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 The information on a law firm’s website does not normally go out of date, so you do not need to remove it.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.