Ask An SEO: How To Handle Duplicate Content Across Multiple Domains via @sejournal, @rollerblader

Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Colin in London, UK.

“My question is about duplicate content. I work for a group of schools in the UK. We have 21 schools, each has its own website and domain with a link or banner linking back to our main group website. The schools are very busy, so to save time, we have created blog posts centrally to give to the schools. They change a few things but basically the pages are pretty much the same.

I have experience with SEO, so I put my Google good boy white hat on and said, ‘Google says not to do it, it’s duplicate content. We need them to be different.’

My question is will we be penalized? I understand they will compete with each other (multiples have taken page 1 at the same time), but otherwise, is this doing us harm?

Is Google smart enough to know we are a group with different emails? Should we rewrite them all? Should we just stop? It would be good to get a second opinion – maybe I need to lighten up or take take action and remove.

Please help. Thanks, Colin.”

Great question, Colin! It is something that comes up about once a year with our clients or as a question when I’m speaking at conferences.

I’m breaking the answer out into a few sections so that it can be applied to non-school situations, too.

But first, check out this post about Google’s duplicate content penalty myth, as it is something that is commonly misunderstood.

Use Canonicals When Publishing To Secondary Sites

In the situation above, it sounds like there is a main website and multiple variations.

If you’re worried about the variation websites taking from the main website, place canonical links back to the main site from the duplicate posts.

Let’s pretend these are the URLs:

• Official site – colininlondon.com/blog-post-school.
• Duplicate 1 – colininleeds.com/blog-post-school.
• Duplicate 2 – colininglasgow.com/blog-post-school.

The official site will have a self-referencing canonical link because it is the main website and the post that should be ranking.

Duplicates 1 and 2 should have their canonical links point back to the (official) main website. This way, Google knows which site is the official one and which are duplicates.

You can also use schema, addresses, and other localization factors to help define that these are the same company and brand, similar to doing locations if you’re a brick-and-mortar business or using TLDs for country-specific targeting.

One thing to be careful of is having canonical links go to the wrong site.

When you publish original content on a specific school location site, make sure the canonical link is self-referencing vs. going back to the official site or main site.

And if the content gets published to the official site and secondary websites, have the canonicals point to the specific school location site.

You also want to make sure your sitemap excludes the content if it is not the official version. Not a big deal at this point, but still something you can control.

Publish To The Most Relevant Audience

When you’re stuck trying to think of which site should be the official one, or your content management system (CMS) allows you to assign a main site for the content, think about who would benefit most from the post and publish there.

If it is an event and only accessible to one or five schools vs. the 21, publish to the most relevant audience and use the same canonical plan above.

You may want the content to be accessible to all students, parents, and faculty, but if it is only relevant to a smaller grouping or a single school, only publish it to the most relevant location.

Some Content Is Not A Duplicate

In the case of snow days where some schools may be cancelled, others delayed, and some are business as usual, feel free to post these.

The main part of the content will be the same or similar, and that is ok. You can have the same opening and closing of the post; the most important content is the name of the school and the information about when school starts based on the location.

It may be beneficial to have a main post with all locations and their status on the main site, then have the “duplicate” variations with localized information on the individual.

A lot of people assume this would be duplicate content. It shouldn’t be as it is catered to a specific audience and only that audience.

Think about a pharmacy or retail chain where the only differences are hours of operation, phone number, and a couple store-specific details.

Should Content Be Rewritten For Each Site?

If you have the ability and you can make it relevant to that specific location, then yes, there would be a benefit.

For example, you may have a boys-only or girls-only school, or elementary, high, and preschool. If the content is for the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), chances are the concerns for the elementary school parent meetings will be different from those in high school.

By adding the agendas, decisions, board members, times, and other unique attributes of the meetings, you can have similar openings and closings because the body and meat of the posts will be unique.

Use Google Business Profile

Something I have not personally done, as I’ve not worked specifically on schools with multiple websites, is using Google Business Profile for your local locations.

I have done this with retailers and similar industries, such as non-profits and service providers, that have local branches, each with its own domain.

By setting the URLs up and combining them as entities, you may help to reduce the duplication of similar content. Google Business Profile will allow you to sync them together.

This will not help with your main duplicate content question, but it could help with making sure the locations are accounted for in the local search results which may be relevant in specific situations.

If your sites make it clear you’re not trying to game the system, then I wouldn’t worry about duplicate content penalties.

If you’re really concerned, use canonical links that reference the main version that lives on the group website. Then use self-referencing canonicals for any unique content published on the individual school sites.

I hope this helps, and thank you for asking!

