SEO
How to limit your reliance on canonicals and boost crawl efficiency
30-second summary:
- Reducing reliance on canonical tags can improve product URL discovery on Shopify
- How you structure your products on Shopify can determine how well these pages perform
- Shifting reliance from canonical tags to rich internal anchor text helps build relevancy
Can anything stop the relentless rise of Shopify? Back in 2012, the landscape was dominated by WordPress, Magento, and Joomla. Fast-forward 10 years and many in the industry now see Shopify as the leading ecommerce platform, with the others going from leaders to laggards.
There are of course multiple reasons for Shopify’s rise to prominence, but arguably one of the biggest factors is that the platform is much more technically accessible than other ecommerce infrastructure providers. Getting your head around a fresh Magento install or working out how Joomla works (which is still a mystery to me till date!) often requires a certain level of technical know-how. And, if you don’t possess it, then you need to spend extra resources outsourcing that work to someone who does.
Shopify understood that baking simplicity and an “it just works” ethos into their platform would allow everyday entrepreneurs to get their sites up and running quickly, without needing a degree in computer science or a huge budget to maintain their online presence. However, as user-friendly, as it might be, there are still a few technical and SEO hurdles to overcome if you want your Shopify site to succeed on the SERPs.
In this article, I’ll take a closer look at a key “out of the box” SEO issue that often limits the relevance of product pages within Shopify and creates significant site bloat. More importantly, I’ll also share four potential solutions that can be used to fix the problem and maximize your product page potential. Let’s dive in.
The cost of inefficiency
Something that we often discuss with our clients is ensuring that Google can crawl their websites as efficiently as possible. We explain this by breaking down the cost to Google of crawling the web. Every time Google visits a webpage on the Internet there is a physical cost to Google: the price of electricity consumption, water consumption, hardware, software, and all the other assets needed to visit that page. While this cost might be a thousandth of a penny per URL, with the sheer amount of URLs crawled by Google each day, the total cost is likely staggering.
Therefore, if you are serving Google webpages that are duplicated or not relevant, you are wasting resources. Google has made a point of stating that in their article on managing crawl budget:
“Without guidance from you, Googlebot will try to crawl all or most of the URLs that it knows about on your site. If many of these URLs are duplicates, or you don’t want them crawled for some other reason (removed, unimportant, and so on), this wastes a lot of Google crawling time on your site. This is the factor that you can positively control the most.”
The key message here is that you can control how much of Google’s crawl time is wasted. By aiming to reduce this waste, you are ensuring that the time Google spends on your website is as productive as possible. This means Google will spend more time crawling URLs that have true value, picking up changes to existing URLs, and discovering new pages much faster.
Use canonicals as a temporary solution and not the final fix
A canonical tag is used when there are multiple duplicate pages, allowing you to define which of the duplicates should be deemed the correct page for Google to index.
While they are effective in the short term, the existence of a canonical tag highlights that there are structural issues within a website, and this can impact crawl efficiency. Even though the canonical tag will indicate to Google that you have selected a preferred URL to index, the search engine still needs to crawl all duplicates that contain the canonical tag to come to the consensus that you have set.
Rather than using a canonical tag as a permanent solution, it’s important to take steps to fix the underlying structural problem, therefore negating the use of a canonical tag. This in turn will have a positive impact on crawl efficiency.
What does this have to do with Shopify product pages?
Put simply, product URLs on Shopify rely on canonical tags to be discovered. Let’s look at the two main causes of this.
Products in multiple collections
The URL below is a product page from a Shopify website.
You will notice that the URL has the collection the product is in is seen in the URL as well. If this product is in multiple collections, Shopify creates multiple product URLs. As these are duplicates, Shopify handles this by using canonical tags. These canonical tags point to the preferred product URL, which does not contain a collection:
The product highlighted above is currently in four collections, meaning there are now five different product URLs for Google to crawl to find this one product that it needs to index. There is, however, another issue that further increases this number: product variants.
