Words (What are they good for?)

The general assumption in law firm SEO for at least the last decade has been that longer content ranks better. And to be fair, there is enough surface-level truth to it that the advice has stuck around for years.

The problem with most data about word count is that almost none of the research actually comes from law firm SEO data. Most of it comes from broader studies of B2C affiliate content, recipe blogs, and various small-business websites. A study of recipe blog rankings is not a study of how Google ranks your law firm. Until now, nobody had really done that work for the legal industry specifically.

CLM Sequoia Uncovers the Truth About Word Count

We used CLM Sequoia, our ai marketing and research platform, to study law firm websites and word count. The study pulled 2,418 ranking law firm URLs from 672 individual Google searches. It covered 32 high-intent legal keywords, various practice areas like personal injury, medical malpractice, workers’ compensation, criminal defense, family law, estate planning, business law, and employment law, and those searches were run within the 24 most populated U.S. metro areas.

For each URL, the word count was measured on the practice page body content only. We did not count subpages, blog content, navigation menus, or footer copy. Footer-heavy WordPress themes can easily add 800 words of boilerplate to what they call a “page,” and counting that as substance would have made the numbers meaningless.

After the content was analyzed, every URL was tagged by source type. Law firm websites went into one bucket. Directories like Avvo, FindLaw, and Justia went into a second bucket since they operate by very different content rules than firm websites. Resource sites like government legal aid pages and media outlets went into a third. For this study, only the law firm bucket was analyzed.

In total, the study reviewed 2,871,865 words of competitor content. The shortest Position 1 page in the dataset has 51 words. The longest has 25,898. That range alone tells you most of what you need to know about how much variation there is in legal search results.

What The Data Says About Word Count and Law Firm SEO

I am not going to walk through every chart from the report in this post. The full study has the breakdowns by practice area, by metro, and within individual SERPs. The headline finding is straightforward enough to summarize: word count and Google ranking position are related, but the relationship is much weaker than the legal SEO industry has been telling law firms for years.

The relationship also gets weaker the closer you look at it. The variation between practice areas in our data is enormous. The variation between metros is sharp. And within an individual SERP, being the longest law firm page on the results page barely improves your chances of reaching Position 1 over what random chance would predict.

What Law Firms Should Do With This Information

The point of running a study like this is to change how law firm SEO resources and editorial hours actually get spent. Based on what we found, here is what I would recommend:

Stop using one universal word count target across every practice area. A 1,500-word target is reasonable for a personal injury practice page. It is also roughly three times the median Position 1 page for employment law in our data. If your agency or your in-house content team is using the same target across every practice area, the strategy needs work. Practice area medians in our data vary by a factor of four.

Benchmark against ranking competitors in your actual metro. Word count for ranking law firm pages varies by a factor of two across U.S. metros. Pages ranking in Texas markets tend to be shorter than pages ranking in northern or coastal markets. A Chicago personal injury page should not be benchmarked against Houston competitors. Pull the firms ranking 1 through 3 for your target keyword in your actual metro and use those medians as your guide.

Avoid the 250-to-500 word range. This was one of the more surprising findings in the study. Pages in this range win Position 1 only 10.3% of the time, which is the worst rate of any word count band we measured. Pages under 250 words actually outperform them at 12.7%. If you have a focused short-form page that is working, leave it alone. If you have a thin half-built page somewhere on your site, either commit to making it substantially deeper or trim it down. The middle ground is where pages get stuck.

Think twice before adding 500 words to every existing page. Word count explains less than 1% of the variation in ranking position across the full dataset. The remaining 99% is being driven by other factors.

For employment, business, and criminal defense pages, less is more. In these three practice areas, the data shows effectively no correlation between page length and ranking position. The median Position 1 employment law page in the dataset is 428 words. That is a focused, intent-capturing page. If your employment law pages are running 1,500 words because that is “what SEO requires,” you are doing extra work for no measurable benefit. Tight pages may actually outperform longer ones in these categories.

For personal injury and medical malpractice, depth still pays off. These are the two practice areas where the median Position 1 page exceeds 1,300 words. If you are practicing in personal injury or medical malpractice and your pages are coming in under 800 words, you are below the competitive band. Firms in these practice areas have spent more than a decade building out deep practice pages with case results, procedural explainers, attorney biographies, and injury-type subpages. Google has come to expect that depth in these SERPs. This is the one practice area category where the conventional advice mostly holds up.

Content Quality is Ultimately What Matters

Search intent matching still matters and a word quota for quota’s sake was always a bad idea. Thorough coverage of a topic still matters. Pages still need to load fast, look professional, and convert visitors into clients. What the data does not support is the application of a universal word count target across every practice area, every metro, and every type of legal search query.

The better question to ask about a practice page is what your prospective client needs to see before they will contact your firm. Do you have enough properly structured information to get ChatGPT or other answer engines to recommend your law firm?

For some queries, the answer is 100 words. For others, it is 4,000. Either way, the data does not support a single number applied across the board, so just develop great content and let the word count fall where it may.

Read the full report: Does Word Count Matter for Google Rankings?