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ask An SEO: Does Dwell Time After Google Ad Clicks Impact Organic Rankings? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

Lalindra from Ontario asks:

“Does the dwell time and user engagement after clicking on Google Ads impact search engine rankings? If yes, since when has this been in effect?”

That is a really good question! It goes along the common myth of PPC impacting SEO, where the more you spend, the better your SEO is.

In theory, no, clicking a PPC ad and dwelling probably won’t impact your SEO – positively or negatively. It will impact your budget if Google Ads assumes it was a legit click and visitor. But, if Google thinks it is a fraud click, you might not be billed for it.

Does PPC Spend And Click Help Boost SEO?

For years, some agencies and in-house SEO professionals have claimed that spending more on PPC increases SEO presence and visibility.

The Google leak, combined with the DOJ trial, fueled these rumors even further. But, the idea that higher PPC spend improves your SEO is a myth, not a fact.

This applies even more to a few users clicking and then dwelling. That is a single user or small group, not a large enough audience to cause any form of signal about the page’s user experience.

Google deals with massive data sets and volumes, so a few clicks, even a couple hundred, is likely not enough to signal page quality. For the same amount of time and money, you could likely get media coverage, which would move the needle further.

That said, there could be some potential for increased visibility if PPC clicks lead to actions that suggest a positive user experience like dwelling, scrolling, and engagement.

For example, there are theories from the Google leak and DOJ trial about “navboost” and “glue.” These concepts suggest how shopping browser extensions may influence how high your page ranks in the top 10 results.

Could PPC Campaigns With High Volume Of Traffic Impact Rankings?

If your PPC ads drive massive volumes of traffic to your website and those users reads multiple pages for publishers and spend time (dwell) on your blog post or in your shop,  this could signal that the UX is relevant for a specific query.

This would also require the browser to track both the query searched and dwell time while ignoring the factor that it was a click from PPC.

The browser would also need to feed the data back to the core SEO algorithm, say that the PPC click experience was relevant for a query, and give it a priority for SEO.

In this scenario, it can be assumed that Google Ads and Google SEO are working together – but they likely are not.

I think they play with the interface and queries, as well as recommendations to boost profits, but I don’t think the PPC team has control over SEO results – just a personal opinion.

If Google Ads sent signals for Google SEO, you wouldn’t see smaller brands and new sites rank, you would see the big brands who are spending the most money. Type “t-shirts” into Google. You likely won’t see big brands like Target, Walmart, Macy’s, etc. dominate organic search results.

If big brands spent big money, and the PPC algorithm fed this into SEO, it would be their golden opportunity to generate a large traffic volume.

By losing some money on PPC for a generic term, they get the big prize of organic SEO traffic.

If it were that easy, there would be no SEO industry because the big brands could simply buy their way to the top.

But small companies can still compete and win. We have clients in highly competitive niches who can move quickly because they are not tied up in red tape needing to negotiate layers of approval. This means they are responsive, can act on the fly and beat major brands

When Can PPC Support SEO?

So, what could be true here? If you spend money building a brand via PPC and the traffic is relevant and coming in volumes, users may start searching for your brand by name or brand + modifier, e.g., “[Your Brand] T-shirts.”

If your domain already has trust and authority and now has a significant volume of people looking for your t-shirts because of a viral social media video and your large spending on PPC ads, the SEO algorithm may pick up this demand.

This means that users are actively saying “your brand has these, so please show it to us”. If the search engine does not show it to them, they go to a different search engine or may try a large language model (LLM) to search.

I have seen this happen firsthand – that the algorithm starts sending traffic for generic phrases in these scenarios. It was especially true when I worked in the infomercial product space.

As users naturally began searching for the product type alongside a brand or domain name, websites started showing up for non-branded phrases in search results.

You may have a product such as a mop or broom, something that waters plants, or a blanket that is going viral. As your product takes off, signalling this is the product brand users want, the generic search can trigger your product and website as the best result.

This helps it climb up (along with quality backlinks, media coverage, and social media chatter) and rank for the generic phrase.

If you have the budget to build virality through PPC, it could help your SEO. But it isn’t the dwell time that is helping; it’s the actual queries being searched and the increased volume via the PPC boost.

But once the trend wears off, you have to do real SEO work to keep it.

I could also see this working for larger purchases that require multiple website visits, such as real estate, luxury vacations, mattresses and furniture, etc.

Bottom Line

In short, no, clicking your own PPC ad and dwelling won’t help your SEO.

You’d have to do it at large volumes and make it appear to be unique users, all having a good experience.

But, running large-scale PPC campaigns that generate branded searches and repeat visits could help send signals that influence Google’s algorithm to test your website for similar phrases.

