Content and practice area pages

Which kinds of page actually earn anything

Cyrus Shepard has rated 17 types of content and graded the survival odds of each in AI search. His rating is built on an earlier study of 400 websites that gained and lost Google traffic¹.

Most of the legal content budgets are funding the bottom row.

Here is the gist of what I got from his write-up.

"Winning content tends to be proprietary, experience-based, niche-focused, and allows task completion beyond merely providing information."¹

The underlying study supports the ranking, and the top pair of features has a high correlation to traffic gains².

• Selling a product or service, Spearman correlation 0.391
• Letting the visitor complete their task on the site, 0.381

So try to build a practice area page that explains the claim and start taking consultation bookings on it.

Google's own definition of filler, which settles the blog argument

Shepard used to work for a Google quality rater program. He says the rating system tied his score for every page to effort, originality, talent and accuracy. The rater guidelines say that effort is first and foremost "the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content"³.

One entry in the 2024 API leak is a field called contentEffort, which is an "LLM-based effort estimation for article pages". No one really knows whether Google uses it³.

This is what annoys me about reading most law firm blogs.

"Low-effort content that adds little value and doesn't directly support the purpose of the page. Filler can artificially inflate content, creating a page that appears rich but lacks content website visitors find valuable."³

Google's guidance on helpful content does say this plainly⁴:

• Does the content show first-hand expertise?
• Is it clear who wrote it?
• Does it go beyond the obvious?
• Would somebody bookmark it or recommend it?

Google says it gives extra weight to these signals in topics like money, health, safety and legal advice⁴.

How long a practice area page should be

There are measurements that show how much Google takes from a page today. Dan Petrovic's sample includes 7,060 queries and 883,262 snippets of the page text Google uses for AI answers⁵.

Any pages that are answering a legal question should be sized as a range, rather than a fixed word count. That 1,000 to 2,000 word range is right for most practice areas if the page answers the question and the obvious follow-ups. Past that it becomes padding you have to carry. A good page will display the answer on top of the copy.

Specific pages are much more useful to AI answers than long ones.

• Surfer's figures show that uncited pages cover just 24% of their topic's key facts, while pages cited in AI Overviews cover 31%⁷
• AirOps's study of 217,508 pages found that five to seven supporting statistics made the content 20.3% more likely to get citations⁸

The deadline, the statute cite, the filing fee, the court and the form number are your main statistics in legal work.

What goes on a practice area page

In my experience, Webris has the most practical checklist of the four guides: messaging, search intent, value, formatting, on-page basics, and calls to action¹⁴. It is sensible, but stops short of actually covering what gets a page cited or signs a client.

This is what I would add as well.

1. The direct answer in the first two sentences. It starts on line one of the page (before any firm history). A visitor is usually there for a deadline, a cost, or an (even more basic) question about whether they have a case at all.
2. The procedural sequence with real timings. Clients wonder what happens when they hit week one, the 90-day mark or the usual delay.
3. The statute and deadline that governs the claim in your state, with the cite. If your attorneys can check it in-house, then check it in-house.
4. The fee explained with the arithmetic. Give them the percentage and the settlement arithmetic, not a paragraph about values. What happens if the case loses and there are costs? The fee page is the thing everyone wants to read, but arguably it's not a page firms publish so much as a page they avoid.
5. The named attorney who handles this work, linked to a real biography. That is the core of Google's "who produced this" test⁴.
6. What the firm will not take. Show which cases you're willing to turn down, and it filters out the enquiries you don't want and increases trust.
7. One way to complete the task. Use a booking form, a click-to-call number, or the likes. The second best feature in Shepard's study is content that lets a visitor complete a specific task².

City pages, and the test that decides whether yours should exist

If you take a look at Google's spam policies page, it explains doorway abuse as pages "created to rank for specific, similar search queries", but its example is very specific. That example is the practice of creating city pages at scale to funnel users to a single page⁹.

This is the heart of Shepard's example of low-effort automation: "5,000 location pages generated from the same template with city names swapped in"³. The standard legal SEO build for a firm covering a state is essentially a gigantic set of these pages.

A city page that is useful because of facts true only of that city passes both tests:

• The courthouse, and anything local about filing or scheduling there
• The judges, and what practitioners know about appearing before them
• The roads and intersections where the collisions actually happen
• The hospitals the ambulances go to, and which records are slow to obtain
• A named attorney who genuinely appears in that county

Where AI answers have moved the content question

Whitespark's study ran 540 searches in Houston, Phoenix and Denver, using six industries (personal injury lawyers among them) to put numbers on this for legal⁶.

AI answers are where people start, often before they're ready to hire anyone. The ready-to-hire row, that's the map pack.

I'd rather have fewer, better posts written to be quoted instead of the informational posts on, say, a personal injury blog. The commercial argument for real effort on the practice and attorney pages that convert is very strong. Guides in themselves are a prime target for AI summaries according to Shepard. A guide only works if you back it with brand expertise and proprietary data¹.

What to do with the blog you already have

This is the part that is skipped.

1. Use your analytics to export every URL's organic entrances and conversions through the last twelve months. The typical law firm blog is only partly alive, with between a third and two thirds of it having neither.
2. Read all the posts with neither. There are three approaches to sorting them.
3. Merge, improve, or remove. I do find that merging is usually best, but merging only works if the surviving page keeps the internal links and gets written properly. Improve posts for queries that actually deserve posts. Any firm in the country could produce the general-law posts this removal targets.
4. Redirect what you remove. A removed post will get a better result by pointing its redirect to the practice page it relates to rather than the homepage.
5. Rewrite the survivors answer-first. Go through your surviving posts and see how they can lead with the answer under a question heading, using the method on the writing page.
6. Consider the pages nobody proposed, which are listed below.

The pages I would add instead, which are never on the plan

These ideas run from the 'enquiry' side of the firm, from intake notes and contact forms. FindLaw found that of legal consumers, 56% acted within a week of realising they had a problem, and 16% acted within a day¹⁰. Someone moving that fast that needs a lawyer doesn't want an explainer.

• A fees and costs page with the arithmetic. A perfect example is the firm explaining the percentage they take on a sample case, including the costs if it loses.
• A what happens next page covering the first four weeks of a matter, in order, with timings.
• A page on the one procedural thing your firm genuinely handles better than anyone local, with enough detail that a competitor would not bother copying it.
• A page answering the questions your attorneys hear every week. Get your own attorneys to write them up and the page will answer each one directly. Your site is surprisingly light on those answers.
• An honest page on whether somebody needs a lawyer at all for their situation, including when they do not. It is the only page on the internet that isn't trying to sign them, which is why it converts better than anything else on this list.

Those pages also convert visitors from referral sources that are already half-decided.

How I decide what to write

I plan content from my clients' enquiries all the time. Read the last hundred intake notes and contact form submissions, and list the questions. The point is to find out the client's own words, sort your questions and predict if each one is going to make a page or not.

The next list is born from the ten questions that the attorneys answer every week. Then, check Search Console's list of queries with impressions and no clicks. The workflow I've written on the keyword research page is a fuller version of this.