SEO
Query Relaxation And Scoping As Part Of Semantic Search
The right search query is a Goldilocks-style effort: Not too specific that you get no results, and not too broad that you get too many.
Semantic search, meanwhile, is all about understanding what searchers throw into a search box.
In other words, with semantic search, we meet searchers where they are instead of requiring them to meet us where we are.
Enter query relaxation and query scoping.
Search engines get searchers to the right content right away through techniques like synonyms, query word removal, and query scoping.
We avoid missing out on relevant information that wouldn’t otherwise appear, and we leave out information that isn’t relevant.
Query relaxation and scoping are tied very closely with the concept of precision and recall.
Precision measures whether the returned results are relevant, and recall is whether relevant results are returned.
One way to increase recall specifically is through query expansion.
Query Expansion
Query expansion is all about expanding what the query will match with the hope of having better results.
The main reason a search engine might apply query expansion is due to some indication that the “base” search results without query expansion would not be satisfactory for the searcher.
In this series, we have already seen some ways to expand queries.
Typo tolerance, plural ignoring, and stemming and lemmatization are all ways to increase the recall of searches.
We’ve already seen those query expansion methods among the bedrocks of search, but other query expansion methods are also just as fundamental.
An article in Search Engine Journal from 2008 covers how Google performs query expansion!
The article discusses not just stemming and typo tolerance but also translations, word removals, and synonyms.
Synonyms And Alternatives
There’s a reason George Orwell introduced Newspeak in his novel 1984 and why it resonated in a story about life utterly controlled to the point of blandness.
Linguistic richness is driven by the ability to say the same thing, or nearly the same thing, with different words and phrases. “Great” can be “awesome,” and “low-cost” is a near neighbor to “cheap.”
Meanwhile, these different words can help us more precisely refer to items similar in all but the smallest ways.
These differences are sometimes so small that this precision instead breeds confusion and less likely to find what we want.
A customer wanting a rocking chair may not know whether to search for “rockers,” “rocking chairs,” or simply “chairs.”
This is where synonyms and alternatives provide value.
They help us expand recall in search results.
Synonyms and alternatives are similar, but they are not the same.
(You could say that they are not synonyms.)
Synonyms refer to two words or phrases that mean the same thing.
Alternatives instead refer to similar words or phrases but have some degrees of difference.
Synonyms
Often, synonyms make their way into a search engine through synonym lists.
These lists can come from predefined lists, such as general ecommerce terms.
The problem with predefined lists is that synonyms for one company’s search engine won’t necessarily work for another.
Quick: What’s a console? You may immediately think of video games, but someone else might think of a car or music.
For that reason, many synonym lists are created in-house.
At the beginning of a search implementation process, internal subject matter experts think of all of the words that could be synonyms for other words and add them to the search engine configuration.
(This, in reality, is often an idealized view of what happens. Often the person creating the synonym list is not a subject matter expert, but instead, the person implementing the search engine.)
Generally, this initial list will provide a good starting point, but there are sure to be missing synonyms.
The only real way to discover which terms your searchers will use is to let them search.
Using Analytics To Discover Synonyms
You’ll see very quickly in your analytics queries that could use new synonyms.
These queries are returning zero results and are a sign that searchers are looking for something they can’t find.
Now, not all of these queries will give you a new synonym.
Sometimes, searchers are looking for items that you just don’t have.
Nonetheless, you’ll see queries where you think immediately, “oh, we have that one,” and “I didn’t know people asked for it like that.”
There will also be times when a query returns results but not what the searcher wants.
These queries can also give you ideas for synonyms if you track “search refinements.”
Search refinements represent when searchers search and then search again.
This implies that the searchers didn’t find what they wanted the first time and tried again to find something better.
Someone searching for “Dell laptop” and following it up with “Dell notebook” is saying that “laptop” and “notebook” are related, but the search results for “laptop” were insufficient.
While there’s nothing wrong with looking for those trends in your analytics manually (it can be a good activity to slowly ease into the work week), you’ll be a lot more productive if you have a system that proactively sources them for you.
Some systems may even apply synonyms on your behalf, but this isn’t always helpful.
A human can spot refinements that don’t show valid synonyms or may see that the system is suggesting an incorrect type of synonym.
Types Of Synonyms
That’s right: There are different types of synonyms.
This concept may seem strange at first, but it’s probably not far from how most people think of them.
“Two-way” is the first type of synonym. These synonyms are direct replacements for each other.
“Small” and “mini” are two-way synonyms of each other.
The words don’t need to be perfect replacements but can be close enough that people might use one for the other.
For example, “rope” and “string” don’t describe the same thing, but they are close enough to be worthy two-way synonyms.
It can be useful to think of the query created through the use of synonyms.
If we take a query of “small cheese pizza” and expand that out, you can think of the query now as “(small or mini) and cheese and pizza.”
“One-way” is the next type of synonym.
This type is often used for words that refer to an object that belongs to a larger category.