I hope this answers your question. The only way to know is to test; if you do, I’d love to see the results.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Damir Khabirov/Shutterstock

Ask An SEO: Why Is Google Not Indexing My Pages? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Harjeet:

“Hi! I have a website that provides information of warehouses all over United states. The problem is that only eight to nine pages are indexed by Google. But it has many dynamic pages.

For example, if you do a search for any location on homepage search bar, it will open the location page with the listings.

But Google is not indexing the location pages and warehouse listings as well. Can you help me solve this issue?”

That’s a great question, and I think I can help.

After looking at your website, it looks like you have a crawling issue with a lack of actual pages and not an indexing one.

I can verify you only have nine pages in Google’s indexes. This is because you only have nine actual pages on your website.

I want to start with an overview of some of the site issues. Then, after the overview, I’ll share how to resolve a large chunk of this so you can begin getting pages crawled and indexed.

Identifying The Gaps In Your Website Structure

It’s very hard for both consumers and search engines to navigate your website because you are missing links and easy-to-find navigation.

There are also two sitemaps, and one of them is incorrect. The good news is your correct one is listed in robots.txt, but it only has your site’s navigation in it and not the pages that are being created dynamically.

To start, list the most important subpages in your sitemap so search engines can find them more easily.

The robots.txt file also includes a disallow directive for all user agents which is problematic because this is blocking crawling and not guiding crawlers to proper folders and pages.

Specify “allow” for the important folders and pathways you want crawled. This guides spiders to the pages and folders you feel are most important.

On top of the sitemap and robots.txt issues, there is no internal linking. Internal links are important to allow crawlers to move around your site and find new pages that need indexing.

Next is to look at the quality of your content and how it is displayed.

The content on your site is thin and there is no content that can provide the kind of information that experts in storage in the local area would know.

Add unique content and location information to each page individually (more on this below in the how to fix this issue section).

The site is also missing robots meta tags and canonical links. Meta robot tags give directions on whether the pages should be indexed or not and if links should be followed or not.

Canonical links say which version is the official version of a page and can help deduplicate similar or competing pages. Adding these will help search engines know what to do as the pages and links are discovered.

Last, you have no city or state-based pages as dedicated resources, but you do have them in a drop-down in the search box. The issue here is these pages don’t exist unless searched for.

If they don’t exist on an official URL, search engines cannot find them and index them easily.

There are other tech and content issues here, but I’m going to jump into fixing the main one, which is getting more pages indexed for you. And this is an incredibly easy one, so this is good news.

Filling The Missing SEO Elements

There are a few steps I would take if this were my site or project:

1. Build a cities and/or regions and states folder structure.
2. Get unique content for each.
3. Add in breadcrumbs and internal links.
4. Modify the robots.txt and sitemaps.
5. Do local PR work, not spammy links and directories.

Build A Folder Structure

When you allow a site search to generate URLs for cities, states, and locations, you create a ton of competing URLs.

People can spell a city wrong or use an abbreviation: Philly, Philadelphia (and is it Missouri or PA), or neighborhoods like Fishtown or Center City if it is the Pennsylvania version of Philadelphia.

And if you live in the DMV (DC, MD, VA) like I do, you may type in Washington or Columbia Heights vs. the state or city name. Washington could also be either DC or the state.

Building a folder structure lets you guide people to the correct location and makes it easier for search engines to know where you offer services.

For example, EU companies can structure by country; individual countries like Mexico could have states like Jalisco and Oaxaca and the major cities in each.

Create Unique Content

Original location-based content is easy to use for your niche. Each region has different climates, and cities do, too. Bring these into consideration when writing the copy.

If the region has more humidity, talk about how the building protects against mold, mildew, corrosion, and other humidity issues that impact storage and warehousing.

For areas that lose power because of hurricanes, snow, or even heat, talk about backup systems and refrigeration for temperature-critical items being stored.

You could include city-based content and localize with original talking points, including directions to the location. Don’t forget to include physical addresses, hours of operation, and phone numbers.

I wrote this guide to localized title tags and descriptions a while back, it applies here, too.

Add Breadcrumbs And Internal Links

Now that you have unique content for the states and major cities in an easy-to-navigate directory structure, help users and search engines find them.

Add breadcrumbs with breadcrumb schema to the site – ideally, at the top of the page so users can click and use them.

In the unique copy for the state pages, link to the city pages. If it will benefit the user, link back to the main head state pages from the city pages.

An example for this would be if one city has people renting in other cities in that state, or if one location fills up, other locations that are close by and are easily accessible as an alternative.

The copy may mention looking for other warehousing options in that state or other city/region. Use the name of the state or city with the call to action and make them an internal link.

