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.
-
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
-
Subfolder cannibalization
Hello, I looked through the forum but couldn't find an answer so here is my question: A client have 2 subfolders that are selling the same things for example Furnitures, Office Furniture, Bedroom Furniture, etc. The website looks like this : www.website.com/subfolder1/ www.website.com/subfolder2/ But it's like 2 diferents brand, just that it sells the same kind of product. The company wants to put evereything in subfolder1 and stop the subfolder2, which mean stop the second brand. But the thing is that right now the subfolder2 have better positions in SEO than subfolder1 for most of the Keywords. How could I make all the internet traffic goes from the subfolder2 to the subfolder1 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sodimaccl
A 301 redirection could do the trick ? In addition of improving the SEO (Title, H1, Meta, etc) of the subfolder1 ? Thanks for your help.0 -
Is Wordpress Website Backup Service Worth the Investment?
I was horrified to learn that my hosting company, InMotion Hosting does not offer redundant backups, that it is on the customer to set up backups to ensure they don't lose their data. I plan to back up to Google Drive 3 x a week for 12 backups and also create 3 backups on our server (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday). So if something goes wrong and we catch it within a week we can generate the backup directly from our server. There are website backup services such as BlogVault. Do they offer any meaningful advantages to taking the contents of the entire server (16 gigs) and backing it up? They do offer Malware removal. Does this have value? Is back up on an external service like Google Cloud while simultaneously backing up on the server a safe way to proceed? If not, what is the simplest and most effective manner to backup? I prefer to avoid adding any plugins to WordPress as our site already has too many (about 30). Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Keyword cannibalization
Hi, I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization. 1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations. The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...). My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page? Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content. Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three? 2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related? In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans? In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization? Looking forward to your comments!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Meta Keywords: Do They Hurt Rankings
I know that Google doesn't use meta keywords, but does it hurt to have anything in there? Just wondering if I need to remove all the meta keywords that are on my site, or are they harmless to have. Also, would meta keywords ever be used by an internal search plug-in if we were to install one in the future, or do they generally look at the product title and description for that info?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b4cab0 -
Optimized pages ranking lower than homepage with keywords
Ok, I know this question has been out there before, but i don't know how fo search for it specifically enough. I have several keywords that rank higher on my home page. As you know MOZ assigns keywords to whichever page on your site popping up in search first. So even though i have A-grade optimized pages for a particular keyword, that page may not pop up BEFORE the homepage for instance, on searches. In many cases, the homepage is grade "F" for a particular keyword, yet its pulling up first for most of my keywords. I know that my homepage has more rank because it gets the most visits and i'm sure we can't really optimize the homepage for EVERY keyword. What is the best thing to do in this situation? Do i just need to wait for my optimized page to catch up in rank, or is there a trick to optimizing homepage to ALL key words at grade "A" level? Do i need to keep back-linking to my optimized page directly to get the juice up? I created all these great optimized pages for specific keywords, but my homepage which shows "F" grade is the one pulling up 4th or 5th on searches Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrMcCoy0 -
New Google AdWords Keyword Tool - What Can We Do?
What options do we have for keyword research now that Google is switching from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to the Keyword Planner??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan0 -
Keyword/Content Consistency
My question is: If you have a keyword that is searched more when it's spelled wrong then when it's spelled right - what do you do? Do you do the misspelled word or keep true to the spelling and say oh well to SEO? Also - Along the same lines of that question: What if you have a keyword that has a - in the middle of it. For instance: website and web-site (this isn't the keyword just an example). and drupal website is searched more then drupal web-site but wordpress web-site is searched more then wordpress website. Technically website is the correct spelling and way to write it, but people put web-site (again not the case in reality - just an example).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrino0 -
Different TITLE for the same page appear for different keywords
Hi there Can anyone advice please on this funny/strange issue I have title on home page. When I type some of keywords the homepage appears in SERP with shortcut TITLE (just one keyword there). But when I type company name I have full TITLE. Could anybody advice please what can be a problem and how to fix it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fleetway0