Product variants
A product variant is a product attribute that can implement within Shopify. This could be color, size, weight, or any other type of attribute that a product may have. Creating variants of a product within Shopify allows a user to select attributes on the product page. This can be seen below on our example product URL as “size”:
In this setup, Shopify adds a parameter to the product URL called ?variant. This contains an ID that references the selected variant. The URL below is our example product URL with the medium variant selected:
This is of course another duplicate, which is handled via a canonical tag. If we begin to calculate the total number of URLs this single product has that rely on canonical tags, you will notice how this can have a detrimental impact on crawl efficiency.
Based on this product being in four collections and having four variants, there are a total of 20 product URLs that rely on a canonical tag. This means Google needs to regularly crawl 21 product URLs to discover the single product URL that needs indexing.
10,000 URLs crawled to index 600
When you factor in the sheer number of products across an entire website, it’s easy to see how this figure can add up. If our example website has 600 products, and each product appears in four collections with four variants each, then Google will need to regularly crawl in excess of 10,000 product URLs to find the 600 that have been requested to be indexed.
How do you fix this on Shopify?
There are two distinct problems we need to fix here: the issue with products appearing in multiple collections, and the issue with product variants. There are solutions for both — however, implementing them will require compromise in certain areas.
Products in multiple collections: The fix
This fix works by removing links to product URLs with the collection name in the product URL. The main culprit here is the collection URL — specifically the theme file that powers collection URLs. On Shopify, this file is called product-grid-item.liquid.
You can navigate to this file via the following route within your Shopify admin.
Online Store > Themes > Customize > Theme Actions > Edit Code > Snippets
Within this file there are HTML hyperlinks that reference product URLs containing the collection name:
The “within: collection” element is what is responsible for pulling the collection name into the product URL. Removing this ensures that the collection name no longer appears in the product URL.
However, before you jump in, there are a few things you’ll need to bear in mind:
- It is recommended that you consult with your web development team before making this change.
- Apps that you use may need the “within: collection” functionality, so it is worth checking with app support on whether or not this can be changed.
- This change impacts the breadcrumb on product URLs. If this is problematic, then I’d suggest building breadcrumbs manually using META fields with a dedicated META fields app.
- You will also need to ensure that manual links that use this format are changed.
- There may be other template files that contain “within: collection” so it is worth liaising with your development team to identify these.
Product variants: The fix (or is it?)
Unfortunately, the solution to product variants is more complex and ultimately depends on how much SEO value you are getting from your existing product variants. The recommendation here is to first find out how viable product variant keywords are in terms of search volume and market opportunity.
For example, if our imaginary Shopify store sells Ralph Lauren polo shirts, then my variants are likely to be color and size. By running a quick search for the product type plus these variants, we can see that there is search volume and therefore it will be important that my variants are indexable and optimized.
Fix Option #1: Optimize ?variant URLs
This first option is viable if you believe that there is search volume opportunity across a wide range of your product variants. The premise of this fix is to build logic into your theme code, so that when a variant is selected, the variant name is appended into the page title tag and where possible, the product description.
This change will likely depend on your theme setup and, as with any change, it is recommended that you consult with your web development team. More details on how to do this can be found via the Shopify community thread below:
Another thing to bear in mind with this solution is that you will need to remove the canonical tag that is currently in place on ?variant URLs. The main drawback to this approach is that you may need to implement it sitewide across all product variants — but not all variants will necessarily have available search volume.
Fix Option #2: Optimize main product URL for variants
If you want more control over which product sets have optimized variants, then this option might be for you. By optimizing the main product URL for variants, by including variant keywords in the product description and META data, you will stand a chance of being visible for these product variant keywords.
The drawback here is that product URLs could become over-optimized and not as relevant as a dedicated, optimized product variant URL.
Fix Option #3: Disallow ?variant parameter
If it turns out that your product variants have minimal or no search value then disallowing the ?variant parameter in your robots.txt file might be the best option. This will stop Google crawling ?variant URLs, therefore making crawl activity more efficient.
Fix Option #4: Individual products per variant
If your product variants do have search viability, then creating individual products per variant might be an effective option. This is something we have seen retailers like Gym Shark do with color. The product below comes in a number of different colors, each of which has its own product URL and does not rely on variants, e.g.:
https://www.gymshark.com/products/gymshark-element-baselayer-t-shirt-black-aw21
With more control over both META data and optimized content, this approach means it is easier to build deeper relevance for product variants. The downside here is that there are simply more products to manage within the CMS.