You’re helping the user find a solution, and search engines understand what each page is about.

This is how you build an effective and meaningful internal linking structure for SEO. The main goal is to help a customer; the benefit is you make it easier for search engines to understand your site structure.

Modify The Robots.txt And Sitemaps

At this point, you have a good site and user experience. Now is the time to make sure the states and cities are in the sitemap, and then modify your robots.txt to allow the folders.

You can request a crawl from Search Console for Google and Bing’s version of Webmaster Tools.

As the spiders access robots.txt, they will find your listed pages, then through internal links find other pages to crawl to find all your pages.

With proper meta robots and canonicals, they will see clean pathways and be able to crawl your site better.

Drive Demand Through Local PR

Anyone can list in directories and pay to play. Yes, some may help you, but the real benefit is local PR.

Getting your business featured in the media drives local demand. People in those regions begin searching for your company by name and the services as modifiers on the keywords.

This may or may not help with SEO, but it does one thing: It builds consumer trust and gets you localized, high-value backlinks. These can send trust signals and customers to you.

Local media includes local blogs that do not allow guest posting or sponsored posts, TV and print media like local newspapers, radio stations and podcasts with descriptions with links, and other platforms that people in the city or state use.

You may be able to add a PR bar with “As Seen In” featuring local media logos to build trust with that region.

Summary

The good news is that you don’t have an indexing problem. The pages that exist are indexed.

You have discovery problems because only nine pages actually exist on your website.

The solution here is to build the state and city-based pages, fill them with content and site structure, and then do the work to build trust with PR and trust-building activities.

I hope this helps. Thank you for asking your question – it’s a good one!

More Resources:

Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock

Ask An SEO: How To Repair & Recover Negative Brand Mentions In SERPs via @sejournal, @MordyOberstein

This time on Ask An SEO, we’re diving into a branding question from someone dealing with negative SERP results:

I have a client that recently had some financial issues and the SERP for their brand has many negative listings.

Do you have any ideas for a strategy that could help to remove those listings and improve their brand status?

There are two ways to approach this. There’s the practical things in your immediate control and there’s the wider brand relationship that needs mending. I’ve very much been here before.

Folks will tend to lean into the changes you can make that are in your immediate locus of control.

For example, start posting on X (Twitter), and you’ll get a carousel for your posts on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This carousel can push “negative” results off page one.

The problem with this sort of approach is that it’s not entirely effective.

For starters, it has limited reach (yes, your posts will appear in a carousel, but not on every SERP related to your brand).

Also, it doesn’t deal with the very top of the SERP, and who knows what actual result you’re pushing to page two – maybe it’s one that is favorable to your brand?

While I’m not saying you should not do whatever you can do in the immediate, I would caution you about getting too caught up in it.

What you need to be doing is thinking about how you repair your relationship with your niche.

Brands fail here all the time. I’ve seen it firsthand. So, I have a few pieces of key advice you need to follow if you want to fix your brand’s SERP for real.

1. You Have To Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone

The main reason brands fail at this is because it’s uncomfortable.

The biggest piece of advice I can offer you is to be ready and willing to get out of your comfort zone.

You’re going to have to eat crow in some way, shape, or form. You can’t wrong someone and then not apologize. You may feel you did nothing wrong or that it was out of your control or whatever.

I warn you not to get hung up on this. Your audience feels hurt – that is all that matters.

You need to somehow repair that hurt, and it’s going to mean eating some form of humble pie. And everyone loves pie, so it’s OK.

2. You Have To Diagnose The Root Cause Of The Negative Sentiment

Often, the knee-jerk reaction brands have is to “market their way” out of a problem. They launch campaigns or initiatives that aim to create new buzz and new chatter that is more positive. This doesn’t work.

You can’t do any of that until you diagnose the root cause. What you’re looking for here is (among other things):

• What event (or series of happenings) triggered the negative response?
• How did this trigger impact the audience? (You need to be extremely specific and explicit here. Generalizations are not helpful).
• Why did this trigger the industry to such an extent? (Again, be explicit here).
• How toxic is the relationship? You need to know how damaged the relationship is, and you have to be consciously aware of it.

3. You Have To Be Transparent

This speaks a bit to my earlier point about getting out of your comfort zone. You are rebuilding trust. That’s hard. It takes time, and it takes substance (so my fourth tip would be: actually change, just don’t say you did). It’s a process.

You need to reinforce to your audience that you are constantly engaging in that process and that you don’t take their trust for granted.

If this sounds like some sort of Dr. Phil episode, it’s because it is. Humans are humans. The relationships that brands have with their audience work just the way our personal relationships do.

