In an attempt to optimize your website, it’s very easy to overcapitalize and actually cause problems.

One example of this is what’s known as keyword cannibalization.

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization is what happens when more than one page targets the same keyword (often inadvertently) and as a result, Google is not sure which page is more relevant for that particular keyword and in the end neither of them end up ranking very well.

A good example of this would be wills and will disputes. If you have a separate page for will disputes, it would be very easy to cause keyword cannibalization.

The reason why is because will disputes contains the word “will”, and if you were to try to target “will dispute lawyer”, now you would directly have the keywords “will” and “lawyer” on two pages, making the chance of keyword cannibalization high.

While it is possible to target both of those, you need to be aware of the risks if you are doing your own law firm SEO, and what to do if cannibalization does occur.

How to Check For Keyword Cannibalization

One way you can check if your site is suffering from keyword cannibalization is to check if two pages are ranking for the same keyword. If they are, this is usually a sign that there is crossover. This method won’t always work, as Google doesn’t usually rank two pages from the same website for a keyword. However occasionally you will see it happen.

Another thing that could indicate keyword cannibalization is if only one page is ranking but it’s not the page you wanted.

If either of these two isn’t happening, then you will have to manually go through your website and see if there are multiple pages targeting the same keyword.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization

One of the methods you can use is to combine the two pages that are conflicting. Then you redirect the old pages to the new “super page”. By combining the content and making one big “super page”, you are more likely to end up with a page that is ranking well. And by redirecting the old pages, you are passing on all the relevance from backlinks etc onto the new page.

Another option is to just redirect one of the pages to the other, more relevant page.

Either of these two are likely to solve the problem and help the new page ranking better than what was happening before.

In the future, when making new pages, always keep in mind keyword cannibalization and consider adding to a current page if the topic is very close to a page that you already have on there.

Deciding which keywords to target with your law firm Search Engine Optimisation can be tricky. Do you target the main ones and go after stiff competition, with the risk of not making it to page 1? Or do you go after the lower search, “long tail” keywords and risk not getting enough traffic? In this post I will cover some methods you can use which will help to decide.

Many people think that you have to go after the main keywords because they have the most search volume. While that is correct, and that certainly should be the long term goal, going after the main keywords right away is going to be difficult. This is because they are the keywords that have the most competition. Especially in a competitive niche like the legal industry.

Trying to rank for the main keywords is usually going to take a lot of effort and a significant amount of time to get there. The reason for this is:

1. Because of the competition mentioned earlier, and
2. Because Google is very selective of what it shows it’s users, so it’s not just going to show a new website for a main keyword with tons of traffic and risk all those people having a bad experience.

This second point is one almost no one considers, but it’s very important. What that essentially means is that you have to prove yourself to Google that you are providing a good experience to users and are giving them what they want, by doing so with the keywords that have a smaller search volume.

Over time, you will prove that you are providing quality content and can handle larger search volumes, and then you’ll start to rank for the main keywords.

This is where things like good conversion rates, time spent on the page, website loading times etc all come into play.

However, that’s all quite complex if you are just starting out. So here’s what I would recommend doing:

Start by making your main pages of your website as if you were targeting the main keywords. For example, “family law” or “conveyancing”.

Then, use your blogs to target the long tail keywords that relate to those pages, and link back to them from those blogs. What this will do is these blogs are likely to rank for those long tail keywords, and some of their relevance will be pushed to the main page. Over time this will make your main pages more relevant for that topic, and more likely to rank for the main keywords.

As you build up a big collection of blog posts targeting these long tail keywords, what will happen is not only will you get traffic and leads from these keywords through your blogs, but your website will become much more relevant for the main keywords and it’s likely to start ranking for them.

In a previous post I spoke about the importance of H1 headlines in SEO. Now I’m going to speak about another piece of content that is equally as important.

The page title. Also known as the meta title.

This is the title that shows up in the browser tab at the top. It’s also the title that shows up on Google in the search results. Let me show you what I mean.

If we do a quick search for Lawyers in Sydney, for example, you can see the results here. The meta title is the headline of these results (outlined in red):

So why are they important?

Similar to the H1 headline, Google looks at the keywords in the meta title to decide what the website is relevant for, and thus ranks it accordingly.

So if you want to rank for certain keywords, you will need to make sure that they are in your meta title.

Similar rules apply to the meta title like they do to the H1 headline. You want to make sure that you have a unique meta title on each page and that you don’t have the same keywords across multiple pages, as that would cause “keyword cannibalization” and neither page would rank as high.

Here’s a format you can use to write meta titles:

“Legal Services in Location | Firm Name”

So an example of that would be:

“Conveyancing & Property Attorneys in Sydney | Top Lawyers”

You want to make sure that you use they keywords that are worth targeting in these meta titles. Don’t just put any keywords there that you think are good. Check the search volume and make sure it’s worth targeting them. In an upcoming post I will show you how to do this.

In the example above, because the firm name already contains the keyword “lawyers”, I put the keyword attorneys after Property so that way you target both keywords. That’s a trick you can use. An alternative to “Attorneys” would be to put “Law Firm”. The way I decide which to use is to simply look at which one of those has a higher search volume and then use that one.

Also keep in mind that you have a limit of around 60 characters for these meta titles. If it’s too long it’s going to get cut off in the Google search results, and whatever’s after that cut off isn’t going to be relevant.

H1 headlines are an extremely important part of law firm SEO and are crucial for getting your website to rank on Google, especially in more competitive niches such as the legal industry.

But firstly, what is an H1 headline?

H1 is the HTML code of the headline, and you can have H2, H3 etc headlines as well. Normal content text is normally <p> format which means paragraph.

Basically this is a way to organise the content on a page in a hierarchy,  and Google uses this to find out what your page is about.

The H1 title is so important because it is the highest priority text on the page, and Google places a lot of importance on it, and in turn the keywords that are contained within it.

That means that if you want to rank for specific keywords, they are going to have to be in the H1 headline.

If you don’t have an H1 headline, and I still see many websites that don’t, what’s happening there is essentially you are just saying nothing to Google, so it’s going to place your website lower than other websites which do have H1 headlines with the relevant keywords in them.

Now, an important thing to note is that each page has to have it’s own unique H1 headline that doesn’t contain keywords for other pages, otherwise you risk what’s known as “keyword cannibalization”. This basically means that more than one page is targeting the same keywords. What happens then is Google doesn’t know which page is the most relevant for that keyword, and as a result both rank lower.

So for example, if you have two pages, one for family law, and one for divorce, you don’t want “family law” in the H1 title of the divorce page, otherwise you risk causing conflict between the two and it’s likely that both will have a hard time ranking.

So that’s a basic overview of the H1 headline, if you have any questions feel free to ask and I’ll be happy to answer them.