Law firm wants two separate sites
-
My client is a new law firm that represents criminal and personal injury cases. They want one site for criminal defense and one site for personal injury. Both of these sites can be filled with a ton of unique content. It is two separate areas of law and two different client bases.
What I want to know is if this is bad for rankings? Will Google punish the sites?
Thanks
-
Nice discussion going on here, with Egol making some very good points.
Personally, I am not a fan of the multi-site approach. It's the brand that needs to be built as the authority, for all of its services. And when it comes to Local, having shared NAP on more than one website can cause citation difficulties. So, again, this comes down to having a single authoritative source representing your business on the web. This tends to be the consensus of opinion on the Local SEO world - 1 site is better than 2.
-
We have a couple of major law firms as clients who do exactly this, run one website for each sector that they operate in and then have a central corporate site.
At the end of the day Google wont penalize you so long as the content is unique.
-
I would be against separate websites. It would take so much more work to get the same results for two websites. Why dilute your domain authority? I'd put some real thought into the organization of the site and focus on needs based navigation that gets people quickly to the relevant content. Spend your time on crystal clear funnels for each audience, and constantly create and measure your content to hone in on the best results. Once you have a system in place, you'll be able to repeat the process over and over and create one powerhouse website.
Also, what about the local citation? Would you be using the same phone number and address, and if so, what site would you be linking to?
-
Depends on whether you're doing organic SEO, local SEO or both.
From an organic perspective, I agree with EGOL and Dennis above, there are pros and cons to going either way. I think most would agree a single site is better because of the ability to consolidate your efforts into building a single brand and site equity.
From a local perspective, the same argument holds. You also need to bear in mind Google's requirements to not mislead people into thinking there are two businesses when there is only one. To have two approved local listings, you'd have to have two separate legal entities, with two separate and distinct business addresses, and two separate websites and local phone numbers.
-
No problem on Google's end. Just be sure you can handle both in terms of SEO work. It usually boils down to that.
Some businesses eventually consolidate into a single site because of the amount of work involved for just 1 site...and some of them have 5-20+ sites
On the bright side, you can do a 301 eventually.
-
I can understand why they think two sites would be a good idea.
Let's say you get two powerful sites up and ranking and someone searches for "Dewey Cheatem & Howe" and clicks into the wrong site. They don't find what they are looking for and leave. The result is that 50% of their brand name searches bounce.
Would BigAssLaw.com who has a very broad practice be a better website? Let's say in the future they decide to do DUI or IP law... would they want four sites and have 75% of their visitors bouncing or still be using BigAssLaw.com that is a large firm with broad expertise?
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
-
Advice needed; Scrap mature .co.uk and move to .com, or run two separate domains?
Asked before, we have a .co.uk domain name and it has grown with rankings over many years with many quality links made to it. Since, we also have acquired the .com of our agency brand, and want to also focus on US market - something hard to do with a UK domain. However, we aren't sure which route to go from here... Should we keep the .co.uk active and allow that to focus on the UK market, and grow the .com from scratch with a site that looks the same with slightly different content and interlink the two with regional flags. Or move across to the .com totally and scrap the .co.uk. I know we could do a redirect and save a good number of the links made on the .co.uk, but is that worth even doing? And what would the risk be of having two sites the same with similar content? Since this isn't an area I've dealt with before, we are interested to get some real advice to understand which decision is right given the scenario.
