Keyword Cannibalization on Professional Service Firm
-
Hi all:
We do ongoing SEO for a tax law firm. Their home page, which contains very little text is marked up in the title tag with the phrase 'tax attorneys and preparers.' We are getting warnings from our SEO software that individual bio pages for practitioners are cannibalizing the homepage for the keyword 'tax attorney.'
Should I be concerned? The head of this firm is a very well known 'tax attorney.' Its kind of hard to describe him differently but we keep getting told his page competes with the firm's homepage for this search string.
Thanks in advance.
-
Good tip, Sean! I wouldn't say that content on the homepage will completely resolve David's question, but it will certainly help! David's scenario is one that every multi-practitioner or multi-location local business has to grapple with: how to ensure that a set of pages that basically share a topic are uniquely useful, as well as optimized. It takes some doing!
-
Thanks, Merriam. As is usually the case my instincts, and not the tool's advice, were correct. The homepage is not even written to rank for the competing word; it's just that Google is making the jump from 'tax attorneys' (which the page also ranks very well for) to 'tax lawyer.' So the tool is telling us that we're cannibalizing 'tax lawyer' when, in fact, I'm not even sure we use it on the homepage. It's just demonstrating semantic understanding.
Thanks again!
-
Miriam did a a thorough job of covering your question, one thing I noticed that immediately caught my eye and with the information you provided would be something I'd make priority number one:
"Their home page, which contains very little text"
This right here! That is the biggest problem to be solved.
-
Hi David,
Excellent topic. My rule of thumb in judging the optimization of title tags goes something like this:
-
Does the title tag accurately describe the page's contents?
-
Could any modifications be made to the tag that could improve it, while strictly maintaining its accuracy.
So, in your case, it sounds like you are marketing a multi-practitioner legal firm. It's helpful to remember that tools are meant to provide suggestions, not lay down the law.
While I'd be concerned if you said that the title tag for every page of your website was identical, I wouldn't be concerned if the tags for each of the practitioner pages are similar, if each of the attorneys provides the exact same service. I would recommend that you look at the findings of the keyword research you are doing and see if there are some variant ways in which people search for tax attorneys, and see if you can somewhat diversify the tags for the group of practitioners using this information.
For example, the title tag of Bob Jones' practitioner page might read:
Tax Attorney Bob Jones, Proudly Serving Atlanta since 1987
And Sally Jones' title tag might read
_Atlanta Tax Lawyer Sally Jones, Founder of Jones Financial _
And Frank Jones could have:
Call Atlanta CPA, Frank Jones at (404) 222-2222 for prompt service
In other words, be as creative as you can, but never stray from accurately describing page contents. And do be sure the other pages of the website are making as complete use of your keyword findings as possible. Doubtless, people have all types of questions about tax attorneys that you can create content around. And this content, in the RankBrain era, will all help with your goal of building the client into an authority (in Google's eyes) for a particular topic (tax law in the city of location).
Tools are helpful. They alert us to potential problems. But they should be seen as good assistants rather than as dictators. Do what is real first, and then use tools to discover if there are nuances that can improve the presentation and optimization of any business you market.
-
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
-
Ecommerce store on subdomain - danger of keyword cannibalization?
Hi all, Scenario: Ecommerce website selling a food product has their store on a subdomain (store.website.com). A GOOD chunk of the URLs - primarily parameters - are blocked in Robots.txt. When I search for the products, the main domain ranks almost exclusively, while the store only ranks on deeper SERPs (several pages deep). In the end, only one variation of the product is listed on the main domain (ex: Original Flavor 1oz 24 count), while the store itself obviously has all of them (most of which are blocked by Robots.txt). Can anyone shed a little bit of insight into best practices here? The platform for the store is Shopify if that helps. My suggestion at this point is to recommend they all crawling in the subdomain Robots.txt and canonicalize the parameter pages. As for keywords, my main concern is cannibalization, or rather forcing visitors to take extra steps to get to the store on the subdomain because hardly any of the subdomain pages rank. In a perfect world, they'd have everything on their main domain and no silly subdomain. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
Potential keyword cannibalization?
Hi, I'm doing an audit of a site for a very competitive term (project management software). The site ranks for its root domain on the second page. They have a lot of other non-blog pages that are geared towards longer tail versions that include that term (project management software pricing, project management tool comparison, etc). My question is: are those pages cannibalizing potential search traffic? Should they just stick to the one page (root domain) and include those longtail keywords on the page instead of creating various pages that seem to possibly be cannibalizing traffic? Is this a fair conclusion that these other pages is causing them to rank lower for the main head term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Correct keywords Anchor text for links passing
Hi i have some old pages with more link equity, i m planning to key some bestseller in the main content.. my question is on best use of anchor text, can i use the below for eg: Product name is Chloride Exide Safepower Cs 7-12 12V Sealed Battery so i want to use the key word which is "12v 7ah Battery" in anchor text or buy 12v 7ah battery in Anchor text, will this google consider as spam?? Pls suggest
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1190 -
Multiply List of Keywords | Tools?
Hi guys, I was wondering does anyone know of any tools which you can had a large list of seed keywords and it will find related keywords per seed keyword. I know scrapebox, ultimate niche finder can do this, but was wondering if there was anything else in the market to checkout? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Using on two pages a keyword in alternative language in the title
Hello SEO wizards, The main language on my website is english, and I am wondering if I can add a keyword in russian to couple of pages to the title and image alt tag and maybe header , with the hope that it would rank in google with that russian keyword.. But I am not sure how google would react to that, I tried to search information on that, but could not find a clear answer.... Many thanks for anybody who takes time to respond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
I'm I being penalize? I fell off SERP for main keyword
I have been making minor changes to my site like fixing 404 pages and adding site maps etc. I have ranked as high as 3rd for the query 'private equity firms' but now Im showing the site around the 10th page and some times never. any ideas what could be going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
Any problems with two sites by same owner targeting same keyword search?
I have a site, let's call it ExcellentFreeWidgets.com. There is a page on the site that is very popular and we'll call the page title, "Big Blue Widget." That page is currently #1 for the search "big blue widget." This week, I was able to buy the exact match domain for that page, we'll call it BigBlueWidget.com. I want to build a site on BigBlueWidget.com to better capitalize on that search "big blue widget," which is huge. The content would not be the same wording at all, but it would be the same subject. It would probably be a five page or so website, all about Big Blue Widgets: what they are, where to get them, etc. The sites will not reciprocally link to each other. New new site, BigBlueWidgets.com, would link to the existing site, ExcellentFreeWidgets.com. The new site and the current page will compete for position in the SERPs. Here are my questions to you experts: 1. Will Google care at all that the same entity owns both sites, or will just just rank for the term as they normally would. 2. I am not sure I'll run Adsense on the new site or not. I will be pointing a link back my ExcellentWidgets.com site from a button that says, "Get an Excellent Widget." But if I do run Adsense on it, does Google Adsense care that the same entity has a site and another site's page that are competing for the same term that both have Adsense add on them? Note: I do not want to start a new entity for the new site (I'm in CA and LLC's are $800/year) as it's probably not worth all that hassle and money. Thank you so much. I hope the that obfuscating the real domain names did not confuse the issue too much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Best Service for optimizing google product feed?
We're looking for a company that can help us optimize our google product feed. Does anyone have any recommendations or suggestions? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric_since1910.com0