Shopify & SEO issues: Final thoughts
As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons for Shopify’s meteoric rise has been the “it just works” ethos that makes the platform such a cinch to use. But that’s not to say that the platform doesn’t suffer from a few SEO snags.
In addition to the canonical issue, Google’s Core Web Vitals can be another source of headaches for SEOs who work with the platform. But there are generally workarounds for those who are willing to take the time to implement them. You can learn more about how to navigate these in our ultimate guide to Shopify SEO (2022).
There are also hopeful signs that the Shopify team are increasingly receptive to the needs of the SEO community. The team have regularly taken on board feedback from SEOs to improve their product, from allowing users to edit the robots.txt file, to allowing for sub-folder international structures. So, we can hope that easy-to-implement solutions around the use of canonicals and other issues will be rolled out before too long.
Can anything stop the relentless rise of Shopify? Back in 2012, the landscape was dominated by WordPress, Magento and Joomla. Fast-forward 10 years, and many in the industry now see Shopify as the leading e-commerce platform, with the others going from leaders to laggards.
There are of course multiple reasons for Shopify’s rise to prominence, but arguably one of the biggest factors is that the platform is much more technically accessible than other ecommerce infrastructure providers. Getting your head around a fresh Magento install or working out how Joomla works (which is still a mystery to me to this day!) often requires a certain level of technical knowhow. And, if you don’t possess it, then you need to spend extra resources outsourcing that work to someone who does.
Shopify understood that baking in simplicity and an “it just works” ethos into their platform would allow everyday entrepreneurs to get their sites up and running quickly, without needing a degree in computer science or a huge budget to maintain their online presence. However, as user-friendly as it might be, there are still a few technical and SEO hurdles to overcome if you want your Shopify site to succeed on the SERPs.
In this article, I’ll take a closer look at a key “out of the box” SEO issue that often limits the relevance of product pages within Shopify and creates significant site bloat. More importantly, I’ll also share four potential solutions that can be used to fix the problem and maximize your product page potential. Let’s dive in.
The cost of inefficiency
Something that we often discuss with our clients is ensuring that Google can crawl their websites as efficiently as possible. We explain this by breaking down the cost to Google of crawling the web. Every time Google visits a webpage on the Internet there is a physical cost to Google: the price of electricity consumption, water consumption, hardware, software, and all the other assets needed to visit that page. While this cost might be a thousandth of a penny per URL, with the sheer amount of URLs crawled by Google each day, the total cost is likely staggering.
Therefore, if you are serving Google webpages that are duplicated or not relevant, you are wasting resources. Google have made a point of stating that in their article on managing crawl budget:
“Without guidance from you, Googlebot will try to crawl all or most of the URLs that it knows about on your site. If many of these URLs are duplicates, or you don’t want them crawled for some other reason (removed, unimportant, and so on), this wastes a lot of Google crawling time on your site. This is the factor that you can positively control the most.”
The key message here is that you can control how much of Google’s crawl time is wasted. By aiming to reduce this waste, you are ensuring that the time Google spends on your website is as productive as possible. This means Google will spend more time crawling URLs that have true value, picking up changes to existing URLs and discovering new pages much faster.
Using canonicals as a temporary solution and not the final fix
A canonical tag is used when there are multiple duplicate pages, allowing you to define which of the duplicates should be deemed the correct page for Google to index.
While they are effective in the short term, the existence of a canonical tag highlights that there are structural issues within a website, and this can impact crawl efficiency. Even though the canonical tag will indicate to Google that you have selected a preferred URL to index, the search engine still needs to crawl all duplicates that contain the canonical tag to come to the consensus that you have set.
So, rather than using a canonical tag as a permanent solution, it’s important to take steps to fix the underlying structural problem, and therefore negating the use of the canonical tag. This in turn will have a positive impact on crawl efficiency.
What does this have to do with Shopify product pages?
Put simply, product URLs on Shopify rely on canonical tags to be discovered. Let’s look at the two main causes of this.
