Optimizing for Lawyer vs Attorney Words
-
With Hummingbird update, my client's personal injury lawyer site went from very good positions for top terms in Google to oblivion. The site had primary landing pages for parallel terms such as "dog bite lawyer" and "dog bite attorney", among other.
He does work in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, so we focus on key phrases for both "Philadelphia dog bite lawyer" and "Pennsylvania dog bite lawyer" etc.
I've decided to investigate siloing more deeply, but am unsure whether Google now considers attorney searches to be the same as lawyer searches, which would mean we would silo for "Pennsylvania" and "Philadelphia" not "Attorney" and "Lawyer".
Any real world experience in this anyone? Thanks
-
I read an article that explains a little bit more on what you are addressing here: link removed by admin
-
Thanks Cyrus. I guess I really should not have written any thing but the word SILO!
The entire first part of my discussion item was for background and example. I simply stated that I was "unsure if Google treated them the same". My question is discussed in the third paragraph and located in the fourth paragraph (if readers would pay close attention -- tip, a question mark at the end of sentence means it is a question) and is whether or not anyone has real, tested, experience that would indicate that it makes sense to Silo for the two terms by creating two separate silos.
That said, I have gotten the opinion from Danny Sullivan directly that he believes (and I'm paraphrasing) that Google has long treated the two as synonyms and that there should be no need to silo.
And (to your points Cyrus), I agree as long as the pages have unique content there should be no "penalty", which I always do anyway. That is simple SEO 101, but I include it for future generations reading this thread
-
I don't have any real world experience with these terms, but if I understand correctly, your asking if Google is treating the intent of "lawyer" and "attorney" as the same.
The only way I know to investigate is to search Google for similar terms, like Seattle Lawyer and Seattle Attorney. If we do this for a dozen searches there seems to be some overlap of intent, but it's certainly not 100%.
That said, I think Google would interpret "dog bite lawyer" and "dog bite attorney" as pretty darn close semantic matches, which if overdone could lead to a Panda, duplicate content like situation. I'd probably try to target these terms on the same page, and consolidate my unique content as much as possible.
Hope this helps! Best of luck.
-
Hi JCDenver,
Hang in there. I've asked for extra help from our staff on your question. It could be that the way it was originally phrased has caused some confusion, but you have provided good details and I do hope you'll get a helpful answer soon. Thanks for your patience!
-
Do tell what is clear then...
I see a mix of results, and without all the other variables that go into the rankings, they look just like the results I used to get when I optimized the two terms as separate terms. Sometimes Google showed my attorney keyphrase searches as the home page that was optimized for lawyer. Sometimes they showed it for lawyer.
-
Our primary key phrase for the site is "Philadelphia dog bite lawyer"... has only tangential relationship to the reference of "Philadelphia lawyer" historic meaning. Again, please focus on the actual question please.
-
Maybe you should explain in more detail?
On a tangent..... You know that "Philadelphia Lawyer" is an ancient term with very different meaning that "Philadelphia Attorney"?
-
Hi JCDenver,
I'm sorry I misunderstood your question. Let me ping our other staff members for you to see if anyone has experimented with this. I hope you will receive an on-target answer.
-
I thought that you got a really good answer, and if you do those two searches and compare side by site... the answer is pretty clear.
-
I'm not referring to Local. I am asking about siloing a website.
-
It is not what I was asking.
-
Hi JCDenver,
First, I want to zone in on your statement about the Hummingbird Update. When I think of this in connection with Local SEO and lost rankings, the first thing that springs to mind is this situation:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/01/08/mining-for-google-hummingbird-guano-in-so-cal/
Are you talking about this? Have the results for your target city morphed into a single one-box for a spammy listing? Wanted to ask about this first.
Regarding lawyer vs. attorney, the important thing to find out is how your regional audience searches. Lawyer vs. Attorney is a classic example of this, as apparently, people in different parts of the US prefer one keyword over another. See the comments from Linda Buquet on this post regarding this:
http://searchengineland.com/google-merges-insights-for-search-with-google-trends-134629
This would be something you would need to further investigate, as it has become a bit harder to surface these regional differences. Hope this gets you started.
-
This might seem like a super simplified answer but just google the terms you're concerned about and that should answer your question as to how google is treating certain KWs. Use an incognito window to do so or read up more technical ways http://moz.com/blog/face-off-4-ways-to-de-personalize-google. De personalizing will allow you to see a better picture of how the terms get treated.
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
-
Optimizing Site for Multiple Business Services
I am currently optimizing for a site that does a ton of services:
Algorithm Updates | | ccdispoto
Web Development
Logo Design
SEO
Copywriting
Social Media
Email Marketing
PPC Marketing Is it better practice to optimize one "Services" page for multiple keywords or to break each service onto its own unique URL and optimize each page individually?0 -
Http vs Https Related Rankings Drop?