If you violated someone’s trust on a personal level, you would need to show you’re doing the work to earn their trust back.

That means a new level of transparency and vulnerability is needed.

Same for your brand. There is zero difference.

Changing The Narrative Sets Everything Else In Motion

The end result of this process, if you do the work to create engagement and audience interest (which is a whole other conversation about how you do that), is exactly what you’re looking for.

What you really want is not to have a result change or an article rewritten. What you want is for the narrative to shift.

Once the narrative shifts, the rest falls into place. People start talking about you in a positive way (even referencing how amazing it is you turned it all around). They’ll even start writing articles about you or mentioning you, etc.

At that point, once the narrative has shifted and the industry has clearly reassociated how they think and feel about you, you can pick up the stragglers.

Then, you can reach out to those sites that still have not updated their content to reflect the “new you.”

You now have the capital and the inertia to put an unspoken pressure on sites to change their content.

If everyone else is thinking about you a certain way and talking about you a certain way, and if you’ve gained a bit of popularity, those stragglers are not going to want to be left behind (or, at a minimum, running against the grain and consensus).

Now, you have the real power to change the listings on the SERP, no matter who is ranking or what the query is.

Change narratives, not organic listings.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ask An SEO: How Long Does It Take For Schema To Rank? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Mariya from Irinjalakuda, India, who asks:

“How much time does it take for schema to go live on a SERP?”

Great question Mariya, and an easy one to answer.

Schema “goes live” on a search engine ranking position immediately once the search engine has refreshed its current version of the page which includes a crawl and the index updating with the new code. Once this happens the new code with the schema deployed is shown.

For authoritative pages that get crawled and refreshed regularly, it could be a few hours. With newer sites, it could be a week or two. But schema does not help you rank. The job of schema is to help search engines know what the page is about, what is in each section of the page, and in some cases, why the page should be trusted.

A common misconception about schema is that it is a ranking signal or a magic bullet that helps you gain positions algorithmically.

It does not, adding FAQ schema (which was deprecated and is no longer used by Google at least) did not help you get featured in people also ask results. Instead, it would help search engines know when to add relevant questions under your site’s listing in the SERP which extended the depth of a listing.

If your pages are not already ranking, and the content quality is not good, schema isn’t going to help you. If you do have rankings, deploying proper schema may give you more visibility via featured snippets and rich results.

When FAQ schema did exist, the questions nested to your search result would help you stand out from the pack, so some users may click on your listing vs. the one above you because you were more visible.

Schema can also help recipe sites that have high trust and a great UX to get their recipes shown in a carousel.

If you have a page where the video is the predominant content on the page, and the video matches the topic including the title and H1, using video object schema will signal to the search engine that you have a video about that topic. That video may start to show up at the top of the search results, inside a “people also ask”, “things to know”, or videos search result.

That is where schema can help with SEO, but increased rankings from schema on its own are unlikely.

Schema isn’t there to help you rank, it is there to help search engines know:

• What your page is about.
• Who created the content or information within the page.
• Which queries to show your pages for include informational, service and leads, ecommerce shopping, comparisons, and reviews, as well as music, images, videos, sounds, and media.
• The types of visitors may have the best experience with that specific page or a section of the page.
• Where you offer services, the times you offer them, and who they’re best for.

If you’re a local business, you can deploy area served schema to show the area you offer services for. If you operate during specific hours, and modify them for the holidays, this can be shown through schema.

Organization schema lets you associate your brand with your social media channels, reference third parties like wiki data to build associations with what your company or publication offers topically, and allow authors, executives, and others to show credibility if they’re known and notable.

But if your website is not a trusted resource, and your pages do not already rank, schema is not going to help you much. When you do have trust for your website, you still have to hope that the search engine will pay attention to the code and consider it. Knowledge panels for example could be influenced by schema, but also by third-party sites.

One thing I look for, after updating a page is the refresh and discover report in Google Search Console. Discover is when Google is looking to discover new pages, and refresh is when it is looking to see if you’ve updated the content of the page. The report contains a date, which is helpful.

Once it has been refreshed, look to see if any changes are currently showing up in search results. If you modified the title tag, for example, you could see when the new one begins showing, assuming Google doesn’t write its own for you. The same goes for the meta description. I also use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to show when featured snippets and rich results start to populate.

By paying attention to crawl data including discover and refresh, and making sure your site has a good user experience on every page, not just a few, chances are your schema is going to be picked up regularly, and even same day.

