Shorter Content on Lawyers’ Websites Could Rank Higher According to Article in Bigger Law Firm Magazine
Sep 28, 2015
San Francisco, CA (Law Firm Newswire) September 28, 2015 – An article in the new issue of The Bigger Law Firm magazine says that shorter content on law firm websites may actually rank higher than longer content in search engine results pages.
In his “SEO Obiter Dicta” column, legal marketing expert Jason Bland questions the conventional wisdom that lengthy content is looked upon more favorably by search engines. Bland indicates that since Google’s Panda update, which devalued webpages that provided no real user value, many in the search engine optimization (SEO) field have assumed that short content is less valuable. That is not always the case, Bland writes.
Search engines seek to deliver the most useful content to users, and Google has identified content that it is actively seeking to weed out. This includes content that is automatically generated by a computer program rather than written by humans, content that is copied directly from another source and “doorway pages” that exist solely to target search terms but do not provide additional content beyond what is already present on the website.
Bland points out that “short content” is not on this list of low-value content. In fact, if a search engine user is asking a relatively straightforward question, a law firm’s concise answer can easily become the top search result, ahead of longer articles on more authoritative websites.
The fact that law firm websites can use concise content to dominate the results pages for certain search terms is just one of the SEO secrets revealed in this issue of The Bigger Law Firm magazine. Bland also points out that duplicate content can be a significant problem for law firm websites, as copying the text of statutes, though helpful to users, can actually be a red flag for Google. However, Bland provides an easy fix that law firms can use to correct the problem — without removing the content. To learn more, read the latest issue.
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