Products in multiple collections
The URL below is a product page from a Shopify website.
You will notice that the URL has the collection the product is in within it. If this product is in multiple collections, Shopify creates multiple product URLs. As these are duplicates, Shopify handles this by using canonical tags. These canonical tags point to the preferred product URL, which does not contain a collection:
The product highlighted above is currently in four collections, meaning there are now five different product URLs for Google to crawl to find this one product that it needs to index. There is, however, another issue that further increases this number: product variants.
Product variants
A product variant is a product attribute that can implement within Shopify. This could be color, size, weight or any other type of attribute that a product may have. By creating variants of a product within Shopify, it allows a user to select attributes on the product page. This can be seen below on our example product URL as “size”:
In this setup, Shopify adds a parameter to the product URL called ?variant. This contains an ID that references the selected variant. The URL below is our example product URL with the medium variant selected:
This is of course another duplicate, which is handled via a canonical tag. If we begin to calculate the total number of URLs this single product has that rely on canonical tags, you will begin see how this can have a detrimental impact on crawl efficiency.
Based on this product being in four collections and having four variants, there are a total of 20 product URLs that rely on a canonical tag. This means Google needs to regularly crawl 21 product URLs to discover the single product URL that needs indexing.
10,000 URLs crawled to index 600
When you factor in the sheer number of products across an entire website, it’s easy to see how this figure can add up. If our example website has 600 products, and each product appears in four collections with four variants each, then Google will need to regularly crawl in excess of 10,000 product URLs to find the 600 that have been requested to be indexed.
How do you fix this on Shopify?
There are two distinct problems we need to fix here: the issue with products appearing in multiple collections, and the issue with product variants. There are solutions for both — however, implementing them will require compromise in certain areas.
Products in multiple collections: The fix
This fix works by removing links to product URLs with the collection name in the product URL. The main culprit here is the collection URL — specifically the theme file that powers collection URLs. On Shopify, this file is called product-grid-item.liquid.
You can navigate to this file via the following route within your Shopify admin.
Online Store > Themes > Customize > Theme Actions > Edit Code > Snippets
Within this file there are HTML hyperlinks that reference product URLs containing the collection name:
The “within: collection” element is what is responsible for pulling the collection name into the product URL. Removing this ensures that the collection name no longer appears in the product URL.
However, before you jump in, there are a few things you’ll need to bear in mind:
- It is recommended that you consult with your web development team before making this change.
- Apps that you use may need the “within: collection” functionality, so it is worth checking with app support on whether or not this can be changed.
- This change impacts the breadcrumb on product URLs. If this is problematic, then I’d suggest building breadcrumbs manually using META fields with a dedicated META fields app.
- You will also need to ensure that manual links that use this format are changed.
- There may be other template files that contain “within: collection” so it is worth liaising with your development team to identify these.
Product variants: The fix (or is it?)
Unfortunately, the solution to product variants is more complex and ultimately depends on how much SEO value you are getting from your existing product variants. The recommendation here is to first find out how viable product variant keywords are in terms of search volume and market opportunity.
For example, if our imaginary Shopify store sells Ralph Lauren polo shirts, then my variants are likely to be color and size. By running a quick search for the product type plus these variants, we can see that there is search volume and therefore it will be important that my variants are indexable and optimized.
Fix Option #1: Optimize ?variant URLs
This first option is viable if you believe that there is search volume opportunity across a wide range of your product variants. The premise of this fix is to build logic into your theme code, so that when a variant is selected, the variant name is appended into the page title tag and where possible, the product description.
This change will likely depend on your theme setup and, as with any change, it is recommended that you consult with your web development team. More details on how to do this can be found via the Shopify community thread below:
Another thing to bear in mind with this solution is that you will need to remove the canonical tag that is currently in place on ?variant URLs. The main drawback to this approach is that you may need to implement it sitewide across all product variants — but not all variants will necessarily have available search volume.
Fix Option #2: Optimize main product URL for variants
If you want more control over which product sets have optimized variants, then this option might be for you. By optimizing the main product URL for variants, by including variant keywords in the product description and META data, you will stand a chance of being visible for these product variant keywords.
