A lawyer, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, is “a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counselor solicitor; a person who
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is practicing law.” Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political and social authority, and deliver justice. Working as a lawyer involves the practical application of abstract legal theories and knowledge to solve specific individualized problems, or to advance the interests of those who retain (i.e., hire) lawyers to perform legal services.
An attorney according to Blacl’s law dictionary in the most general sense this term denotes an agent or substitute, or one who is appointed and authorized to act in the place or stead of another. In re Ricker, 60 N. H. 207, 29 Atl. 559, 24 L. R. A. 740; Eichelberger v. Sifford, 27 Md. 320. It is “an ancient English word, and signi- fieth one that is set in the turne, stead, or place of another; and of these some be private * * * and some be publike, as attorneys at law.” Co. Litt. 516, 128a; Britt 2856. One who is appointed by another to do something in his absence, and who has authority to act in the place and turn of him by whom he is delegated. When used with reference to the proceedings of courts, or the transaction of business in the courts, the term always means “attorney at law,” q. v. And see People v. May, 3 Mich. 605; Kelly v. Herb, 147 Pa. 503, 23 Atl. 889; Clark v. Morse, 16 La. 576.
Most people use the terms interchageably. But what if you are trying to optimize these words for search engine results (SERP). Take a look at Google trends to find out what the most popular word is.
google trends – Click to Enlarge
This is a graph with 100 being the highest of the trends for the seaches on the web. The color coordination is attorney in blue, lawyer in red, lawyers in green and attorneys in yellow. So to state the obvious the word of choice to optimize for is attorney. In the United States it is searched on over twice as many times as the word lawyer. For some reason the plurals of the word are inverse to the singular. The trends for all 4 words appear to stay about the same.
If you take a look at Google’s keywords tool it shows 11,100,ooo local searches per month for attorney and 7.480.000 local searches for lawyer. Again many more searches for the word attorney vs lawyer. So this seems to verify that the word most searched on between attoreny and lawyer is attorney. The plurals also were comparable.
However, not so fast, as Google keywords tool allows you to query for broad match, exact match and phrase. In exact match attorney is searched for 40,500 times per month and lawyer is 49,500. Below is how Google defines broad, exact and phrase match
Broad: The sum of the search volumes for the keyword, related grammatical forms, synonyms, and related words.
Exact: The search volume for that specific keyword and close variants
Phrase: The sum of search volumes that include the whole phrase or near variants of the whole phrase
I suggest you try this exercise with personal injury lawyer and personal injury attorney if you are seeking personal injury cases. Unfortunately in smaller markets adding a geo qaulifier such as Cincinnati yields negligible results. Of course geo qualifiers are critical.
And remember linking should be natural . Too many exact match anchor text links can now backfire. Anecdotal evidence suggests that branded links such as Anthony Castelli Attorney are critical.
by Anthony Castelli Attorney practicing Ohio injury law at 8170 Corporate Park Drive #220 Cincinnati, Ohio 45242 513-621-2345
Other articles of interest:
A J Kohn Keyword Match Ratio
Read more: What is ATTORNEY? definition of ATTORNEY (Black’s Law Dictionary)
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Good analysis. I wonder how much lawyer v attorney matters in the end because I would think google may be smart enough to realize the terms are synonymous. This certainly did not used to be true but it may be true now.
I work near the US border and serve a lot of Canadians. I often wonder if I should optimize my site for the term “solicitor” or if Canadians know enough to use the terms “lawyer” or “attorney”
Anthony, this is a recurring topic, and definitely a good point to take into account. Let me share some more relevant ideas that we found in a previous, similar research.
Google Trends can be a valuable tool to find out what better works for your law firm / site / niche. And filtering out by keyword match is definitely a good idea. But be also sure to restrict the searches to the appropriate categories – and location if you aren’t running a globally targeted website or firm.
In terms of getting good ranks, you also need to pay closer attention to your competition. If a keyword gets the same number of competing sites that another keyword, but it gets more searches than this other keyword, then the rule of thumb is just picking the keywords with more searches. But if the competition for specific, attorney-related searches in your area is bigger (or just stronger positioned) than for lawyer-related searches, then you’ll want to go with a dominant “lawyer” term.
Also, the way search engines handle synonyms has changed to the point that, in Google searches for long tail queries including “lawyer” (without the quotes,) occurrences of “attorney” will also be highlighted in bold. The opposite is also true. And this also happens with acronyms and other words. Long tail pages targeting combinations of “attorney” can still be outranked by similar pages that mostly use “lawyer” in the copy.
An example of that would be searching for “IP attorney” (without the quotes) and you would (probably – as it depends on your location and search preferences) see at least one example of highlighted (bold) keywords in the first search results page with the full “Intellectual Property Lawyer” text.
What you mention about being careful with overusing exact match links is a really good suggestion, since with the latest Google updates, avoiding penalties is more important than ever. Adding some moderation and variety can be a really helpful strategy.
So definitely, the suggestion to mostly use “attorney” in a globally oriented website is a good piece of advice, and a great starting point. If you also want to fully optimize the search engine strategy of your local law firm, then deeper research is required.