Keyword optimization when two keywords mean the same thing

[micromano]

How does one best go about optimizing a page, meta title, and meta description for two keyword when the two keywords mean the same thing (e.g. attorney vs. lawyer). It's awfully tedious, obnoxious, and spammy-looking to keep putting "attorney/lawyer," "attorney-lawyer," or "attorney or lawyer" into content, titles, and descriptions.

[ChrisAshton]

Thankfully these days search engines (or at least Google) do a pretty good job of understanding both what your content is about and the intent of people searching for your service.

In this context, what that means is you don't have to try jamming both keywords everywhere you can. I would suggest having both in the content a handful of times for that little extra targeting but if your other quality signals (link profile, load speed, content quality, anchor profile etc) are stronger than your competition, it's entirely possible you could rank for "attorney" without ever mentioning the word.

The most recent example of this I've seen in action is a car hire company who ranked for some "car rental" terms without ever using any variation of the word "rental".

As for how you go about having both words in there a couple of times without it seeming awkward, it can be as simple as either switching back and forth between the terms (perhaps not the best idea in this vertical) or maybe even having a small section of content with a heading something like "Attorney or Lawyer, Is There a Difference?"

Embarrassingly, until I started working at a major law firm in my previous role, I didn't realise lawyer and solicitor were the same thing here in Australia so it's entirely possible this content will actually help others too, though this may be a regional thing.

[micromano]

Google seems to distinguish between attorney and lawyer, and pages optimized for either word seem to rank differently depending on the search term. For years, I used attorney almost exclusively because attorney was preferred on the U.S. west coast while lawyer was preferred on the U.S. east coast. Now they are almost equal-- which makes it more difficult to decide which word to focus on.

I was hoping there was a way I could have duplicate pages with only the one word changed, and then somehow use canonicalization to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.

Thoughts?

[ChrisAshton]

hmm, that's frustrating!

The canonicalization idea isn't going to work too well since it essentially passes the strength of one page to the other so you will still only end up with a single page that ranks. Also, it doesn't present a great user experience. If anything, it probably further confuses the fact that they're both the same thing!

If you've got offices in multiple locations, you can go with a number of ideas from Rand's Whiteboard Friday on a related topic. If this does apply to you, you could use the most common term for each region. Location pages for Western states would talk about Attorneys and Western states focus on Lawyer.

It's far from ideal but if Google isn't understanding the difference here, it's about the best option I can see.