Your firm has a website with a blog. Someone, at some point, paid a content service to publish two posts a month. There are now 140 posts titled things like "What to Do After a Car Accident" and "Understanding Child Custody Laws," none of which rank, none of which anyone at the firm has read, and none of which sound like your lawyers.
That is what happens without a content strategy. A content strategy for a law firm website is a short document that says which pages the site needs, what each is for, who writes it, and when it gets reviewed. It is less about volume than about deciding what not to write. This page describes how we build one as part of our SEO for lawyers work.
Start from the consultation, not the keyword tool
The best source of content ideas in a law firm is the intake and consultation log. Every question a prospective client asks in a first meeting is a question someone else is typing into Google. "Do I have to go to court for an uncontested divorce?" "What happens if I miss the deadline to answer a complaint?" "Will my employer know I filed for bankruptcy?"
Spend an hour with the lawyers and the intake staff listing the questions they answer every week. Group them by practice area and by stage (before hiring, during the matter, after). That list is the backbone of the content plan. Then confirm each item against search data, which is where law firm keyword research comes in: it tells you how people phrase the question and whether a page can realistically rank for it.
Four kinds of pages, and what each is for
Practice pages are the foundation. One per matter type the firm wants, written to explain what the matter involves, what the process looks like in your jurisdiction, what it costs, and who at the firm handles it. These are the pages that rank for "[matter type] lawyer [city]." They should be long enough to be useful and no longer.
Question pages answer one specific question from the consultation list. "How long does probate take in Cook County?" "Can a landlord keep a security deposit for normal wear and tear?" They rank for the question, they get cited by AI assistants, and they feed the practice page through an internal link. These are what the blog should have been.
Local pages describe the courts, agencies, and places clients deal with: the county courthouse, the family division, the workers' compensation board's regional office, the immigration court. They rank for searches that include the court name and they show the firm knows the terrain.
Credibility pages are attorney bios, case results (where the rules allow), fees, and the about page. They rarely rank on their own, but every prospective client reads them before calling, and they decide whether the ranking turned into a consultation. Our page on SEO for business litigation attorneys shows how these four types fit together for a practice where credibility carries most of the weight.
What not to publish
The strategy should list what the firm will not write. Generic explainers already answered better by Nolo or a state court's self-help site. Posts about national news with a "call us" paragraph at the end. Pages for practice areas the firm does not actually want. Holiday greetings. Anything a content service would write without talking to a lawyer.
It should also schedule what to remove. Old posts with no traffic and no links should be deleted or redirected to the practice page they were vaguely about. A site with 30 strong pages outperforms one with 30 strong pages and 140 weak ones, because the weak ones dilute the site's overall quality signals and waste crawl attention.
Who writes it, and how it stays accurate
The lawyer does not have to write the page, but the lawyer has to be in the room. The workable pattern is a 30-minute recorded conversation between the lawyer and the writer about the topic, transcribed, and turned into a draft the lawyer reviews. The page ends up in the lawyer's voice with the lawyer's specifics, at a cost of an hour of the lawyer's time rather than a day.
Every page needs an owner, a review date, and a note on what could make it stale (a statute, a fee schedule, a court rule). Put a "last reviewed" date on the page. Legal content that says "as of 2019" is worse than no content, and both readers and search engines notice.
Writing so AI Overviews quote you
Google's AI Overviews and assistants like ChatGPT draw from pages that answer a question directly, define terms, and cite the rule. That happens to be good writing for humans as well. Put the direct answer in the first paragraph under a heading that matches the question. Follow it with the nuance, the exceptions, and the jurisdiction-specific detail. Add a short FAQ block with three or four related questions.
Avoid writing for robots. Keyword-stuffed headings and repeated city names read badly and no longer help. What helps is being the clearest, most specific page on the question. Our page on law firm visibility in Google AI Overviews covers the structure and markup that make a page easy to cite.
Questions we get
How many pages should we publish per month?
Fewer than you think. One substantial practice or question page per month, reviewed by a lawyer, is a sustainable pace for most firms and outperforms four thin posts.
Should lawyers write their own content?
Some enjoy it and are good at it, and their pages are usually the best on the site. Most do not have the time. The interview-and-draft pattern above gets the lawyer's expertise onto the page without requiring the lawyer to write. What does not work is publishing content the lawyer has never seen.
Can we use AI to write the pages?
AI tools are useful for drafting from a transcript, restructuring, and producing first drafts of FAQ sections. They are not a substitute for the lawyer's specifics, and a page generated from a prompt with no firm-specific input reads exactly like the 140-post blog. Every AI-assisted page should be reviewed by a lawyer before publication, both for accuracy and for the rules on legal advertising.
If you want help deciding which pages your site needs and which it should lose, tell us what you are working with.