As a lawyer, your practice areas are one of the most essential parts of your law firm’s website.
You want to accomplish two goals with your practice area pages:
- Optimize your content for search engines so that people find you organically, and
- Show your visitors exactly what they should hire you for and why.
I’m currently writing web content for a client’s law firm. During the planning phase, I had to decide how to organize each practice area and how much to write under each topic.
This might sound like a simple task but most practice areas are complex, with many overlapping parts.
- Do you split large practice areas into smaller sections?
- Is there a minimum word count you need to write?
- What happens if you end up duplicating content?
- What’s better – one long page or multiple short pages?
SEO rewards good content, but the way you structure your content matters too.
If your practice area pages are too short or “thin,” you could be missing out on keyword traffic.
Click here for answers to the most frequently asked questions about law firm content and SEO.
Structuring Practice Areas: Single or Multiple Pages?
Imagine you’re an employment lawyer. To attract the right clients, you want to write about the services you provide and the types of cases you take. Let’s say that includes discrimination lawsuits.
Discrimination is a huge area of practice. There are so many types of discrimination cases with varying legal implications. Between federal and state law, there are numerous statutes that grant different rights to different groups of people, each with its own issues and needs.
How do you wrangle a topic so massive into something readable and marketable?
How Do You Present Your Content for the Best SEO Results?
With all the content my client wanted to cover, I had 2 choices:
- Split each type of discrimination into its own shorter page, or
- Write about all types of discrimination on one long page
When determining what to do, I had to balance:
- What type of content Google prefers, and
- Creating an accessible reading experience.
I decided to go with one long page and use anchor links to create a table of contents.
Why Is Longer Content Better for Your SEO?
I tell my copywriting clients that their blog posts and content-heavy pages should be at least 1000 words long. Neil Patel, a leading SEO marketer, actually suggests 1500 words or more.
I’ve had some clients resist at first. After all, people have short attention spans. Why bother writing so much when no one is going to read it all?
Understanding the Human Element of SEO
First, it’s wrong that no one reads long blog posts. The “trick” is to create blog posts that people actually want to read from start to finish – i.e., well-written, interesting content.
The second trick is to format your blog posts to appeal to both skimmers and deep divers.
Yes, some people are there to skim. They’re in a rush, they want information fast, or they just want quick confirmation that you know what you’re doing. You appeal to skimmers with clear headings and easy to read formatting. Creating a table of contents will help with that even more.
But some people are there to research. They want to dive deep into a topic and learn about their rights and options facing a legal issue. Not only do these readers research legal issues, but they also research lawyers. If you have the most in-depth, helpful, authoritative legal website between your competition, the deep diver will choose you.
Google also measures the amount of time a visitor spends on a single page before navigating away. Your average “dwell time” or “time on page” affects your SEO score.
Let’s say someone clicks on your website from Google search. If they spend 2-5 minutes on your page, Google can reasonably infer that there’s something worth reading there. If your visitors spend an average of 10 minutes reading your page, that must mean they really found your content to be interesting and valuable, and Google takes note.
If visitors click on your page only to find a few paragraphs of content similar to what they’ve already seen, they’re going to click away almost immediately without visiting any other pages on your site. This increases your page bounce rate, which is bad news for SEO.
Now that we’ve covered humans, we have to consider our other target audience: Google.
Longer Content Generally Does Better on Google
… Even without considering dwell time. The reason behind this is actually pretty intuitive.
The longer your content, the more valuable keywords and keyword phrases you can include.
I don’t mean keyword stuffing, which is a big no-no. When you include keywords or key phrases, you must do so naturally. Fortunately, If you’re creating actual valuable, quality content, keywords tend to follow.
Let’s compare a hypothetical where all else is equal:
You have two employment law practice area pages from two different law firms. Both pages are about discrimination and both hit around the same number of keywords and keyword phrases in the first 500 words of content.
The first page stops there but the second page keeps going. In another 500 words, the second page is able to repeat its main keywords twice and include another 5 related keyword phrases. Google will rank this page higher. Plus, this page will rank for the extra keyword phrases too.
Now consider a third similar page by another law firm. Except this firm has expanded the content with 4000 more words + another 10 repeated keywords and 30 unique related keyword phrases. And because the page is such an in-depth resource, other websites link back to it, supercharging the page’s rank and authority.
The third page will become the authority and rank the highest among competitors. And once a page achieves first-page ranking on Google, it’s hard to knock back down.
Now, long content is great, but we have to consider the user experience. While it isn’t much to ask someone to read 1000 words, another 4000 words can be overwhelming.
That’s where anchor links come in.
What Are Anchor Links?
Anchor links take you from one spot on a page to another spot on the same page. They can also be called page jumps. By using anchor links on a long page, you can create a table of contents at the top that links to sections within the page below.
What Are the Benefits of Anchor Links?
Anchor links create a great user experience. Your readers can skim and/or deep dive to their heart’s content based on this helpful navigation.
But anchor links have an SEO benefit, too.
When you create a table of contents with anchor links, Google takes note. It takes those links and adds them as another line in your search engine listing. Like this:
The bottom line of links is extra visibility that you wouldn’t otherwise get in search results. You get that additional search engine real estate without paying for it.
How to Create Anchor Links on Your Law Firm Website
Anchor links are simple to create in WordPress. The best part? You don’t have to know any code or use any extra plugins! You can create anchor links with the quick and easy WordPress page jump tutorial.
Bonus: Avoiding Duplicate Content
Longer content also works better when there’s a lot of overlap.
We’ve discussed the problems with duplicate content before.
For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applies to many different types of discrimination. So if you break down the topic into separate pages, you have to figure out a way to repeatedly refer to Title VII without copying the same text over and over.
Duplicate content is bad for SEO for many reasons. You end up competing against yourself and both pages suffer in rank. Google likes unique content the best.
Instead, if you structure everything into one long page with a table of contents, you can write about Title VII once – and then use anchor links to refer to it from the rest of the page. No duplicate content to be found! Just a solid, keyword-rich page filled with information.
Law Firm SEO
If you’re building your law firm’s practice area pages or if you need guidance to help them perform better in search results, I can help. You can read about some of my SEO success stories here and here. Contact me today for a free SEO consultation.