Does Your Law Firm’s Website Need to Be 200,000 Words to Get Google’s Attention?

Focusing on quality instead of quantity is as important in content writing as it is in other aspects of business and the legal profession. You have probably already reached this conclusion in your career already. Your law firm can more easily stay financially solvent if you focus on working with the lawyers, office staff, and financial resources you have, rather than trying to expand too much in a short period of time. Likewise, it is a much better business strategy to stick with the kinds of cases with which you are the most comfortable, rather than to practice “door law” where you say yes to all prospective clients, so that, before you know it, you are working on personal injury, probate, business dispute, child support, and criminal defense cases all at the same time. For purposes of search engine optimization (SEO), Google also values quality over quantity, but you would not know this by the way that conventional wisdom on content marketing emphasizes word count. Instead of stressing about the volume of your legal blog content, you should focus on consistently writing blog posts that address your prospective clients’ questions and concerns.

An Enormous Word Count Makes You a Motor Mouth, Not an Authority

In a recent post on SEO Roundtable, Barry Schwartz addresses a persistent rumor about the minimum amount of content your site must contain before Google considers it authoritative. Some versions of this rumor say that a website (including all of its various pages) needs at least 200,000 words before Google will consider it authoritative; other versions say that an authoritative website needs at least 30 articles.

According to Schwartz, all of this is unfounded speculation; word count is not even a criterion for SEO, at least not in recent versions of the algorithm. What matters more is that you keep updating your site. The information on a law firm’s website does not normally go out of date, so you do not need to remove it. This means that you should continue adding content, such as blog posts and practice area pages, to your site, and as you do, the word count on your site will increase. Assuming that you add one 500-word blog post to your site per week and one 500-word content page per month, it will take about five months to get to 30 articles (assuming that the definition of “article” includes both blog posts and content pages) and just over six years to get to 200,000 words. If you have consistently been providing new content about your practice area of law for six years, this qualifies you as an authority, regardless of word count.

Law Blog Writers Provides Quality

There is no rule saying that you must compose every word of content on your site to make your site authoritative. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will provide content for your website to build your reputation as an authoritative source of information.

The Age-Old Question of How Often to Update Your Law Firm’s Blog

A brief overview of search engine optimization (SEO) principles for business websites will tell you that one of Google’s criteria for assigning a ranking to your site is the frequency of updates to your site. The target for frequency of updates varies widely from one industry to another; for example, ecommerce sites add new product listings and promotional offers several times per day, but that strategy is not practical for law firms. It simply doesn’t make sense to post an announcement on your site that says, “Sue by midnight and get a 20 percent discount on your attorney’s fees,” only to replace it the next day with a message of congratulations to all the people who filed lawsuits the previous day. For law firm websites, updating the site is synonymous with adding new posts to your site’s blog, especially after you have already written separate content pages for the various types of cases your law firm takes. Frequently updating your site with informative legal blog content can give your website the SEO boost it needs.

Blog Posting Frequency Is Relative

According to Neil Patel, Huffington Post, which is one of the most widely read blogs in the world, adds new posts at a rate that exceeds one blog post per minute. It is both unrealistic and pointless for a local law firm to post thousands of blog posts per day, even if you were to enlist dozens of chatbots to write them. With law firm blog posts, quality should take precedence over quantity. Adding new posts every day will not help your SEO rankings if the posts are simply spun versions of each other, or if they are mostly filler and fluff that you composed for no purpose other than to include keywords and meet a word count target.

If you want to find out how many blogs you should post, look at your competitors’ sites, and then one-up them. If the site that ranks above yours posts one blog per month, post two, and if it posts two, you should post three. If it posts three posts per week, you should post four.

Lazy but Brilliant Ways to Increase Your Posting Frequency

Write a new post every week, or even more than one post, sounds completely overwhelming if you are already swamped with work, which most employees at small law firms are. The good news is that you can get SEO points for updating your site without writing completely new posts. Simply making a few edits to one of your existing posts and then clicking “publish” also counts. Even adding a new paragraph to a content page, such as one that addresses a law or court decision that was enacted or issued more recently than when you first wrote the content page, will give you an SEO boost.

Pick a Number, and Law Blog Writers Will Write That Many Blog Posts

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will write as many or as few blog posts as your law firm’s website needs.

SEO Is Not a Quick Fix

No one goes into the legal profession to get rich quickly. If you open your own law firm, you have to spend a lot of money on it before you have enough cases to break even. Even if you take the risk averse route and get a salaried position with a well-established law firm, chances are that, between student loan payments and astronomical cost of living expenses, you will be left with just pennies in your bank account at the end of each pay period. Meanwhile, you never question whether it was worth it to get a law degree and become a lawyer. You should take a similar attitude toward search engine optimization (SEO) of your law firm’s website. SEO is about building your site’s reputation over time, as you have done with your reputation as a lawyer. Rather than obsessing over analytics and trying to anticipate the next fads, you should simply keep adding informative legal blog content to your site and establishing your online reputation as an authority on your practice area of law.

How Long Does It Take for Your SEO Efforts to Become Profitable?

Olga Zarzeczna of SEOsly says that the biggest disadvantage of SEO is that it is time consuming. Even the spiciest blog post about a legal case or court decision is not going to drive millions of new viewers to your site overnight. According to Zarzeczna, it takes about six months of implementing a successful SEO strategy before you see your site rise above the competition on organic search results. She recommends investing in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for those first six months, so your site can start to have visibility from the beginning. Once your site is in the top spot among the organic search results, you no longer need PPC advertising, and you can safely stop paying for it.

In other words, slow but steady wins the race. Start with keyword research and by studying your competitors’ websites. Then add content to your site; remember that you get points with Google’s search engine bots by updating your site frequently, so there is no need to spend weeks composing content in a Google Doc and then to upload it onto your site in one sitting. It is better to upload it piecemeal. In addition to blog posts, you should also have many different content pages for the various laws that prospective clients might need to know about and the types of cases you represent. You also don’t need to reinvent your strategy every time a digital marketing expert uploads a new video with a title that promises to upend your strategy or disrupt the SEO industry as a whole. In this regard, less is more. It is enough to reevaluate your SEO strategy once or twice per year to see what is working and what can still improve.

SEO Does Not Have to Be a Lonely Slog

You can always entrust the long-term planning to the pros. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will provide a steady stream of custom-written content pages and blog posts for your site.