Practice Pages That Say Something
The page is supposed to answer the question the client typed. Most answer a different one: “what does this firm think of itself?”
Search a legal question and read the top results: they answer the question. Now read the average firm’s practice-area page: a heading, four paragraphs about the firm’s dedication, a bulleted list of sub-services, a button. Google is trying to satisfy a person’s query; the page is trying to be a brochure. Only one of those ranks.
One page, one intent
Every practice page should exist to satisfy one searcher intent: “DUI lawyer [city]” is a hiring intent; “what happens at a first DUI hearing” is a learning intent. Both are valuable — the second feeds the first — but they’re different pages. A page that half-answers both satisfies neither, and “satisfies” is the thing Google’s helpful-content guidance is explicitly tuned to measure.1
The test for every page: after reading it, does the visitor know something they didn’t — the process, the timeline, the realistic outcomes, what it costs to find out more? Written by a named lawyer (Chapter 1), that page is simultaneously the best-ranking and most-persuasive version of itself.
The doorway-page trap — twice bad
The SEO industry’s worst habit for law firms is the city-page generator: forty near-identical pages, “Personal Injury Lawyer [Town]”, same copy, swapped place names. Google’s spam policies name this pattern — doorway abuse — and its scaled-content policy covers the AI-accelerated version.2 And for a law firm it’s uniquely radioactive, because a page claiming to serve a place where nobody’s admitted is also an ethics problem — one pattern, two regulators.
Location pages that work are location pages with local substance: the courthouse the matter would be heard in, the lawyers actually admitted there, real local matters. If there’s nothing local to say, the page shouldn’t exist.
Structure the answers
Headings that are actual questions, direct answers under them, FAQ/Article schema where honest3, internal links from the explainer pages to the practice area page and the bio — that’s the architecture. It’s also, not coincidentally, exactly the shape AI assistants quote (Chapter 4).
What actually does it
1. One intent per page — split the practice area pages from the articles, and write both on purpose.
2. Answer the top ten questions per practice area, signed, with real substance — depth over volume.
3. Kill or localize the city pages. Local substance or deletion; nothing in between.
4. Add honest schema and internal links from every article to the practice area page.
5. Watch the claims register. Practice pages are where superlatives breed — the Rule 7.1 filter applies to every new page.
Your firm’s practice-page checklist
Footnotes
- Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — the documentation’s test: does the content leave someone feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal? ↩
- Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search — doorway pages (“sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries” that funnel users to the same destination) are a named violation, as is scaled content abuse. ↩
- FAQ and Article structured data — valid and honest — is how the page’s answers become machine-readable; see also Chapter 4. ↩
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