If your firm has been publishing blog posts and adding pages for a few years, there’s a real chance a good chunk of that content is doing nothing for you, and some of it may actually be pulling your rankings down.
A content audit is a structured evaluation of every page on your website. The goal is to determine how each page contributes to your visibility, authority, and ability to generate new leads. Some of the common issues discovered in a content audit include:
- Thin or generic content
- Outdated content (e.g., old laws)
- Competing pages (multiple pages fighting for the same keyword)
- Poor internal linking (e.g., orphaned pages)
- Disorganized content silos
- Near-duplicate practice area pages
A content audit tells you which pages are earning their place and what to do with the ones that aren’t, and it’s one of the more useful exercises you can do for your law firm’s online marketing.
Start by Mapping All Your Content
At this stage, you’re building a complete picture of your content before you review them.
How? Screaming Frog is a good tool that makes scraping and listing all your pages fairly quick and easy. From there, you can filter to view the HTML pages on your site and paste them into a spreadsheet that’s easy to work with. At a minimum, include details like URL, H1, title tag, and meta-description.
What do I look for? Organize the pages into topic silos. For example, group practice area pages by location and group all your car accident blogs together. This will give you an overview of your topic silos so you can quickly identify duplicate topics to consolidate and thin silos to develop.
Why is this crucial? This step gives you a clear picture of what pages are on your website. Don’t make the mistake of opening every page from your menu or blog home page. Otherwise, you will be searching for each page individually rather than pulling all of them at once, which could cause you to miss some.
This step is also how you’ll first start to notice pages covering nearly identical topics or entire sections of content that are disconnected from the firm’s core services.
Analyze What’s Driving Results
Once you’ve mapped your content, analyze how each page is performing in organic search and newer search platforms like Google AI Overviews or LLMs like ChatGPT.
How? Tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics let you see not just which pages are getting traffic but what those visitors are searching for and how they behave once they land on your site.
Ahrefs, Semrush, and SE Rankings are third-party tools that allow you to evaluate which terms you’re ranking for organically and which pages are ranking for those terms.
AI rankings tools like Prompt Watch are relatively new, but they’ll review your visibility in AI search platforms for queries you enter, such as “best car accident lawyer in Miami.”
What do I look for? Performance at this stage only means search performance. Ultimately, you’ll care about which pages or queries are driving leads and signed cases, but that requires setting up lead attribution processes.
As you do your content audit, look for:
- Practice area pages that are generating little or no visibility
- Content ranking for the wrong queries (e.g., blog post outranks a practice area page for “car accident lawyer”)
- Multiple pages competing for the same keyword
- Pages that attract visitors but fail to convert into leads
Why is this crucial? Without this step, you’re making decisions based on assumptions. You might spend time revamping a page that’s already ranking well, or ignore one that’s cannibalizing a stronger page. The performance data helps you decide what needs to be fixed, what to leave alone, and where to focus first.
Compare Content Quality Against Google’s Standards
Once you know how your pages are performing, evaluate whether the content itself meets the standard Google is rewarding.
How? Google’s guidance emphasizes content that demonstrates E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authority, and trust. For law firms, which Google classifies as a “Your Money or Your Life” category, the bar is higher than most industries. Read each page and compare it directly against what’s currently ranking for that query in your market.
What do I look for? Ask yourself whether your page reflects real legal experience, clearly answers a specific question, and is written for a layperson rather than another attorney. Some things you want to flag include:
- Thin content that’s generic or explains legal concepts broadly without practical relevance
- Content that uses overly technical language and jargon when simpler language will do
- Practice area pages that could have been written about any firm in any city (hint: if you can swap your firm’s name for another and the page still works, then it’s generic)
- Pages with outdated information, such as old statutes or deadlines, which can undermine your credibility
- Pages that appear to have been generated by AI without real insight or perspective from your firm baked in
Why is this crucial? Pages that fail to demonstrate real expertise will struggle to rank regardless of how well the rest of your SEO is dialed in. And even if it does rank, generic content gives a potential client no reason to call you specifically.
Evaluate Content Silos and Internal Linking
Once you’ve mapped your content and reviewed performance and quality, step back and look at how your pages connect to each other and how your site is organized overall.
How? Tools like Screaming Frog let you review inbound and outbound links for every page on your site. Its Crawl Tree Graph and Directory Tree Graph, and similar features from other SEO tools, let you build visual maps of your internal linking structure, making it easier to see what’s linking where and whether authority is flowing toward your most important pages.
What do I look for? Your silos should give good coverage of your main practice areas with clear organization, usually by location, sometimes by practice area, depending on your firm.
- Look for gaps where a core topic has little or no supporting content around it.
- Check that related blogs and supporting pages are linking to the main practice area pages
- Check that supporting pages aren’t just floating without any connection to the rest of the site (orphaned pages).
Also, take note of your URL structure. A disorganized or absent parent and child hierarchy is worth flagging for a technical audit and may point to a larger law firm site design conversation.
Why is this crucial? Without a clear internal linking structure, it’s harder for Google to determine which pages are your most important or how your content relates to other pages on your website.
Identify Competitor Content Gaps
Once you know what you have on your website, compare it against what your competitors are ranking for.
How? Ahrefs and Semrush both have competitor gap analysis tools. Enter your domain and a handful of competing firms in your market, and the tool will surface keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t.
What do I look for? Start with your core practice areas. If car accident cases are your bread and butter, but a competitor is ranking for ten car accident-related queries, and you’re only showing up for two, focus there. The tool will show you which terms you’re invisible on and which you’re present but underperforming.
You can also review competitor pages that are ranking for queries you want to capture and compare them against yours. If their content is clearly more thorough, better structured, or better aligned with search intent, that’s a content gap you can address by revamping your page. If your content is comparable or stronger, the issue is likely elsewhere. Whether it’s backlinks, domain authority, or something else, it’s worth flagging for a deeper audit.
Why is this crucial? Without a competitor content analysis, your content strategy is based entirely on what you already have, and the biggest opportunities are often the gaps you can’t see from the inside.
Decide What Stays, What Changes, and What Goes
Once you’ve evaluated performance and quality, assign each page a clear action.
How? Assign each page one of four actions: keep, revamp, merge, or remove. Work through your spreadsheet page by page and make a call on each one.
What do I look for? The stages above will inform your decision on every page.
Keep pages that are generating traffic, ranking for the right queries, earning AI visibility, and contributing to inquiries. That includes strong supporting content that helps build authority in your main practice areas.
Revamp pages that have potential but fall short in execution. Thin content, weak alignment with search intent, and outdated information are fixable.
Merge pages that are targeting the same or closely related topics. Consolidate them into a single, stronger page and redirect the URLs to the stronger page. This concentrates authority rather than splitting it across competing pages.
Remove pages that generate no traffic, serve no clear purpose, and have no realistic path to improvement. In most cases, you’ll redirect them to the most relevant page on your site.
Why is this crucial? This step produces your content trimming plan (the pages you’ll remove) and is the first step in creating your content strategy.
It also gives you a starting point for your content calendar, as you identify which pages need revisions (the revamp and merge categories) or need to be written (gaps identified in the mapping or silo stage), giving attorneys marketing insights into their biggest content opportunities.
Get a Clear Picture of Your Website’s Performance
If you want a clear picture of how your content is performing, the SEO content team at We Do Web can show you where you stand.
Reach out, and we’ll take a look with a free site audit.
