For so long, keyword stuffing has been widely condemned by search engines, where websites that breached rules are penalized. There was a time when the tactic of stuffing keywords worked on boosting a website ranking but the black hat practitioners have been abusing this method. Thus, filling your website page with keywords won’t increase your chances of ranking your page higher.
It used to be that websites could rank on a range of keywords by cluttering them onto a page, despite the irrelevance of the keywords. These websites didn’t are only filled with meaningless keywords without adding value to the audience. Some have tried to be subtle about keyword stuffing by hiding the irrelevant keywords by matching the text color to the background color of the web page.
The Dangers of Keyword Stuffing and Over-Optimizing
Many law firms have been rebranding to adhere to Google’s guidelines. With keyword stuffing being considered a strictly black-hat tactic, does it still work for your law firm? It may be true that keyword stuffing has short-term effects, but doing this practice is playing with fire.
If a search engine catches your law firm stuffing keywords, your page might be demoted in rankings, or your website may be taken down altogether!
Google dislikes black hat tactics such as keyword stuffing since those methods specialize in cheating the algorithm instead of providing an excellent user experience. As for law firms, keyword stuffing involves including additional descriptors to your business name on your Google My Business that are not relevant to your registered business name.
Your law firm may be in trouble if you add keywords that are not relevant to your practice area or law firm. Google may issue the soft or hard suspension. A soft suspension involves having your Google My Business listing disabled, where your law firm missed out on potential leads. Your listing will show up on Google and Google Maps.
If your website suffers a soft suspension, your law firm has become unverified. Your website ranking isn’t affected. On the other hand, hard suspension means your GMB listing is taken down from Google Maps.
Here are the reasons for hard suspensions:
- Being known as a repeat keyword stuffing violator
- Your law firm serves a service area but with multiple listings
- You use a virtual office, mailing service or PO box as your address
- You use multiple listings for the same business or location
- You add a listing that offers a service in a building you do not own
The Impact of Keyword Stuffing in Law Firm Websites
Many law firm websites have been updating their brands to insert keywords in their law firms’ names. Doing so enhances their GMB name, improve their rankings while preventing Google suspension.
The trouble with this tactic is that law firms may misrepresent their business. According to GMB guidelines, businesses should consistently represent their brand in the real world including signage, stationery, etc.
The business name you listed in the GMB listing should match your in-office signs, website logo, business card to help a customer find your business online. Stuffing your brand name with keywords isn’t the key to crush the competition. It can negatively impact your Google ranking.
Law firm website’s ranking power decreases when everyone is doing it
You lose your ranking power once law firms within your practice area incorporate keywords into their business names. Did you recently sacrifice your business name just to get higher rankings? Once you reach a point where the law firm within your practice area is adding descriptors to their name, the ranking power of those specific keywords diminishes. You are now left with a less relevant business name that doesn’t help your website ranking.
Keyword Stuffing vs Keyword Optimization
Now that we have tackled keyword stuffing in Google My Business, we can now move forward in optimizing keywords within your content. It’s essential to differentiate keyword stuffing from general keyword usage.
A keyword is still important so long as you know how to use them within your content. Finding the right keywords and inserting them throughout your content can boost your SEO efforts.
How to optimize law firm keywords
Choosing the best keywords can help your law firm reach your target audience better. Ensuring your keywords are aligned with your practice area and your audience’s search intent can help increase conversion rates and click-through rates.
The goal of keyword optimization is to ensure the keywords you choose to drive the right traffic to your law firm website. More so, keyword optimization is choosing competitive keywords high enough that the right audience can find your website easily. The keywords you choose should clarify your content to search engines. You can start by using free keyword tools to determine relevant and highly competitive keywords to incorporate into your website and content. Once you have the keywords ready, consider conducting keyword mapping. Keyword mapping will prevent you from stuffing keywords within one web page.
Find out what makes each web page unique from each other and incorporate the keywords to align with the page. Besides inserting keywords throughout your content, you can also include keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, alt images, and alt texts.
Meanwhile, as Google uses neural matching to determine if a page is relevant to the user’s intent from search, you can incorporate synonyms and long-tail keywords into your content.
Adding synonyms and long-tail keywords opens up doors of opportunities to optimize content and keywords. However, you must ensure that you use these synonyms naturally.
The Takeaway
There is no exact answer as to the keyword density you should follow. However, you should at least use a significant number of target keywords within your content and website whenever these keywords make sense. Don’t increase keyword density on a page just for the sake of adding more keywords.
Doing so will just affect the quality of your content. If the keywords aren’t used effectively and the content is poorly written, the keywords don’t matter.
