[Insert specialist area] solicitors - keyword advice

[Stuart26]

Hi There,

I work in legal services and the most common search terms in our field always contain 'solicitors' (or lawyers) after specialist areas e.g. landlord solicitors, property solicitors, divorce solicitors etc.

Naturally, we have a page dedicated to each of these specialist areas but we haven't optimised our pages with keywords. Is there any known issues with repeatedly optimising our pages across the site using these keywords?

Thanks,

Stuart

[Cyrus-Shepard]

This is an area a lot of SEOs face, and a lot of folks screw up, frankly.

The big question you have to ask yourself is wether or not the keyword are distinct enough to warrant separate pages for each?

The way to answer this is typically user intent. Obviously a user seeking "divorce solicitors" wants something way different than "landlord solictors" so it makes sense to keep these on different pages and target them seperately.

The next step is making sure each page is relevant, unique and provides a good experience. This goes way beyond copying and pasting your keywords into a pre-written "solicitor" template, and includes telling a story for each.

On the other hand, if user intent and/or content can be combined into a single subject, it's usually best to do so.

A couple of blog post by Rand Fishkin that might help:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-targeting-how-to-employ-multiple-keywords-for-seo-conversions

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mapping-keywords-to-content-for-maximum-impact-whiteboard-friday

Keep in mind Google hates thin content that repeats itself. Take this advice from the Google Webmaster Blog on quality guidelines:

"Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?"

Avoid this and you should be okay! Best of luck.

[Rubix]

Hi Stuart,

If you are optimizing the each page with the same keywords that it might be worthwhile to look into Canonical tag but  I believe in your case you should be able to target niche keywords for each page. For instance, you can have one page for Road Traffic Accident then you can have a second page for Car Traffic Accident. Although both pages target  Personal Injury, Traffic Accident, each page can target more long tail keywords such as _Car accident claim_s or road accident compensation etc

There are so many long tail keywords that you can target, i recommend you to concentrate on those. I hope that helps

[jesse-landry]

Yeah and to Andy's point I'd personally suggest keeping with having one page focused on each separate keyword. This way it is obvious to Google which page you want each keyword's search to land on and does not dilute your SERPs.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Unless I'm in the same vertical... insert evil laughter

Yeah, my list really stinks.  Here's the revision lol

-Don't keyword stuff

-Do write something for people

-Have a call to action

-Use LDA

[SEOAndy]

hang on Cody... things not to do "write something readable" .... i think you've mixed two lists into one!

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Things not to do:

• Don't keyword stuff

• Write something readable

• Have a call to action

• Read about LDA: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated

On-page optimization is more than just using the keywords.  You have to use contextual clues to reinforce your main keywords.  Talking about Cars?  Write about engines, spark plugs, etc.

[SEOAndy]

Google knows they are all separate niche's and so I can't see a problem in optimizing across them all. I would advise you mix things up so that your titles aren't all the same just with a word swapped out - same for the urls etc.

hope that helps