More Cases. Better Clients. Real Results.
Schedule a 1:1 ConsultationAs GAVL’s Lead Content Writer, as you might imagine, I get asked about content length a lot. Writers want to know how long blogs and practice area pages should be. Clients ask how long our content generally is. I always say the same thing:
How long should a piece of content be? As long as it needs to be.
Boom. Question answered. We can all go home now! Shortest blog ever.
But wait—It’s a little more involved than that.
How Do You Know How Long a Piece of Content Needs to Be?
First, let’s go over the basics. Written content exists on any site—including any law firm’s site—to inform viewers. When a potential client has a question or query, that content exists to answer that question. Ideally, when that potential client views the answer, that answer instills a sense of trust in the viewer that then encourages them to reach out to the firm about their case.
When we talk about content for law firms, we generally refer to practice area pages and blogs. Both are an essential part of your firm’s SEO efforts and have a massive impact on how and how often your site is found online.
The Many Needs of Practice Area Pages
Practice area pages on a firm’s site are your meat and potatoes—the pages which outline the areas your firm practices in and serve as landing pages for organic search traffic. These are your gold. They should answer all kinds of questions viewers and potential clients may have. This, in turn, makes them gold for traditional search engines and AI-powered search results (also commonly referred to as LLMs or large language models) alike.
How long a practice area page needs to be depends on many factors, ultimately. Practice area pages are a little on the needy (and often meaty) side. Here’s a brief look at some of the most important factors:
Competition
What are other firms in your market doing content-wise? How many local competing firms are there? In larger, more competitive markets, practice area pages tend to trend on the longer side because there’s simply more information out there competing for the top spots.
Practice Area
Some practice areas are naturally harder to rank well for than others and will often need meatier, more expansive pages that cover more content. Some can end up quite long. For competitive pages in a very large market, you may find that a base page and a series of subpages that branch off into other areas related to the base page is a better option to making one extraordinarily long page.
Query Type
One more thing to consider is the main query the page is answering. Is it a broad practice area page explaining to visitors how a lawyer can help them with a type of case and the many facets of the type of case? Depending on the practice area, there could be a great deal of ground to cover that’ll naturally require a longer piece. Is it a page about a specific type of injury that’s limited to only certain occupations? Then you’ll want to dive right in and talk directly about the injury and how it’s caused, which may result in a shorter piece.
The last thing you ever want to do is create extra content for the sake of creating extra content. You don’t want to write about nursing home abuse, for example, on a page about boating injuries. Cohesion matters, especially when it comes to looking at the way your content is structured as a whole (more on this below!).
Blogs: A Lesson in Not Meandering
That brings us to blogs. Blogs can be easy to overlook because for so many years, common practice has been for businesses like law firms to blog about anything—and everything—including the kitchen sink. This is no longer a great idea. Blogs should be written and published with a purpose. And length, of course, ties in directly to purpose.
SEO professionals sometimes like to use the analogy of a site’s overarching content structure looking similar to a spider web. The center of a web can’t exist without all of the ooey-gooey strands holding it in place and forming connections with other strands. If a site’s practice area pages are held in the center of the web since they’re the meat and potatoes of the site, then the outlaying strands need to form connections between each center bit and make the whole thing stick together. Guess what blogs do? They help make up those sticky strands.
Blogs should be crafted with a goal in mind. As far as SEO-focused blogs go, often that goal is to enhance an already-existing page and bridge a keyword gap. Blogs make practice area pages stronger by supporting and expanding upon what’s already on that practice area page and by answering additional questions and queries potential clients and readers may have.
So, how long does a blog need to be? Again, it depends on many factors, but the most vital is the query or question itself the blog is attempting to answer. Write to answer the query.
If you’re writing a blog about how seatbelt injuries occur, for example, write about seatbelt injuries and how they happen. Jump right in, answer the question, include any vital information that readers asking that question may want to know, and finish the piece. Don’t write about rollover accidents or dooring accidents or other subject matter that isn’t cohesive just to make the piece longer and satisfy a word count.
Show Me the Numbers?
There. I did it. I finally used the phrase “word count”—the singular phrase that makes the cogs and wheels of so many content teams all over the world function. Word counts—while extremely common in the marketing industry—are simply one tool we have as writers and marketers to achieve goals. Word counts shouldn’t be the goal in themselves.
At GAVL, our content team has one goal. We write good content that performs well. Period. While we do occasionally utilize word counts as a tool to help our writers be more efficient and provide clients with the most accurate estimates possible, we keep our content goals based on the needs of the client and the content itself—not random numbers.
Our 100% in-house, U.S.-based writing team approaches every project we tackle with the goal to create great content that performs well and the know-how to achieve that goal. We stay on top of best SEO and LLM practices and we understand the importance of writing for people as people.
Want to learn more? Get in touch with our team today. We can take your firm’s content and website to the next level.
