What You Can Learn from Large Law Firms

The legal industry is not dissimilar to other industries. The larger entities in the field have a competitive advantage due to their size and accessibility to resources. However, if you are competing against large law firms, you should be happy to know that you can do something to your website that large firms do to maintain search engine superiority.

Every change that Google makes to its algorithm sends a message loud and clear. Google wants content. Not only does it want content, it wants quality meaningful content. On top of that, if you are willing to provide a library filled with unique meaningful content, the Google algorithm is prepared to reward your efforts with better placement. Of course, you also need a strong link building effort, but quality content also encourages unsolicited inbound links. In short, quality content should be at the center of your online law firm marketing goals.

Large law firms know this and take advantage of it. We sampled websites from a few of the largest law firms in the United States with the following results.

DLA Piper is America’s largest law firm, weighing in at 3,785 lawyers and 71 locations. They have so much content on their website that if you type “DLA Piper” into Google, their listing shows a search bar right next to their results in the Google results pages that allows you to search their massive library of content. When doing a search to determine how many pages they had indexed in Google (site:www.dlapiper.com), the results came back at 37,100 pages.

We skipped down to No. 8 to the 1,840-attorney law firm of Greenberg Traurig, based in Miami Florida. While they may have half as many attorneys on staff as DLA Piper, they have plenty of content within Google’s index. How many pages? 19,900 pages, according to Google (site:www.gtlaw.com).

Last on our list is the law firm that ranks No. 250 on the list of top 250 law firms in the U.S. Nexsen Pruet is based in Columbia, South Carolina and has 174 lawyers on staff. They have eight offices in South Carolina and North Carolina. Their website has 2,860 pages indexed, according to Google (site:www.nexsenpruet.com).

The other notable fact about these three websites is their Pagerank. That is, of course, the score named after Google co-founder Larry Page that is given to websites in Google to determine their quality. The lowest is 0 and highest is 10.

DLApiper.com – Pagerank 7
GTLaw.com – Pagerank 6
Nexsenpruet.com – Pagerank 4

If your law firm’s domain name has been around for a while, you may need to invest more in building the content of those pages. Having deep pages of content that go into as much detail as possible, maintaining an active blog, and building a library of information will help your law firm compete against these giant law firms by using the same content strategy they do. While you cannot come up with 30,000 pages overnight to compete with DLA Piper, not starting a strategy today insures your future inability to compete at all.