Law Firm Practice Area Marketing – How Niche City and Practice Pages Work
By Peter Boyd on June 8, 2021 in Internet Marketing
Making the Most of Your Law Firm Practice Area Content
Most law firms practice in several related areas, such as business, bankruptcy, and say . . . litigation. Even firms that practice in just one area, like estate planning, have many sub-practice areas that can be considered related, such as probate, elder law, wills, trusts and estates. So how do you create content for your law firm that ranks highly and showcases your location?
For years, the default best strategy was creating your default practice area pages to target your primary office location. The way to rank high was to create content for each detailed practice area and then tie that into your primary office location. This approach is still largely true, but for search engine optimization (SEO), creating content hubs with subpages for individual claims is now the norm.
But what if you have multiple offices? What if you want to expand your geographic scope to include other cities throughout your state(s).
City Practice Area Pages
Enter the niche city practice area page. They are not new, but they are dominating search results right now. This is similar to your current practice area page that targets your main city.
Now, you must create a content page about your practice for each additional city where you want to expand and target. So, for instance, you may still have a main practice page on say “Family Law” that targets your entire state (or nation generally), but then you create practice pages about family law in specific cities.
Show Me an Example
For example, say your main site is about probate law in Fort Lauderdale. But you also practice in Miami, West Palm Beach, Tampa, and Naples. If you want to expand your rankings, you may need to create individual localized content pages about each of those cities with specific information about these locations and how you practice probate there.
Why? Multiple Pages? Can’t I Just Add the Extra Cities to the Existing Page?
Right now, Google seems to prefer niche content on specific practice areas. Yes, there are times when you can simply add a few city keywords to an existing page and rank. We always like the path of least resistance, so if this can work for you, try it.
Try adding the extra office locations to the title tag, headlines, subheads, and text of the existing page. If you rank higher with the original page, great. If you have enough domain authority and page authority, this may work. If your city is a niche enough city with low competition, this may work. This also may be worth attempting for smaller cities or major suburbs connected to the target city.
But generally speaking, we have found that for midsize to large cities, Google is going to rank specific niche content higher than a generalized page for popular practice areas. This could change, of course, but it is just what we see now.
Rules to Follow for Your Location-Based Law Firm Pages
It is absolutely critical to make your content unique for each page. In addition, you need:
- Title Tags – Title tags need to be unique and highly focused on that city and practice.
- Meta Description – It also needs to be unique and focused on that city and practice.
- Headlines and Subheads – Cannot be duplicative of other practice areas from other cities and should be unique.
- Content – Must be unique. Don’t write the same content and simply replace city names and/or spin the content through an auto generator. This needs to prove you are local. Include local references (i.e., cross streets, mentions of parks, monuments, etc.) Repeating your content could actually hurt the performance of your website.
- FAQs – Include frequently asked questions that are local in nature.
- Office – If you have an actual office location with an address and phone for that area, then list it on that page.
- The Extras: Other valuable items for your location-based pages include local images and links to relevant local resources.
How to Organize Your Website
It is fine to have one-off pages about set practice areas. You can add these to your sitemap and menu. If you start to have lots of these practice areas, you will want to group all your cities into a “Locations” page or “Areas Served” page. This way, the user can see that you practice in, say, Orlando and then see all the specific practice areas you have. Your content will be tailored to their unique location and areas of practice they need.
However you choose to organize your site, just make sure that the location-based pages are not hidden from navigation and that you add internal links to these pages from your main practice area pages.
Questions or Feedback?
We would love to hear your feedback if this blog post has helped you to better understand how to create practice area pages that target specific cities. Also, if you run into any issues or need content writing assistance, feel free to contact us, and we would be happy to provide further assistance.
