Sub-Domain Choice Dilemma

[legalseo]

We have successfully rolled out 5 sub-domains using very industry specific KWs as the sub, e.g. familylawyers. We're rolling our an employment focused sub.and ideally would use employmentlawyers.XXX.com.

However I'm tempted to use a long established (5+ years) sub-domain with a topic related KW that now hosts a non-active blog with PR3 -  employment-law.XXXX.com. It has 49 indexed pages, some with PR2. So there's potential for getting a kickstart on traffic and trust with some redirects. Should I go for instant gratification or build for the long haul with the slightly more beneficial URL KWing?

I should add that this sub-domain will have thousands of pages that are geo and sub-category focused - a typical URL would be. sub-domain.XXX.com/TX/Austin/wrongful-termination-lawyers.html

THX for any opinions.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Exact match type efforts are great.  For a single phrase.  Or longer tail phrases off of that.  As soon as you want to get ranked for variations that in their sum total require going beyond the exact match, they're not as valuable.  Especially if you need to start from scratch.

On the other side of the coin, is all of the content on the existing site high enough quality AND truly relevant to your goals?  If it' snot and you need to scrap it, you're going to take a hit on those statistics anyhow.

And on a final note - don't trust the PR numbers alone.  They're inaccurate at best, and at least months old.  Could very well be that the real PR (not the TBPR you're going by) is lower, especially after Panda/Farmer.

Better to look at the traffic statistics on the site both current and historically compared.  If you don't have analytics to review, it's a crap-shoot.