How Large Law Firms Get Web Traffic

We recently did some research on some of America’s largest law firms to see what they do to get traffic from the web. So we picked a few of the firms from the nation’s top 250 largest law firms. Basically, these firms are becoming content machines.

First, we looked at the largest law firm in the country, DLA Piper. On most of their practice areas (on their website referred to as global services) they have a list of publications separated from the news. From an SEO perspective, what we found most fascinating is that their website has a horrible URL structure (i.e. http://www.dlapiper.com/global/services/detail.aspx?service=629&show=pubs) but their publications have neat SEO friendly URL (i.e. http://www.dlapiper.com/life-sciences-personalized-medicine-shift/). Remember, the structure of your URL plays a huge role in how Google favors your website.

Baker & McKenzie (the second largest firm) was our favorite. Separate from news, they have published a massive number of articles on their site per practice area. Google has more than 34,000 pages indexed on Bakernet.com – a number significant enough to give them their own search box when Googling Baker & McKenzie.

What makes them our favorite is that they are getting close to the same number of pageviews as DLAPiper.com, with only a third of the content; and they could probably get more by optimizing the titles of their content. In fact, DLA Piper has over 100,000 pages indexed in Google, according to Google’s site search tool.

A comparison that puts this into perspective is the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal. When doing the Google site check, the ABAJournal.com website has just 17,000 pages indexed. This means that a legal journal’s website has half the amount of content as the second largest law firm.

Even number 81 (Patton Boggs) on the top 250 law firms list has over 6,000 pages.

We checked these three on Cubestat to get an estimated pageview count to see how the content was working for them:

The following are daily pageviews:

DLA Piper (dlapiper.com) – 6,304
Baker & McKenzie (bakernet.com) – 6,005
Patton Boggs (pattonboggs.com) – 1,349

You do not have to be a giant law firm to make Google recognize your practice as a significant resource. Contact SEOLawFirm.com to learn more.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.