I hope this helps answer your question, and thank you for reading.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal 

Ask An SEO: What To Do When Your SEO Formula Doesn’t Work? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This month’s Ask an SEO question comes from Heather, who asks:

“Do you find that, sometimes, even your best formula to rank doesn’t make sense? I advise employment lawyers on how to write. However, I find the “formula” doesn’t seem to work. Have you found you can’t even to get it to work? Loaded question, but I hope you know what I mean.”

Great question, Heather, and it’s not as loaded as it originally sounds. It’s an easy one to resolve when you don’t overthink it.

When you use the same approach for law firm SEO or any niche SEO, you’re creating the same experience for the search engines.

Search engines need the best experience – not the same. That’s why using similar strategies doesn’t work.

Look how each law firm is unique and use that as a strength.

Identify who in the practice can become part of the brand (including any partners with media potential), what their specialties are, and how to approach each law firm’s strategy differently.

The answer below also applies to ecommerce, service providers like your clients, and publishers, so this post benefits all readers.

But I will stick to lawyers since that is the example our inquirer mentioned. If someone wants ecommerce or another topic, feel free to submit it, and I’ll be happy to respond.

Why SEO Formulas Fall Short For Law Firms

The reason the same SEO formula does not work, even if they’re the same type of lawyers is because each firm is unique.

Unique in this sense is having licensed attorneys nationally and providing full coverage.

Some could be multi-location vs. single location in a city or state, and others can be a boutique law shop specializing in one niche. Each will have different needs and different abilities, so the formula has to change.

If you’re not creating original and unique strategies for each and every law firm client, you’re not giving search engines like Google a reason to show them. That is why the formula doesn’t work, and your clients are at a disadvantage.

Larger law firms have extra people to talk to the media; they can go out and litigate and get backlinks from the cases.

Firms with multiple locations have more Google Business Profile opportunities and more abilities to do community work and gain exposure.

They’ll also need individual location pages vs. a single location, providing them with more localized content for city-based queries. And firms that have won cases that go viral in their space may get media attention.

This results in an increase in branded searches and backlinks, which leads to easier SEO for competitive terms.

The clientele is also different. If the employment firm handles small business or personal injury vs. enterprise corporations and big four accounting, the language levels and terminology need to change because you’re writing for people using different jargon and language levels.

If it is an NGO vs. for-profit, there are other phrases and rules they need to follow. This means the writing levels, types of sourcing, and information they’re providing have to be different as the clientele and type of audience they want are different.

Going for huge corporate accounts means having content for the assistants that meet their needs when they research, and the executives where you have summaries that make sense as to why they’re searching for a law firm.

They have a general counsel that will review your casework and look for something completely different.

If it’s a small business, it’s easier to adjust to a single page that talks to the owner and builds their confidence. Same niche, different target audience, different site experience need a unique strategy.

Here are some of the ways I’d tweak the SEO strategy for law firms, if I only worked in one specific niche. Then, I’d implement unique strategies on top of it based on attracting their specific target clients, not in general.

Build Digital PR And Trust

I’m not talking about link building here; I’m talking about building a brand. When the lawyers and partners are known entities, it carries over and can help build brand trust.

Larger cities like New York, Chicago, or Dallas have more opportunities than smaller towns, but each region has media opportunities.

Build a list of media companies, bloggers, and community resources, including city and town-run government forums, and see who talks about employment and employment law.

Now, look at the topics they cover. It could be anything from discrimination to hiring, job loss and layoffs, or employee and employer rights.

These are hot topics year-round and opportunities to get your clients featured. Once they go through media training, get them on TV, in columns as experts, and on stage at community forums as experts.

This results in natural backlinks when done correctly, and it leads to people searching for them by name and brand, which may signal to the search engines there is something to it.

If your client wins a case that is relevant to the topic the journalist covers, feature it as a recent blog post or PR article so the journalist has extra incentive to use it as a subject matter expert.

Once your client is a known entity and the leader in their area, their profile on the law firm’s website will become a place that attracts links, maybe a knowledge panel, and there may be markup available to help with this.

Enhance Visibility With Schema

You’ll want an organization schema with legal service (it also applies to local businesses) and area served. For single locations, cover their city, state, or where they’re licensed and provide services.

If multi-location, deploy service area schema on each location page. And don’t forget there is attorney schema, too.

Because you work with employment law firms, you may want to add references to this page on Wiki data or the matching one on Wikipedia from the additional type to build relevance to the type of legal services offered.

Optimize Google Business Profile

If they have physical locations, create Business Profile pages and do your best to get customers to leave reviews and feedback.

You want to fill out all pages just like normal, and if clients want to know if you want them to say anything, emphasize specific tasks and common situations you resolved for them.

And if others have asked questions about their law firms, your clients can answer questions based on their experiences.