The drawback here is that product URLs could become over-optimized and not as relevant as a dedicated, optimized product variant URL.
Fix Option #3: Disallow ?variant parameter
If it turns out that your product variants have minimal or no search value then disallowing the ?variant parameter in your robots.txt file might be the best option. This will stop Google crawling ?variant URLs, therefore making crawl activity more efficient.
Fix Option #4: Individual products per variant
If your product variants do have search viability, then creating individual products per variant might be an effective option. This is something we have seen retailers like Gym Shark do with color. The product below comes in a number of different colors, each of which has its own product URL and does not rely on variants, e.g.:
https://www.gymshark.com/products/gymshark-element-baselayer-t-shirt-black-aw21
With more control over both META data and optimized content, this approach means it is easier to build deeper relevance for product variants. The downside here is that there are simply more products to manage within the CMS.
Shopify & SEO issues: Final thoughts
As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons for Shopify’s meteoric rise has been the “it just works” ethos that makes the platform such a cinch to use. But that’s not to say that the platform doesn’t suffer from a few SEO snags.
In addition to the canonical issue, Google’s Core Web Vitals can be another source of headaches for SEOs who work with the platform. But there are generally workarounds for those who are willing to take the time to implement them. You can learn more about how to navigate these in our ultimate guide to Shopify SEO (2022).
There are also hopeful signs that the Shopify team are increasingly receptive to the needs of the SEO community. The team have regularly taken on board feedback from SEOs to improve their product, from allowing users to edit the robots.txt file, to allowing for sub-folder international structures. So, we can hope that easy-to-implement solutions around the use of canonicals and other issues will be rolled out before too long.
Marc Swann is Director of Search at Glass Digital, a digital marketing agency offering SEO, affiliate marketing, and paid search services. Marc has been working in digital marketing for 12 years and specializes in technical SEO. At Glass Digital, his focus is on the organic search service, ensuring our teams are delivering maximum value for their clients.
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SEO
Expert Embedding Techniques for SEO Success
AI Overviews are here, and they’re making a big impact in the world of SEO. Are you up to speed on how to maximize their impact?
Watch on-demand as we dive into the fascinating world of Google AI Overviews and their functionality, exploring the concept of embeddings and demystifying the complex processes behind them.
We covered which measures play a crucial role in how Google AI assesses the relevance of different pieces of content, helping to rank and select the most pertinent information for AI-generated responses.
You’ll see:
- An understanding of the technical side of embeddings & how they work, enabling efficient information retrieval and comparison.
- Insights into AI Content curation, including the criteria and algorithms used to rank and choose the most relevant snippets for AI-generated overviews.
- A visualization of the step-by-step process of how AI overviews are constructed, with a clear perspective on the decision-making process behind AI-generated content.
With Scott Stouffer from Market Brew, we explored their AI Overviews Visualizer, a tool that deconstructs AI Overviews and provides an inside look at how Snippets and AI Overviews are curated.
If you’re looking to clarify misconceptions around AI, or looking to face the challenge of optimizing your own content for the AI Overview revolution, then be sure to watch this webinar.
View the slides below, or check out the full presentation for all the details.
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
[Expert Panel] How Agencies Leverage AI Tools To Drive ROI
Join us as we discuss the importance of AI to your performance as an agency or small business, and how you can use it successfully.
SEO
7 Strategies to Lower Cost-Per-Lead
SEO for personal injury law firms is notorious for how expensive and competitive it can be. Even with paid ads, it’s common for every click from the ad to your website to cost hundreds of dollars:
When spending this kind of money per click, the cost of gaining new cases can quickly skyrocket. Since SEO focuses on improving your visibility in the unpaid areas of search engines, you can cut costs and get more leads if you’re savvy enough.
Here are the strategies I’ve used to help new and boutique injury and accident law firms compete with the big guns for a fraction of the cost.
Recommendation
Unlike many other local service businesses, personal injury law firms need to work harder to earn trust and credibility online.
This applies to earning trust from humans and search engines alike. Google has a 170-page document called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. This document contains two frameworks law firms can use to help Google and website visitors trust them more.
