SEO for law firms: how many pages a firm actually needs

A firm with one services page covering six practice areas is asking one document to rank for six different searches, and it will lose to six focused pages every time. In New York, personal injury and probate are both large searches with click prices 4 times apart. They are not one audience.

Last updated: 4 August 2026

Why does one page per practice area matter?

Because the searches are not related, the buyers are not the same person, and the money behind them differs by a factor of four.

Three practice areas in one city, measured 3 August 2026:

Personal injury and family are almost identical in volume and nearly two and a half times apart in click price. A single page cannot be optimized for both: the language differs, the urgency differs, the questions asked before contact differ, and the person searching at 11pm about a car accident is not the person searching on a Tuesday afternoon about a will.

One page trying to serve all three ranks well for none of them. It is the most common structural fault we find, and it is the cheapest to fix.

How many pages does a firm actually need?

Fewer than an agency will sell and more than most firms have. The arithmetic is simple.

• One page per practice area you actually want more of. Not per practice area you are capable of. If the firm does not want more probate work, it does not need a probate page.
• One page per location you genuinely serve, if more than one.
• One page per question that comes up before instruction. What it costs, how long it takes, what happens first.

A three-partner firm wanting more of two practice areas in one city needs perhaps eight to twelve pages. Not sixty. A supplier proposing sixty is selling volume, and volume without intent is how a site ends up with pages nobody searches for.

A damaging admission: the firm already knows which two practice areas it wants more of. That decision is not ours to make and it is the one that determines whether any of this works.

What actually goes on a practice-area page?

The questions asked before somebody instructs, answered in the order they are asked.

1. What this actually covers, in the words a client would use rather than the ones on a fee note.
2. What it costs, or the honest reason a range is not possible yet.
3. What happens first, and how quickly.
4. What the firm has done before in this area, at whatever level of detail confidentiality allows.
5. Who will handle it — a named person outranks an unnamed team.
6. How to make contact without a phone call at four in the afternoon.

Item two is the one most firms omit and the one most readers came for. 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions, measured across the 40 suppliers we read on 3 August 2026, and a page that ducks the question sends the reader back to the results to find one that does not.

Does the same logic apply to locations?

Yes, and it is abused more often than practice areas, so it needs a limit.

A page for a city where the firm has an office, takes instructions and can name a person is a real page. A page for a city forty miles away that exists only to capture the search is a doorway page, and Google removed roughly 80% of doorway pages in the measured cases from its 2024 core updates.

The test: could a partner defend this page to a client in that city? If the honest answer is "we do not really work there", the page should not exist.

Why not just one big services page?

Because ranking is per page, not per site, and a page ranks for what it is about.

A page covering six practice areas is about none of them specifically. Search engines read it as a general page and rank it against other general pages, which is a much larger field. The narrower page wins the narrower search, and the narrower search is where the person ready to instruct actually is.

There is a second reason, which matters more than it used to. AI Overviews appear on 39 of the 54 money searches in this market, measured 3 August 2026. An answer engine summarizing "how much does a probate attorney cost in New York" needs a page that answers that question specifically. A general services page gives it nothing to lift.

What does it cost, and how long does the build take?

The Practice Sprint is $1,450 and the build tier is $2,900, both fixed and published, with no minimum term.

Of the 40 suppliers we read on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price at all, five of those published only a range, and one offered work with no minimum term.

On timing: the page map arrives in week two, the pages are drafted and published across weeks three to ten, and nothing measurable happens in month one. Positions move between months three and four, and the work is not fairly judged before month six.

What this is worth where you are

In New York, 14,800 people a month search for personal injury, and Google charges around $73.14 for one of those clicks. We hold the same figures for 52 cities.

The free report gives you yours, plus which pages are missing from your site, and what 40 suppliers charge.

Get the report →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

By practice area, where the architecture above gets specific: family lawyer marketing and criminal defense lawyer marketing cover two areas whose searches behave very differently from each other.

If paid is under consideration alongside search, PPC for law firm covers why we never charge per lead and what that means for how campaigns are structured.

For the wider view, marketing for lawyer covers every channel, and law firm SEO agency compares suppliers including where one of them fits better than we do.

Frequently asked questions