Local SEO | | thewebpreneur0 -
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 -
Page Structure for Law Firm with Multiple Services
Hello and thanks in advance for any help. I'll try to keep this simple. I am about to do some major SEO for our Law Firm. We have 4 practice areas and I will be focusing on Lemon Law Attorneys for this example. I always try my best to keep it clean, organized and for the user. This one just has me a little confused about which direction to take as its a little more complex. The business is 1 location. The office is in San Diego but we service all of California. CURRENT PAGE STRUCTURE
Local SEO | | ChrisCanada
.com (home)
.com/practice-areas/
.com/practice-areas/lemon-law-attorneys/
.com/practice-areas/service-two-example/
.com/practice-areas/service-three-example/
.com/practice-areas/service-four-example/ I did some research and got better keywords (listed below) KEYWORD & SEARCH VOLUME lemon law 40500
- california lemon law 9900
- lemon law california 9900
- lemon law attorney 3600
- california lemon law attorney 880
- lemon law attorney san diego 170 It would be nice to rank for both California and San Diego search terms but I'm ok if that's not the right way to do it. These are the options I can think of using Lemon Law Attorney as an example. I'd love to hear what you think would work best and im open to other options. PAGE STRUCTURE (Option A)
.com/practice-areas/
.com/practice-areas/lemon-law-attorney-san-diego/ PAGE STRUCTURE (Option B)
.com/practice-areas/
.com/practice-areas/california-lemon-law-attorney/
.com/practice-areas/california-lemon-law-attorney/lemon-law-attorney-san-diego/ PAGE STRUCTURE (Option C)
.com/lemon-law/
.com/lemon-law/california-lemon-law-attorney/
.com/lemon-law/california-lemon-law-attorney/lemon-law-attorney-san-diego/ PAGE STRUCTURE (Option D)
.com/lemon-law/
.com/lemon-law/california/
.com/lemon-law/california/san-diego/ PAGE STRUCTURE (Option E)
.com/lemon-law-attorney/
.com/lemon-law-attorney/california/
.com/lemon-law-attorney/california/san-diego/ The biggest problem I see if having to make unique Lemon Law content for both California and San Diego Lemon Law Attorney pages. I dont want the site to look spammy to the end user. At the same time I want to make sure im setting myself up for success from the start. Thank you,
Chris1 -
Two Companies Same Address
A client has two businesses running from the same address. Both businesses will operate out of Unit 1. Would it be safe to go for Unit 1 and Unit 1A. Will that distinction be enough for Google local and has anyone had any specific experience with this issue?
Local SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Developing a content marketing strategy for a social security disability firm.
I have a client that I've been working with for a little over a year now and I've been struggling to generate new business from his online presence. Initially, I completely re-designed his website with semantically correct html markup, and used all of typical, site level SEO tactics, i.e., keywords in title tags, h tags, paragraphs, correct NAP, etc. We've only seen very low marginal returns off of our efforts. Part of the problem is that my client is not an attorney, but instead he runs a social security disability advocacy firm. He still performs all of the operations that an attorney performs, but due to the fact that he is not an attorney, we cannot optimize his site for search phrases containing "attorney", which is a common keyword that people would generally use to find the services that my client offers. So I've decided to try a different approach. A content marketing approach. The only reason I prolonged avoided this approach for so long is that, to be frank, I had no idea how to target his ideal clients with content. After talking to my client the other day and recommending this new approach, I uncovered some similarities between his previous clients. Most his clients live in rural areas, and they like nascar, hunting, fishing, etc. So I suggested that I create blog for him, and begin finding some freelance writers that can create some killer content about nascar, hunting and fishing. Admittedly, I don't have a much experience with a content marketing approach, but I want to learn everything there is to know about it. I guess I'm a little unsure about this approach that we're getting ready to try, and would love to hear from some people that have been down this path, and might be able to offer any advice. I really want to help my client's business flourish, and it's now very clear to me that solely relying on an old SEO line of thinking is not doing the trick anymore. Any tips, tactics and strategies would be greatly appreciated. Am I on the right track here? How would we get this content in front of his ideal clients, and market it in such a way that he will get a good return on his investment?
Local SEO | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Duplicate site content and setting up country specific domains
We look after a website which was originally just hosted on mysite.co.uk. We expanded to the European markets creating mysite.de and mysite.fr getting each product and page translated properly into German and French respectively. We have really good success on google.de and google.fr for these sites. We want to do the same with google.ie and create mysite.ie for the Irish market but as they speak English there will be no translation required. The only thing we will change is the base currency from GBP to EUR. From a duplication point of view will this be bad for both businesses mysite.co.uk and mysite.ie or will the .ie site be seen as the 'copier' and the .co.uk as the authority? Has anyone got any advice over best practice here and what would be the best thing for us to consider? We absolutely cannot risk the .co.uk site ranking wise. It's unrealistic for us to rewrite each product description and page so it means the same thing but is worded differently to avoid the duplication issue.
Local SEO | | gavinhoman0 -
If you have a product on your site that's only available in the US, is there a way to avoid it leading to a 404 error if a user in Canada accesses it?
A client has some products on their site that are only available in Canada. When a user in the US accesses the product listing, it results in a 404 error page. Are there any work-arounds for something like this? Thanks in advance!
Local SEO | | DA20130 -
Mobile Options for indexing mobile sites and live sites.
Our development team has noindexed our mobile versions of desktop pages in Wordpress. I am wondering if there is a negative impact to noindexing the mobile pages? We have a desktop version of the page live so the content is available in both locations and I believe we would be avoiding duplicate content issues by no indexing the mobile page, is there a reason I am missing that I would not want to noindex my mobile pages? Thank you in advance for your assistance.
Local SEO | | Highline_Ideas0