The first is “your money or your life,” or YMYL. Google uses this term to describe topics that may present a high risk of harm to searchers. Generally, any health, finances, safety, or welfare information falls into this category. Legal information is also a YMYL topic since acting on the wrong information could cause serious damage or harm to searchers.
The second framework is EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
This framework applies more broadly to all industries and is about sharing genuine information written by experts and authorities for a given topic. Both YMYL and EEAT consider the extent to which content is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable, with the ultimate goal of delivering trustworthy information.
Here are the things I implement for my personal injury clients as a priority to improve the trustworthiness of their online presence:
- Prominently display star ratings from third-party platforms, like Google or FaceBook reviews.
- Show your accreditations, certifications, awards, and the stats on cases you’ve won.
- If government-issued ratings or licenses apply to your practice areas, show those too.
- Add contact information like your phone number and address in the footer of every page.
- Share details of every member of your firm, highlighting their expertise and cases they’ve won.
- Add links to your professional profiles online, including social media and law-related listings.
- Include photos of your team and offices, results, case studies, and success stories.
Generally speaking, your Google Business listing can account for over 50% of the leads you get from search engines. That’s because it can display prominently in the maps pack, like so: 
Without a Google Business listing, your firm will not show up here or within Google Maps since it is managed completely separately from your website. Think of your Google listing like a social profile, but optimize it like a website. Make sure you create one of these for each location where you have an on-the-ground presence, ideally an established office.
Take the time to fill out all the details it asks for, especially:
- Your firm’s name, address, and phone number
- Your services with a description of each
- Images of your premises, inside and outside the office
And anything else you see in these sections: 
Also, make it a regular habit to ask your clients for reviews.
Reviews are crucial for law firms. They are the number one deciding factor when someone is ready to choose a law firm to work with. While you can send automated text messages with a link to your Google profile, you’ll likely have a higher success rate if you ask clients in person while they’re in your office or by calling them.
I’ve also seen success when adding a request for a review on thank you pages.
For instance, if you ever send an electronic contract or invoice out to clients, once they’ve signed or paid, you can send them to a thank you page that also asks for a review. Here’s my favorite example of this from a local accountant. You can emulate this concept for your own website too:
Recommendation
The most common way that people search for legal services is by searching for things like “personal injury lawyer near me” or “car accident lawyer new york”.
For instance, take a look at the monthly search volume on these “near me” keywords for an injury and accident lawyer:
People also commonly search at a state, city, and even suburb level for many legal services, especially if it’s an area of law that differs based on someone’s location. To optimize your website architecture for location keywords like these, it’s best practice to create dedicated pages for each location and then add sub-pages for each of your practice areas in that location.
For example, here’s what that would look like:
The corresponding URL structure would look like this:
- /new-york
- /new-york/car-accident-lawyer
- /new-york/personal-injury-lawyer
- /new-york/work-injury-lawyer
Pro Tip:
Check out my guide on franchise SEO for local and national growth strategies if you have many offices nationwide.
A topic hub is a way to organize and link between related articles on a website. It’s sometimes referred to as a topic cluster because it groups together pages that are related to the same subject matter.
If you run a small firm or your marketing budget is tight, I recommend focusing on a single area of law and turning your website into a topical hub. You can do this by publishing different types of content, such as how-to guides, answering common questions, and creating landing pages for each of your services.
For example, if you currently offer services for immigration law, criminal defense, and personal injury compensation, each appeals to very different audience segments. They’re also very competitive when it comes to marketing, so focusing your efforts on one of these is ideal to make your budget go further.
Most areas of law are naturally suited to building out topic clusters. Every practice area tends to follow a similar pattern in how people search at different stages in their journey.
- Top-of-funnel: When people are very early in their journey, and unaware of what type of lawyer they need, they ask a lot of high-level questions like “what is a car accident attorney”.
- Mid-funnel: When people are in the middle of their journey, they tend to ask more nuanced questions or look for more detailed information, like “average settlement for neck injury”.
- Bottom-of-funnel: When people are ready to hire an attorney, they search for the practice area + “attorney” or “lawyer”. Sometimes they include a location but nothing else. For example, “personal injury lawyer”.
