong Goodie Bone", they are going to find results for amazon.com, ebay.com, the Kong company website, Petco (which is not in Canada) etc. I would imagine that Canadian shoppers would start to add terms such as Canada, Buy, or online to try to find Canadian sellers. If that is the case, then Well.ca ranks. I guess my question is, if the dominant search terms in my industry are polluted with irrelevant or American companies (even in Canada), is this form of localization a good idea? The terms don't seem to be searched much according to any keyword research tool I've used, but I know that I add "canada" to my search terms in order to find Canadian results? I will also note that our website recently launched, we are using 100% original product page content, we are using videos, and we are really putting a lot of energy into quality content. I am just wondering if patience is the name of the game when you are dealing with sites with incredible domain authority, or if we are better off trying to find niche opportunities. Thoughts?
Local SEO | | evan890