Keyword Cannibalization on Professional Service Firm

[Daaveey]

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.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi David,

Excellent topic. My rule of thumb in judging the optimization of title tags goes something like this:

1. Does the title tag accurately describe the page's contents?

2. 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.

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

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.

[Daaveey]

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!

[MiriamEllis]

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!