This pattern applies to most areas of law. To apply it to your website, enter your main practice area and a few variations into Keywords Explorer:
Make sure to include a few different variations like how I’ve added different ways people search for lawyers (lawyer, attorney, solicitor) and also for other related terms (compensation, personal injury, settlement).
If you check the Matching terms report, you’ll generally get a big list that you’ll need to filter to make it more manageable when turning it into a content plan.
For example, there are 164,636 different keyword variations of how people search for personal injury lawyers. These generate over 2.4 million searches per month in the US.
You can make the list more manageable by removing keywords with no search volume. Just set the minimum volume to 1:
You can also use the include filter to only see keywords containing your location for your location landing pages:
There are also a number of distinct sub-themes relevant to your area of law. To isolate these, you can use the Cluster by Terms side panel. For instance, looking at our list of injury-related keywords, you can easily spot specific body parts that emerge as sub-themes:
Other sub-themes include:
- How the accident happened (at work, in a car)
- How much compensation someone can get (compensation, average, settlement)
- How severe the injury was (traumatic)
Each of these sub-themes can be turned into a cluster. Here’s what it might look like for the topic of neck injuries:
People tend to ask a lot of questions related to most areas of law. As you go through the exercise of planning out your topic clusters, you should also consider building out a knowledge hub where people can more easily navigate your FAQs and find the answers they’re looking for.
Use the knowledge base exclusively for question-related content. You can find the most popular questions people ask after an accident or injury in the Matching terms > Questions tab:
You can also easily see clusters of keywords for the top-of-funnel and mid-funnel questions people ask by checking the Clusters by Parent Topic report. It groups these keywords into similar themes and each group can likely be covered in a single article.
Here’s an example of how Smith’s Lawyers has created a knowledge base with a search feature and broad categories to allow people to find answers to all their questions more easily.
The easier you make it for people to find answers on your website, the less inclined they are to go back to Google and potentially visit a competitor’s website instead. It also increases their interaction time with your brand, giving you a higher chance of being front-of-mind when they are ready to speak to a lawyer about their case.
Some areas of law lend themselves to certain types of interactive content. An obvious example is a compensation calculator for injury and accident claims. Doing a very quick search, there are over 1,500 keywords on this topic searched over 44,000 times a month in the US.
The best part is how insanely low the competition is on these keywords:
Keyword difficulty is graded on a 100-point scale, so single-digit figures mean there’s virtually no competition to contend with. It’s not all that hard to create a calculator either.
There are many low-cost, no-code tools on the market, like Outgrow, that allow you to create a simple calculator in no time. Other types of interactive content you could consider are:
- Quiz-style questionnaires: great for helping people decide if they need a lawyer for their case.
- Chatbots: to answer people’s questions in real-time.
- Assessments: to pre-qualify leads before they book a meeting with you.
- Calendar or countdown clock: to help people keep track of imminent deadlines.
Backlinks are like the internet’s version of citations. They are typically dark blue, underlined text that connects you to a different page on the internet. In SEO, links play a very important role for a few different reasons:
- Links are how search engines discover new content. Your content may not be discovered if you have no links pointing to it.
- Links are like votes in a popularity contest. The more you have from authoritative websites in your industry, the more they elevate your brand.
- Links also help search engines understand what different websites are about. Getting links from other law-related websites will help build relevancy to your brand.
Think of link building as a scaled-down version of PR. It’s often easier and cheaper to implement. However, it is very time-intensive in most cases. If you’re doing your own SEO, hats off to you!
However, I’d recommend you consider partnering with an agency that specializes in law firm SEO and can handle link building for you. Typically, agencies like these will have existing relationships with law-related websites where they can feature your brand, which will be completely hands-off for you.
For instance, Webris has a database of thousands of legal websites on which they have been able to feature their clients. If you don’t have an existing database to work with and you’re doing SEO yourself, here are some alternative tactics to consider.
Expert quotes
Many journalists and writers benefit from quoting subject-matter experts in their content. You could be such an expert, and every time someone quotes you, ask for a link back to your website. Check out platforms like Muck Rack or SourceBottle, where reporters post callouts for specific experts they’re looking to get quotes from or feature in their articles.