I've noticed in a number of keyword ranking tools (Moz included) that our rankings have dropped substantially for a number of our top performing keywords precisely 7 days back. When you view the attached screenshot you'll see there was a drastic drop in the overall organic impressions as well as a drop in keyword rankings. I also noticed that all the keywords which have dropped in rank now show with the https version of our home page url. I've read up on this and it believe that this should not cause a drop in rankings but we have even added https as a domain in webmaster tools with no improvement. Quite simply, has Google de-indexed our http home page url which was previously tied to our higher rankings for our core keywords? How can we get this back without "disavowing" our https version of the site. We're not doing anything to game search results so I dont think we're being penalized, simply there is some sort technical glitch taking place between recognizing HTTP vs HTTPS versions of our site. Our home page is goo.gl/qVPRwf and an example keyword is "wedding ring sets his and hers" Can anyone recommend further debugging steps or have an understanding of what can be done at this point? Also, if it helps, I have studied the Help Center, read the FAQs and searched for similar questions with no success.wedding ring sets his and hers impressions%20-%20ranking%20drop.png?dl=0
Algorithm Updates | | punitshah0 -
Numbers vs #'s For Blog Titles
For your blog post titles, is it "better" to use numbers or write them out? For example, 3 Things I love About People Answering My Constant Questions or Three Things I Love About People Answering My Constant Questions? I could see this being like the attorney/lawyer, ecommerce/e-commerce and therefore not a big deal. But, I also thought you should avoid using #'s in your url's. Any thoughts, Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Content vs articles vs blogs is there a difference?
I was wondering is there really a difference between website content, articles or blogs and most important do search engines see it differently? My website is pretty much an ecommerce site and most of my long text is on my blog. The only other pages that have much content is the homepage, all the other pages may have a paragraph. I am just wondering if i need to make more actual pages with text/content or is having my blogs good enough? I am no expert in seo and just wondering if i am wasting too much money on getting blogs written or should i get more content. Content being a page called commercial printing and blog being a page called why do do i need commercial printing? Also would it matter to the users who find the site? Would the users come to my site just looking for information or would they actually think of me for the service?
Algorithm Updates | | topclass0 -
Does word order matter for exact match bonus?
Hello, For a two word search does order of the two words matter to get the exact match seo bonus? For example, would matchexact.com get the same SEO bonus as exactmatch.com? I Googled many two word searches reversing the word order and I got the exact same search results suggesting order does not matter (yes I am assuming people are just doing a broad search) Thoughts? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | max20120 -
Google dance/over optimized/paranoid?
Hi guys, hope your all OK and thanks in advance for taking a nosey at this. OK where to start - my rankings for the last 12 months have progressively improved every week, usually of the 300 KWs i track the last few months has seen approx 70 up/70down per week, but the improvements usually outweigh the declines. This week I saw a sudden drop though - 35 improvements and 112 declines. The strange thing was though, the improvements came on the more competitive KWs, and the less competitive words I haven't done much or any back linking for dropped. Seems silly me asking this question when I run that through my head ofcouse KWs you don;t work on will drop like flies? It should be plainly obvious those words would drop off but all have been improving on there own slowly over the last 6/7 months. Now if this was a penalty (nothing showing in webmaster tools) I would have expected it to come through on my KWs I have over done the backlinking for, but these are the 1's that improved. So is it just the Google Dance? I normally see some words such as the big 1 we target DJ Equipment go from position 13 - 24 can change hourly sometimes! Could it just be quite a few have dropped all at once and will pop back up this week? Also if anyone could give us any pointers in general on where you think we should be taking our SEO it would be much appreciated. I know we have been a little lazy with our backlinking and could do with some much better/ industry related websites linking to us, and there are title tags/metas on product page that need sorting.. aside these couple of issue's? DJs Only
Algorithm Updates | | allan-chris0 -
Today all of our internal pages all but completely disappeared from google search results. Many of them, which had been optimized for specific keywords, had high rankings. Did google change something?
We had optimized internal pages, targeting specific geographic markets. The pages used the keywords in the url title, the h1 tag, and within the content. They scored well using the SEOmoz tool and were increasing in rank every week. Then all of a sudden today, they disappeared. We had added a few links from textlink.com to test them out, but that's about the only change we made. The pages had a dynamic url, "?page=" that we were about to redirect to a static url but hadn't done it yet. The static url was redirecting to the dynamic url. Does anyone have any idea what happened? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | h3counsel0
