Ranking for Synonymous Terms (ie. lawyer & attorney)

[RickyShockley]

To accomplish ranking for synonymous search terms, are we better off just letting Google make the connection? Should we put the secondary synonymous term in our page titles? Is it best practice to create a completely unique landing page for the term? Not sure how to go about this. Some examples would be "miami lawyer" or "miami attorney", "obgyn" vs "gynecologist" etc. Any help on this would be much appreciated!

[Chris.Menke]

Ricky,

While Google's working to unify rankings for synonymous terms, synonyms can often have slightly different uses and meanings--especially regionally. At the least, be sure to investigate if that's the case with your terms in your region. You're likely to get a bit more traffic if you have separate pages ranked at the top for each term but whether the value's there for you or not is a different matter.   The more advanced Google gets, the more difficult it is to know what differences are required in the two pages in order to differentiate them and get them to rank for the separate terms. Personally, I think it's better to choose one or the other as part of your branding and just go with it.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

When I first started here, the previous SEO company employed a double strategy. We had urls that were blah, blah, attorneys-lawyers and title tags that were attorneys-laywers, and text that was attorneys-lawyers. Except for the urls, I changed it just because I thought it looked bad. I decided to just pick one and work on it. It has worked out fine. Overall our rankings have improved, and will only continue to improve as google does, as stated by Chris above.

Without question, there is a difference if you decide to pick one of the words over the other. The one you pick and optimize for will rank higher. It does for us on everyone of those keywords, however, it is slight. Most often it is 1-5 places. Granted, that can be the difference between being on the first page and the second, so I guess "slight" is relative.

However, my life has been much easier once I decided I didn't want to write for both attorney and lawyer, and just picked one. My content is more user friendly, my rankings went up and I don't have to worry about duplicate content.

Also, if you are looking long term, (and this part is pure conjecture) I could see Google eventually penalizing a site that has one page for Miami Attorney and one page for Miami Lawyer, (because that can't be that substantively different) or at the very least, not allowing both pages to rank. Thus, you would have spent a whole lot of time for, at most, modest gains.

Hope this helps!

Ruben

[crackingmedia]

I agree with Chris. Stick with one page. It would be worth using synonyms where appropriate in the content of your pages though.

Peter

[RickyShockley]

Thanks Chris, that's the way we've been doing it to this point (just going with the primary search term that has the most search volume) but I definitely agree with you that Google HAS to be moving in the direction of showing search results for synonymous terms.

[S.S.N]

I stick with one page, and use the terms interchangeably within the text itself and use the more frequently searched word as the keyword in urls and title tags.