Guest posting
If you like writing content, you can alternatively create content for other people’s websites and include links back to your site. This approach is more time intensive. To make the effort worth it, reach out to websites with an established audience so you get some additional brand exposure too.
Updating outdated content
If you’re checking out other people’s legal content and you ever notice a mistake or outdated information, you could reach out and offer to help them correct it in exchange for a link to your website.
Naturally, you’ll need to recommend updates for sections of content that relate to your practice areas for this to work and for the link to make sense in the context of the content.
Final thoughts
SEO for personal injury lawyers is one of the most competitive niches. High advertising costs and high competition levels make it difficult for new or small firms to compete against industry giants.
As a new or emerging firm, you can take a more nimble approach and outrank the big firms for low competition keywords they haven’t optimized their websites for. It’s all about doing thorough research to uncover these opportunities in your practice area.
Want to know more? Reach out on LinkedIn.
SEO
Google Ads To Phase Out Enhanced CPC Bidding Strategy
Google has announced plans to discontinue its Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
This change, set to roll out in stages over the coming months, marks the end of an era for one of Google’s earliest smart bidding options.
Dates & Changes
Starting October 2024, new search and display ad campaigns will no longer be able to select Enhanced CPC as a bidding strategy.
However, existing eCPC campaigns will continue to function normally until March 2025.
From March 2025, all remaining search and display ad campaigns using Enhanced CPC will be automatically migrated to manual CPC bidding.
Advertisers who prefer not to change their campaigns before this date will see their bidding strategy default to manual CPC.
Impact On Display Campaigns
No immediate action is required for advertisers running display campaigns with the Maximize Clicks strategy and Enhanced CPC enabled.
These campaigns will automatically transition to the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy in March 2025.
Rationale Behind The Change
Google introduced Enhanced CPC over a decade ago as its first Smart Bidding strategy. The company has since developed more advanced machine learning-driven bidding options, such as Maximize Conversions with an optional target CPA and Maximize Conversion Value with an optional target ROAS.
In an email to affected advertisers, Google stated:
“These strategies have the potential to deliver comparable or superior outcomes. As we transition to these improved strategies, search and display ads campaigns will phase out Enhanced CPC.”
What This Means for Advertisers
This update signals Google’s continued push towards more sophisticated, AI-driven bidding strategies.
In the coming months, advertisers currently relying on Enhanced CPC will need to evaluate their options and potentially adapt their campaign management approaches.
While the change may require some initial adjustments, it also allows advertisers to explore and leverage Google’s more advanced bidding strategies, potentially improving campaign performance and efficiency.
FAQ
What change is Google implementing for Enhanced CPC bidding?
Google will discontinue the Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
- New search and display ad campaigns can’t select eCPC starting October 2024.
- Existing campaigns will function with eCPC until March 2025.
- From March 2025, remaining eCPC campaigns will switch to manual CPC bidding.
How will this update impact existing campaigns using Enhanced CPC?
Campaigns using Enhanced CPC will continue as usual until March 2025. After that:
- Search and display ad campaigns employing eCPC will automatically migrate to manual CPC bidding.
- Display campaigns with Maximize Clicks and eCPC enabled will transition to the Maximize Clicks strategy in March 2025.
What are the recommended alternatives to Enhanced CPC?
Google suggests using its more advanced, AI-driven bidding strategies:
- Maximize Conversions – Can include an optional target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
- Maximize Conversion Value – Can include an optional target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
These strategies are expected to deliver comparable or superior outcomes compared to Enhanced CPC.
What should advertisers do in preparation for this change?
Advertisers need to evaluate their current reliance on Enhanced CPC and explore alternatives:
- Assess how newer AI-driven bidding strategies can be integrated into their campaigns.
- Consider transitioning some campaigns earlier to adapt to the new strategies gradually.
- Leverage tools and resources provided by Google to maximize performance and efficiency.
This proactive approach will help manage changes smoothly and explore potential performance improvements.
Featured Image: Vladimka production/Shutterstock
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