Determine optimal word count for legal services

You have your website built and running and you even have valuable content there. But ranking on page 1 of Google is a challenge. It’s like everyone has a secret and they’re not sharing. 

“The best place to hide anything is on 

page 2 of google search”

There are many reasons why your great content may not get the traction you thought it would. Visitors to your site come from all over the place whether it’s your social media, other websites linking to you, and search engines such as Google. 

If you want to make your content more appealing to Google and other search engines then this article has the secrets you are looking for!

Word Count for Legal Services

Search engines want to provide their users with the best content available on the internet. There are any number of articles that talk about the different ways to rank, but almost none of them ever discuss how many words your legal service page has. 

Legal questions are complex and typically something that you can answer using 100 words. That works to your advantage because every legal services post should have at least 300 words, but ideally, 500 since as a general rule search engines don’t rank anything below those word counts. 

In our research, we typically find 700-800 words is the sweet spot to ranking a page.

As a content strategy is good for you to identify a minimum of 2 or 3 pages that are the ones you would like to have a better ranking on. Examples could be your locations or practice areas. For these pages, you should consider  800 to 900 words of legal services posts.

Although word counting is an important element, it’s not all that it takes to have a high ranking page. 

Keywords

These are the words that help search engines to understand what you are talking about. Having clarity on what are your keywords will help you build your piece around it and make it more appealing to search engines. 

There are keywords that are broad and have big volume and also big competition, on the other hand, there are keywords that have smaller search volume and a smaller competition — these are known as long-tail keywords. 

When choosing keywords you should keep in mind that it has to be something that people are looking for and determine if for your purpose it is better to use a long-tail keyword or not.

You can check this post to learn more about the importance of keywords for legal websites.

Building your Legal Services Post

The chosen keyword will be the axis for the piece. But a high ranking page is not made by a single block of text. Having sections makes it easier for the reader to find the information they want, and for Google to understand what your page is about. 

Each section should have a title that is a supportive keyword. Which means it is related to the main keyword but not exactly the same. To choose these headings a possibility is to think in questions the reader may have on the topic and try to answer them on the sections.

As an example, if you were writing about how to make a birthday cake the sections could be:

  • Moist birthday cake
  • Colorful birthday cake
  • How to get the most flavor out of your cake
  • How to safely transport the cake to the party 

The title you give to each section should answer the questions someone’s interest in its topic would have.

Writing a Legal Service Post:

There’s a lot more than just these tips that go into writing an article that will rank well in Google. Applying these techniques will make the post be noticed as a better quality post by search engines and a well-written post will rank better. 

The best practices we discussed in this post:

  • Lengthen the post in according to the importance of the page you are trying to rank 
  • Choose the main keyword that reflects a topic people are interested in
  • Choose supporting keywords that answer the questions people may have on that topic 
  • Break the post into sections. Make it easy to read and skim