More threads by mattstephenskc

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As usual, a practical concern in my work has given rise to a strategic, technical question, because I need to know how to proceed.

The concern is that we maintain professional profiles and bios for attorneys in dozens of listings across the web in addition to their bio pages on our website.

I understand the importance of consistent NAP/citations and maximizing link-building opportunities. I'm curious whether the written biographical summary matters at all, from a search perspective, on the directory practitioner pages—particularly those on business directory sites (not integrated with Google, Bing, etc), like lawyers.com (for attorneys), psychologytoday.com (for therapists), zocdoc.com (for physicians), or usnews.com (for all the various business categories).

There are a few aspects of this that concern me:
1. SERP competition. These sites/listings are our competitors—often our biggest ones—in SERPs. They're money-suckers if they win, so we don't want them outperforming us in organic results.
2. Backlink value. That said, they're often some of our most authoritative backlink/DA/DR sources because of their SEO rockstardom. So we're stuck in a sort of "complicated" relationship.
3. Narrative consistency. That's probably not the right technical term, but I wonder if the similarities between narrative content on the directory sites and our own website improve our site's authority (similar to the way citations do), maybe as long as they aren't verbatim duplicates.
4. Duplicate content. On the other hand, is bio summary copy that is verbatim or very similar among directory profiles and website profiles a redundancy concern from an algorithmic standpoint?

Are any of these even significant enough to worry about? We have to write something for 25 professionals times, say, 25 sites. So I'd like to make sure we're doing the best we can with them.

Thanks again for entertaining my complex reasoning undergirded by technical ignorance. (-:
 
Definitely. I can show you plenty of instances where professionals own sites are outranked by directory pages. I just built a "Top Realtors" page for a realtor that immediately outranked the realtors on the page.
 
I probably should've summarized the two key questions I unpacked in my original post:
  1. How much can the narrative biographical summaries on a practitioner's local directory profile help or hurt the local search performance (organic SERPs, at least) of his/her business website bio page?
    1. I.e., Do the narrative portions of directory profiles matter much at all for a business website's organic SERPs?
  2. Is it better for these narrative summaries to be consistent across directories (i.e., can we copy/paste), or does it matter? What about between the directories and the business website?
I'm looking for a strategic basis for how to write these narrative summaries if they matter at all for search.

Thanks again!
 
I probably should've summarized the two key questions I unpacked in my original post:
  1. How much can the narrative biographical summaries on a practitioner's local directory profile help or hurt the local search performance (organic SERPs, at least) of his/her business websitebio page?
    1. I.e., Do the narrative portions of directory profiles matter much at all for a business website's organic SERPs?
  2. Is it better for these narrative summaries to be consistent across directories (i.e., can we copy/paste), or does it matter? What about between the directories and the business website?
I'm looking for a strategic basis for how to write these narrative summaries if they matter at all for search.

Thanks again!

How much is always relative, it completely depends on what you're trying to outcompete. Google doesn't care about duplicate content typically in a context like this but that also doesn't mean you couldn't have gotten more value from non-duplicate or that it will stay like that forever. There are no one-size-fits-all "it always works the same way" strategies in SEO. You have to test and re-test to know. It's the only way to really know. I realize this isn't the answer you wished for. Just sharing my perspective. Godspeed.
 
How much is always relative, it completely depends on what you're trying to outcompete. Google doesn't care about duplicate content typically in a context like this but that also doesn't mean you couldn't have gotten more value from non-duplicate or that it will stay like that forever. There are no one-size-fits-all "it always works the same way" strategies in SEO. You have to test and re-test to know. It's the only way to really know. I realize this isn't the answer you wished for. Just sharing my perspective. Godspeed.

I understand and appreciate your response. Our analytical capabilities aren't sophisticated enough to track this level of cause/effect relationship. Or we lack the time to properly experiment (presumably write all directory profile bios via the copy/paste method... see how our own bio pages rank in response after a couple months... try rewriting them all uniquely... review results). Managing 25 lawyer profiles across—I don't know, a dozen directories—would mean writing 25 blurbs vs. 300 blurbs. I'm just going to blindly hope that the effective difference is negligible.
 
I understand and appreciate your response. Our analytical capabilities aren't sophisticated enough to track this level of cause/effect relationship. Or we lack the time to properly experiment (presumably write all directory profile bios via the copy/paste method... see how our own bio pages rank in response after a couple months... try rewriting them all uniquely... review results). Managing 25 lawyer profiles across—I don't know, a dozen directories—would mean writing 25 blurbs vs. 300 blurbs. I'm just going to blindly hope that the effective difference is negligible.

I do stuff like this. Just put 37500 fact-based product descriptions online for an ecom in just a few hours. It's not hard.
 
I do stuff like this. Just put 37500 fact-based product descriptions online for an ecom in just a few hours. It's not hard.

The copy/paste method isn't hard. Rewriting 25 attorney bios 12 times each while maintaining factual accuracy, correct terminology, and professional voice is a bit harder, as it typically requires actual humans knowledgeable of these nuances to manually write and rewrite the copy. Not an extraordinary lift by any means, but maybe not the best investment of time or (if outsourced) money, without compelling evidence to the contrary.
 

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