Lawyer versus Attorney... does it matter?
-
Having worked with quite a few firms and large partnerships I have always wondered a bit about how Google or Bing approach terms like attorney or lawyer, attorneys or lawyers. Having done a lot of KWA analysis I can tell you that in some states you will have a preference for one over the other and it is rather fluid. Even when you get into specific disciplines within the law, you will see searchers favor one over the other. So, for an example you might see in Texas that divorce attorney is searched more frequently than divorce lawyer but Criminal lawyer is more prevalent over criminal attorney.
Does anyone know if search engines look at attorney and lawyer as interchangeable such that if you build a page and only use lawyer you would still be able to rank as attorney, etc? I have my opinions based on experience but just thought it would be cool to hear from others.
Thanks
-
Google does, in fact, know that lawyers are attorneys and attorneys are lawyers. However, you'll notice that Google's search results don't reflect this. You'll see different results for lawyer phrases versus attorney keywords. When optimizing, you'll want to make sure you've done your keyword research and mention those keywords appropriately on the site.
-
When I search for "personal injury attorney" there are plenty of results that pop up that are clearly optimized for "lawyer." I'd say yes, Google clearly has connected the dots on that one.
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
-
When conducting a link building strategy does it matter the country the link is from?
We are a UK business and if we have links mostly from US based blogs and websites does this penalise us. The links are from relevant websites and topics. Should we be focusing on .co.uk sites
Link Building | | Caffeine_Marketing1 -
Lawyer Directories
I am doing some SEO work for a lawyer and I am wondering if there are good legal directories I should be using to help improve SERP's.
Link Building | | kevgrand0 -
Does Website Design Matter?
I've got a new site officially launching next month (just waiting on a few inner page designs to be finished up). But if I'm looking to get a head start on backlinks, would it be okay to start publishing content now on one of the default WordPress themes? And then start publishing guest posts immediately to get backlinks? Or would Google look at the site as not being unique?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Does the trailing slash really matter in terms of passing link juice?
Does the trailing slash matter? Say my website resolves to: link to: http://www.domain.com/ So if a user went to link to: http://www.domain.com it would 301 them to link to: http://www.domain.com Then does a link to: link to: http://www.domain.com**/** pass the same amount of link juice as a link to: http://www.domain.com ?
Link Building | | adriandg0 -
LINK BUILDING - Does it really matter if the link is not relevant?
Hi guys, I have just done a lot of link buillding and I thought I am just going to link build and I am not going to go after RELVANT links. I have property/real esate website and I have been any kind of link builidng and I have noteced some good increases in rankings.. So my questions is; Does it really matter if the link is relvant to property or real estate if I have got ranking increases? Or will it later harm my site?? Thanks Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ091 -
Authority versus Content in Linkbuilding
Hi there, I am rather new to linkbuilding and reach out to various sites at the moment. The interest in linking to us is very high and now I sometimes get the question where on a particular page I'd like to be linked to from. I then do a check in opensiteexplorer to find out about the authority of the various subpages. Yet, how do I decide if one subpage has more authority while another one has more relevancy for us (in terms of the content being provided there being more related to ours)? Thanks for your recommendations! Best regards, Tobias
Link Building | | space560 -
Link building, does query string matter?
Hi All, We have some partners which link to our site, and they put "?ref=SITENAME" so we Can identify the source of the link....but does this matter to the search engines? Does this count as a different page than the one without the query string? -Rasmus
Link Building | | rasmusbang0 -
Link Building: Asking for links versus building links
I am currently delving into link building for SEO having started out from a social media marketing side. From that angle, it was always my belief building high quality links came from engaging targeted bloggers and sites in my market and related verticals for product reviews and/or providing expert advise and opinion for posts they are creating. As I am learning more the "technical" side of SEO, I've read a lot of posters on here talk about asking from links from websites. While I get the concept from a strategic stand point, are links really asking for or is better to continue to pursue the long term investment of pitching to get coverage from well known bloggers and sites?
Link Building | | joshuaopinion1