One of the most important yet overlooked factors in the success of any law firm’s website is the content on the site. It’s important for helping convert visitors into clients, as well as crucial to getting additional traffic to your site from the search engines.

Let’s talk about the quality of the content first. It’s absolutely crucial that the content is written in a way that convinces a visitor to contact your law firm. It has to answer the question “Why should a client choose you to handle their legal matter?”. When a visitor who is looking to find an attorney comes to your web site, trust me, they are asking themselves that exact question. In addition, they want to know if you have the expertise to handle their specific legal matter. Having a page that lists your practice areas is good, but actually having content for all those specific areas is much better. You will have a much greater chance of having a visitor contact your firm if you can show expertise on a the specific situation that visitor is dealing with.

In addition to showing that your firm has experience handling those specific legal issues, content can also help you get additional traffic from the search engines. Law firm websites that are loaded with original, quality content get much more traffic then sites with just a handful of pages. If a website has 500 words in the entire website compared to another site with 10,000 words, which site has the potential to be found for more keyword phrases? The more content you have, the better as long as the content is unique. Let’s talk about duplicate content for a bit. Search engines like Google frown upon duplicate content so don’t copy someone elses content and stick it on your site. I feel like I shouldn’t even have to say that, but you’d be suprised….I’ve seen many lawyers with content stolen from other websites. Pages that Google determines to be duplicate content will in most cases be removed from their index. It’s also not ok to have the same exact content (even if it’s all your own) on multiple websites so if you have multiple domains with the same content, so make sure to set up a forward from your other domains to your main domain name. This will help you avoid getting your site removed from the index.

Your best bet is to have a legal content writer who understands search engine optimization to create original content for your website. That’s not the cheapest way to go but it’s the best way. In any event, if you’re serious about creating a web presence that will help you generate clients via the Internet, you need to add content to your site. If you can add content on a regular basis, that’s even better. Search engines favor sites that add fresh content on a regular basis (law firm blogs are great for this).