“PlayStation” is a type of video game “console,” but a “console” is not a type of “PlayStation.”
If you add a one-way synonym to the search configuration, you can have PlayStations show up whenever someone searches for “console.”
Why not a two-way synonym between these two terms?
Because two-way synonyms are transitive.
If term one and term two are two-way synonyms, and terms two and three are two-way synonyms, then terms one and three are two-way.
In a more direct example, “PlayStation” and “console” and “Xbox” and “console” as two groups of two-way synonyms would mean that “PlayStation” and “Xbox” are synonyms, and searchers would see Playstations when searching for Xboxes, and vice versa.
“Alternative corrections” is the final type.
These are used when the words aren’t precise replacements for each other, and you want the exact match to appear higher than the alternative.
For example, you might say that “pants” are an alternative to “shorts,” but when someone searches the word “shorts,” then all shorts should appear higher than pants generally.
All synonym types, by their nature, expand recall.
However, the hit on precision should be minimal because these synonyms are “pointers” to similar concepts.
You would expect a better search experience for the end user.
Query Word Removal
Sometimes searchers will use a query that doesn’t return anything because the query was too specific or used a word that didn’t exist in any of the records.
Remove one word, or two words, from the query, and perfectly decent results would come back.
This is a great time to use query word removal.
Stop Words
Perhaps the most common query word removal step is removing “stop words.”
Stop words are very common words that provide meaning for communication but don’t help with retrieval. Words such as “the” or “an” can remove otherwise good matches.
This is more common in queries oriented toward natural language, such as voice search queries.
An example of this would be searching for “an orange shirt” on a product search engine.
If the search engine searches over the title, color, and category, there might be plenty of records that have “shirt” as a category and “orange” as a color, but none that include the word “an.”
Now, really, does the word “an” provide any useful information here?
No, it doesn’t, and the search engine can safely remove it without losing precision.
Unlike synonyms, you generally do not want to create your own stop word lists, and most search engines have them built-in per language.
However, there are times when you will want to expand on the built-in list, such as if you have an industry term that is so common that it doesn’t provide any value to a query.
Removing Words If No Results
Then there are queries where all of the words bring value but searched together, bring back no results.
Often searchers will be happy with less precise results in exchange for increased recall. In these situations, we want to remove words to put results in front of the user.
There are two main ways to do this: make all query words optional or remove words from the query.
If you make all of the query words optional when there are no results, you assume that records that match more words are more relevant, all else being equal.
An alternative is to remove query words one-by-one until you find matching records or there are no more words left in the query.
You can start by removing the first words or the last words. Last word removal tends to be more common.
Making all of the query words optional and then sorting by the number of matching words is generally the better approach, especially when paired with the removal of stop words.
This is, however, a less ideal approach when precision is important, and you want to show that, indeed, there were no results that matched all of the query words.
One person may be alright with seeing Uniqlo v-neck sweaters for a query of “Gucci v-neck sweaters,” while another sees those results as completely irrelevant.
Of course, another scenario is to know which words are actually providing the most value to the query and mark them as optional.
This is generally not seen in keyword-based search engines, but there have been some search engines that will take a similar approach for stop words.
For example, some search engines have experimented with discounting common words automatically without stop word lists, using inverse document frequency.
As with synonyms, query word removal will expand recall, usually without a hit on precision. Because stop words don’t provide much value to the result, you won’t lose out on good results by not including them.
Similarly, removing words when there are no results has no precision to lessen because there are no results that could be precise.
Query Scoping
We’ve primarily looked at situations where a searcher is overly precise and the search engine needs to expand the query to improve recall.
There are, likewise, times when the search engine can understand the user intent, and query scoping can increase precision.
Search expert Daniel Tunkelang calls query scoping “one of the most effective ways to capture query intent.”
He identifies two major steps in query scoping. The first is query tagging, followed by the scoping itself.
Query tagging identifies the parts of a query with the attributes they likely belong to.
For example, “Marcia” will most likely match to a “name” attribute, while “The Brady Bunch” maps to a “show title” attribute.
Query scoping takes this mapping and restricts attribute searching for these query parts.
The search engine doesn’t search “Brady” inside of the “name” attribute or “Marcia” in the “show title” attribute.
This kind of query scoping reduces recall, as we won’t see results that have that text in other attributes.
However, the outcome should be that we have higher precision because we aren’t searching for irrelevant attributes.
We could increase precision even further by filtering results by known attribute values.
This doesn’t even require machine learning, as the search engine can do a simple match between facet values and text in a query.
This reduces recall heavily, so we can also find a nice balance where we instead boost results with matching values rather than filtering.
The boosted results will tend to be the best matching ones because the query-filter match gives you a signal that it is what the searcher wants.
Through your analytics or hands-on experience, if you find that your search is missing user intent and requiring searches to be “just right,” then query expansion and query scoping are two ways to calibrate your precision and recall.
These approaches will let in results that should be there and leave out the ones that shouldn’t.
More resources:
Featured Image: penguiin/Shutterstock
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.
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