Make sure to fill out all the services offered and fields. The more you give the search engine accurate and updated information, the better it can do to show your clients.

Develop Distinctive Copy

The content should not be the same strategy for each client even if they have the same types of customers.

You, as an SEO, need to create a completely unique content plan and ensure that others are not doing the same thing.

Google only needs one resource, so the same strategy for two similar law firms means only one can win, or neither will if both are the same because a third firm is going to be unique and take over.

It is easy to develop strategies for a unique experience.

Have the law firms publish their success stories as informational guides and in the reading and writing level of the customer.

Both will have unique brands and voices, and use those to cater to their potential customers.

Do not have them say what they did for their clients; have them talk about the issue the client had and the steps taken to resolve it.

By sharing the issue that was being faced and using the words their customers use, the law firm is speaking their client’s language.

This helps create a resource that potential leads will find when they’re searching for solutions to their current situation.

By providing a resource that includes common misconceptions, pitfalls to avoid, and the ways the happy client reached a solution, the law firm is building trust and can generate a lead when the person finishes reading.

Ensure Testimonial Relevance

One of the largest oversights I see with law firm SEO and conversion optimization is outdated and irrelevant testimonials.

This can also be a unique copy and a trust builder. Make sure all testimonials are:

• Matched to the theme or topic of the page they are on and not sitewide.
• Are from similar customers to the clients the firm wants by name, company size, and job type.
• Explain the success of the specific legal situation that matches the call to action so the potential client knows you have experience resolving legal issues for their needs.
• Each one is up-to-date and accurate. You don’t want potential clients to think your law firm hasn’t won a case in years or isn’t familiar with current employment law best practices.

The bottom line is that you cannot use the same strategy for each practice as each is unique, and search engines only need one of the same experiences.

All of your law firm clients will need title tags, schema, and content, but the PR work, copy on the pages, and authority building have to be original and play to their strengths so the pages meet the needs of their future clients.

If you’re not creating original and unique strategies for each and every law firm client, you’re not giving search engines like Google a reason to show them.

That is why the same SEO formula doesn’t work when applied to multiple clients. I hope this helps.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal 

Ask An SEO: Should I Point Guest Post Backlinks To Homepages Or Individual Ones? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Nazim from Islamabad, who asks:

“I have a price comparison/aggregator website with my country’s domain. I want to ask what type of backlinks/guests posts should I have (local/international).

Also, I should build backlinks to my homepage or category/individual pages, too? Besides are (name removed) and (name removed) authentic platforms for backlinks building?”

Great question, Nazim, and happy to help.

I’m breaking the answer into three sections: The first is guest posting in general, then the homepage or category and individual pages, and the last is where to get quality links.

The first two have a TL;DR if you’re short on time. Otherwise, there’s a longer explanation if you want the thoughts or SEO theory behind it.

I’d like to emphasize where to get backlinks before going into the rest of the post.

Where To Get Backlinks

If you want backlinks that can move the needle and build stability, it comes down to quality and natural backlinks. This means the website should:

• Not list that they allow guest posting or advertorials anywhere (except in the case of mass media as advertorials are clearly marked).
• Only allow vetted and knowledgeable contributors who are invited to write columns.
• Have quality control policies in place, including using proper link attributes like “sponsored, nofollow, etc.”
• Not link to topically irrelevant sites externally, and definitely not the big P’s (porn, payday, pills, personal loans, etc.) unless you’re in those industries.
• Make it hard to get an actual link (social media, forums, and blog comments allow anyone to post, and many allow links, so they are not earned or hard to get).

You can get quality links from:

• Local media sites and blogs for local businesses.
• Industry and trade publications.
• Niche websites and content creators.
• National media in directly relevant and non-affiliate sections.
• PR stunts and events that have direct tie-ins (not scholarships or grants) to your actual products and services (don’t do a surfboarding scholarship and expect to rank long-term).

Guest Posting For Backlinks

TL;DR: Guest posting has its place, but it should not be used to build backlinks because guest posts are not earned.

Guest posting can build trust in you as an expert or brand authority and drive an audience to your website who is interested in the content you produce, the products you sell, or the services you offer.

Guest posting should only be done on topically relevant websites with an active audience, where audience acquisition – not backlinks – is the goal.

When Not To Do Guest Posting

The first thing is that guest posting and link database providers, based on my experience, are red flags SEO-wise and should not be used.

That doesn’t mean good ones don’t exist. Think about it this way.

If you’re using the same systems as everyone else, and it’s the same sites, or there’s a low cost to entry, your links are likely going to be part of a PBN (private blog network, also known as link farms, link wheels, link exchange networks, etc.) or easily mapped network.

