One page for each practice area you actually want cases in. Most law firms need somewhere between five and fifteen. Fewer if you’re a specialized boutique. More if you’re a multi-attorney general practice with genuine depth in each area. The number itself doesn’t matter — what matters is that every practice area you actively serve has a dedicated page, and you haven’t built pages for sub-niches you don’t actually want.
The math is simple in both directions. Every practice area you serve but don’t have a page for is invisible to search — those cases go to competitors who built the page. Every page you build for a sub-niche you don’t actually take cases in is dead weight that dilutes your topical authority for the practices you do want.
The audit framework — three steps, one hour
Before you start adding or cutting pages, do the audit. It takes about an hour and tells you exactly what to build, what to consolidate, and what to remove.
Step one — list every practice area you actually want cases in. Not every practice area the firm has ever touched. Not every practice area you’d take if a great client walked in. The ones you actively want to grow. For most firms this list is shorter than you’d expect — somewhere between four and twelve real practice areas. Write them down.
Step two — list your current practice pages. Open your site. Write down every URL that’s set up as a dedicated practice page. Most firms find one of two patterns: too few (a single combined practice-areas page covering everything) or too many (legacy pages for sub-niches the firm hasn’t worked in three years).
Step three — match the two lists. Every practice area on list one needs a page on list two. Every page on list two without a corresponding practice area on list one is a candidate for consolidation or removal. The gaps are your build list. The orphans are your cleanup list. More on the full audit process here.
The over-build trap
The most common over-build I see: a firm building thirty practice pages because some agency told them “the more pages, the better.” Twelve of those pages are for sub-niches the firm doesn’t actually serve. Eight are duplicate variants of the same query. The remaining ten are thin and undifferentiated. The site ranks for nothing because Google can’t tell what the firm actually does.
This is the opposite of what feels intuitive. More pages, in the volume-model SEO mindset, equals more chances to rank. In reality, more thin pages equals more dilution. A firm with eight real, deep practice pages will outrank a firm with thirty thin ones almost every time. The exception is firms with genuine depth in many practice areas — those firms can defend thirty pages because each one demonstrates real expertise. Most firms aren’t that.
Every practice page you build is a promise to Google that your firm has real expertise in that area. If you can’t keep the promise, the page is hurting you — not helping.
The under-build trap
The mirror failure is just as common — firms with one combined “Practice Areas” page covering six services in two paragraphs each. The firm wants cases in all six. The page ranks for none of them. Every month, the firm pays for marketing while leaving four to six pages of organic case flow on the table because nobody built the pages.
If your audit reveals a single combined page covering multiple practices, that’s the project. Build a dedicated page for each practice area you want cases in. Move the relevant content from the combined page to its new home. Keep the combined page as a brief overview that links out to each dedicated page — or kill it and let the global nav handle that surface area. More on why each practice area needs its own page here.
How big should the list actually be?
For most firms in the $500K to $10M range, the answer falls into one of three buckets:
Boutique or specialized firms — three to six pages. A PI-only firm doesn’t need fifteen pages. It needs a well-built personal injury page, plus dedicated sub-pages for the practice’s biggest case types (car accidents, truck accidents, premises liability, wrongful death) where there’s enough substantive difference to justify a separate page. Resist the urge to over-segment.
General practice firms — eight to fifteen pages. Multi-attorney firms with genuine depth across several areas. Each major practice area gets a page. Sub-pages exist only where the practice has enough depth to justify them. Don’t build a “uncontested probate” page if you’ve handled three uncontested probates in the last year — fold it into the estate planning page.
Larger firms with departments — fifteen to thirty pages. Real depth across multiple practice areas, multiple attorneys per area, multiple offices. The page count can grow because each page can carry real substance. The risk shifts from under-build to thinness — every page still has to earn its place.
The honest question to ask before adding any page
Before you build a new practice page, answer this honestly: do we actually want this kind of case? Will the firm take the next ten inquiries that come through this page? Does someone in the firm have genuine substantive expertise in this practice area that the page can demonstrate? If any of those answers is no, don’t build the page. Empty pages and pages without real expertise behind them dilute everything else.
The same question applies to existing pages. If your firm has a “construction defect” page that hasn’t generated a case in two years and nobody at the firm wants those cases anymore — kill the page and 301-redirect to the most-related practice area. Sites get healthier as they prune. Most law firm sites are carrying dead weight from agency engagements three years ago, and the dead weight is costing them rankings on the pages they actually care about.
Related reading: should each practice area be its own page, can one page rank for multiple practices, and how to rank practice pages.