San Francisco, California – Custom Legal Marketing, a law firm SEO company, has released a comprehensive report examining the relationship between word count and Google rankings across the legal industry. The study, conducted using the company’s proprietary AI law firm marketing platform, Sequoia, analyzed 2,418 ranking law firm web pages across 8 major practice areas and the 24 most populated U.S. metropolitan markets.

For at least a decade, the prevailing advice in search engine optimization (SEO) has been that longer content reliably outranks shorter content. While studies conducted on the internet-at-large have confirmed that, there wasn’t any reliable research particularly focused on law firms and how word count correlates with their rankings. On CLM’s blog, the company said most data “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.”

The new study finds that while word count does have a statistically detectable relationship with where a law firm page appears on Google, the effect is significantly weaker than commonly believed and varies dramatically by practice area and geographic market.

“Word count has been treated like a settled question in law firm SEO,” said Jason Bland, Co-Founder of Custom Legal Marketing. “The advice for years has been to write longer pages, and there has been almost no industry-specific data behind that recommendation. We decided to run the numbers ourselves. What we found should change how a lot of law firms and their marketing companies approach their content strategy.”

Among the most notable findings, the median word count for top-ranking law firm pages varies by a factor of four across practice areas. Employment law pages ranking at the top of Google have a median length of 428 words. Personal injury pages in the same top position have a median length of 1,691 words. Family law, estate planning, and business law all fall at distinctly different points along the same range, indicating that a one-size-fits-all content target does not reflect how Google actually ranks legal pages.

Geography also plays a substantial role. Across the 24 metro areas studied, the median word count for ranking law firm pages varied by a factor of two. Texas markets clustered well below the overall median. Northern and coastal markets clustered higher. The study found that two firms in different parts of the country could be competing on the same keyword and ranking with pages of very different lengths.

The report also examined individual search results pages directly. When the longest law firm page in a given search result was compared against shorter competitors, it held the top position less than 30 percent of the time, only marginally better than random chance would predict.

“Content quality matters. Search intent matching matters,” Bland added. “What the study shows is that the same word count target applied to every practice area and every market doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening on Google and it doesn’t reflect improved performance.”

The complete research report, Does Word Count Matter for Google Rankings?, includes practice-area-by-practice-area breakdowns, metro-level analysis for each of the 24 cities surveyed, within-SERP competitor comparisons, and the full methodology.

Custom Legal Marketing’s AI marketing platform, Sequoia, is always running experiments and most of the discoveries become proprietary entries into the system’s knowledge base. However, this year the company has released some of their platform’s findings to the public.

Custom Legal Marketing is a law firm marketing agency built for how clients actually find lawyers today. Founded in 2005, CLM combines award-winning creative with their purpose-built AI platform, Sequoia, to help law firms stand out, get chosen, and grow in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.

Custom Legal Marketing
1111 Kearny Street San Francisco, CA 94133
800-789-6451
https://custom.legal/
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