The search engines will ignore these links, and you will waste your time and money.  Other times, they could lead to an action against your website because they are not natural.

More importantly, if you can get into or see a list of them, do you think search engines cannot access them?

There are third-party tools like Majestic SEO that database and map these all the time.

If they’re able to find PBNs and guest posting rings as an independent company, Google, Bing, and giant corporations can likely do it at a much larger scale.

If these sites allow themselves to be listed in databases and actively allow guest posting or link selling because they make money from it, they’re likely going to be ignored or eventually cause a manual action for unnatural link building.

Instead, focus on links other sites do not have and that are not part of these systems or platforms.

Getting the links nobody else has from topically relevant websites and genuine non-pay-to-play websites helps move the needle, especially if the site is a trusted authority in your niche.

When To Guest Post

If you decide guest posting is part of your business plan, focus on websites that are topically relevant to your industry and have your users as subscribers.

The website should also have a readership base that comes back at least once a week to read new content that has been published.

Search Engine Journal is a good example.

I do not use it to build backlinks to my blog, but I do contribute because one of the services my marketing agency offers is SEO.

Marketers engage with SEJ’s webinars, podcasts, newsletter blasts, social media, and they check back for new content.

By contributing via the columns, I’m reaching an audience of marketers, which is my target audience.

Some of you also write and ask how to subscribe and get access as I publish new content (thank you, by the way; I let the editorial staff know).

Being a columnist allows me to build trust with the readership who checks back. I don’t do it for backlinks, and I don’t think I’ve ever sourced my site from one of my articles.

If there is a link, it was added by its editors because they thought my resource was high enough quality, and they didn’t have one of their own.

Linking To The Homepage Or A Category Page

TL;DR: Link to your homepage and not a category page.

Categories do not provide more information or value; category page links are used to game the system and work against you. Categories will rank naturally when the rest of the website is trustworthy.

For guest posts and backlinks to feel natural, you should be referencing your own brand and homepage.

The alternate is if you have a resource, and the site you’re pitching does not have an equal one, get the link to your resource as it is original and the only one available.

Longer Explanation

I always recommend homepage links off of the brand when it comes to link building, especially with guest posting.

Being a brand that people search sends a very strong signal you’re an authority to algorithms.

When people search for your site by name, they’ll likely also add modifiers to the query, such as colors, sizes, adjectives, brands, etc.

These modifiers signal why people go to your website.

It could be the best recipe for brownies for health conditions like diabetes, which color of paint makes sense for a contemporary living room, or the right brand of servers and racks are needed for a data center.

These modifiers with your brand let the search engines know that if they want the person searching to keep using their engine, they need to crawl and index more of your website to find the specific page or category their searcher was looking for.

If the search engine only had your homepage indexed, but the person wants a specific product line, the search engine makes their user work harder than other search engines by having users search for the pages.

Here’s an example. If you sell wall paint, and the search engines only had your homepage, they would give that result as people search for your company by name.

Suddenly, the color you developed became the color of the year; now, people are searching for your brand plus the name of the color or the numeric mix to find it.

By not crawling and indexing your site, it cannot surface that specific page, but other search engines do.

If other search engines surface that specific color, they win the user. When more users search because the engine has better results, the search engine can show more ads.

The more ads they show, the more money they make. So, build your brand + modifiers.

When someone adds your brand plus “blue,” “washable,” “kitchen,” and other modifiers, the search engine will know it needs to explore further to keep the searcher coming back.

In the above scenario, winning the award or recognition will naturally build backlinks because your product or service won something of value. The same with the photograph of the year, holiday toy of the year, etc.

There’s a lot more to it, and this is where branding comes into play.

Once you’re a known brand or destination site that consumers trust, there’s a better chance that bloggers, journalists, and others will link to your category, review, blog posts, and comparison pages naturally.

If you do it from a guest post, it may count for a while, but it will also likely backfire, as you are giving yourself a backlink, not something earned.

Linking off of your brand gets that branded search going.

Search engines make their money by selling ad space. They can only sell ad space if users are searching. If they give bad results, fewer people will continue using their search engines, which is why they need to focus on quality.

Guest posting for backlinks is a bad idea.

Yes, it works until you get caught, so if you’re doing it for backlinks, always have a second and third strategy to offset the guest posting links.

If you want to do a churn and burn site where you grow it to sell fast, guest posting and PBNs can be a great strategy for you, but it is at the buyer’s expense who will pay the price.

When you want a website that makes money and generates steady revenue, go with evergreen and quality links instead of gimmicks and easy-to-trace techniques like guest posting.

I hope this helps.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal