Practice area pages on a firm website: one page per service that gets found and convinces

Why an overview page is not enough

Someone searching for “Anwalt Kündigung Arbeitnehmer Graz” (lawyer, dismissal, employee, Graz), “Steuerberater für Ärzte” (tax adviser for doctors) or “Lohnverrechnung Gastronomie” (payroll for restaurants) has a concrete concern. Google shows the page that answers exactly this concern best. A “Services” page on which employment law is one item out of twelve can hardly win that search: it says a little about everything and not enough about anything.

The same goes for people. Someone who lands on your website after being dismissed wants to see within seconds that you handle exactly this, for people in their situation, and what happens next. A separate page per practice area does both: it is the target for searches and ads, and it is the place where a visit turns into an enquiry. The overview page still makes sense, as a signpost to the individual pages.

How a good practice area page is structured

A service page does not have to be long, but it has to be complete. A fixed order that guides readers from the question “Am I in the right place?” to getting in touch has proven itself:

Keep the facts up to date and show who is responsible for the page and when it was last revised. Amounts and deadlines change every year, especially in tax and legal topics. A good rule of thumb for what belongs on the page and what belongs in an article: the service page explains your offer, the article explains a single topic in depth.

Naming it correctly: focus area, Fachanwalt, specialist

The heading of a service page is also a statement about your qualifications. This is where professional law applies, and it differs considerably between professions and countries:

For notaries this does not mean doing without service pages. Factual information about practice areas is permitted in both countries; what is prohibited in Germany, for example, is advertising that is incompatible with the public office (§ 29 BNotO). A “Buying property” page with the process, the documents to bring and a note on the statutory fees is exactly the kind of factual information that is wanted. It simply does without superlatives and promises.

How many pages make sense

There is no ideal number. What matters is whether you have enough to say for each page and whether people search for the topic. A sole practice with three areas of law needs three pages; a tax firm with four target groups may need four pages by industry plus two by service. Three questions help you decide:

• Do you do this regularly? A page for an area you work in twice a year raises expectations you do not want to meet, and it is delicate under professional law if it claims a focus area.
• Do people search for it? The suggestions in Google Search and the performance report in Search Console show which terms your clients use: “Scheidung” (divorce) instead of “Familienrecht” (family law), “Lohnverrechnung” for payroll in Austria, “Lohnbuchhaltung” in Germany.
• Is there enough of your own to say? If two pages would differ only in the keyword in the heading, they belong together. “Employment law for employees” and “Employment law for employers”, on the other hand, have different target groups and situations and justify two pages. How employment law firms make this decision is shown in the post employment law: employers or employees?

Sub-pages for individual concerns, such as “Dismissal” under employment law or “Tax audit” under tax advice, are worthwhile once the main page is in good shape and you have much more to say about the concern than a paragraph.

Avoiding thin and duplicate pages

Google also assesses websites as a whole. Many pages with little original content, copied statutory texts or interchangeable boilerplate drag down the impression of the entire site. Pages that are built only to rank for certain search terms and then funnel visitors elsewhere are what Google calls doorway pages, and its spam policies treat them as spam.

Texts generated by AI without any real knowledge also fall into this category if they add nothing that is not already on a hundred other pages. Using AI to help with wording is not forbidden; what matters, according to Google's guide to helpful content, is that the content comes from your practice and has been checked by a professional.

City pages only for real locations

The idea of creating one page per place and area is tempting: “Anwalt Arbeitsrecht Linz”, “Anwalt Arbeitsrecht Wels”, “Anwalt Arbeitsrecht Steyr”. Such pages are almost always doorway pages. Professional law adds another problem: a page that suggests an office in Wels when there is none is misleading. Branch offices and additional practice locations require approval or notification, depending on the profession.

If you have two real locations, each gets its own page with address, directions, team and opening hours, and its own Google Business Profile. For everything else it is enough to mention your catchment area naturally on the service pages: “We advise clients in Linz and the Mühlviertel region, also by video.” More on searches that include a place in the guide to local SEO for professional firms.

Internal linking: connecting the pages

A service page that nothing links to will be found neither by Google nor by people. Search engines follow links to discover pages and read from the link text what the target page is about. So plan from where each page can be reached:

• Main navigation and overview page: each service page with its real name, not just “Learn more”.
• Home page: the most important areas with one sentence and a link.
• Team: from the person to their areas and back, for example “Contact for family law: Mag. Eva Huber”. The guide to the team page shows how this looks when done well.
• Articles and FAQ: an article on notice periods links to the employment law page, and the employment law page links to the matching articles.
• Related areas: from inheritance to estate planning, from company formation to ongoing bookkeeping, where the content fits.

Finally, check how the title and description of each page look in the search results. A good page title names the area, the target group or the place and the firm name, for example “Arbeitsrecht für Arbeitnehmer:innen in Graz | Kanzlei Huber” (employment law for employees in Graz).

Checklist for every service page

Which other pages a firm website needs is summarised in the article Content for a firm website. If you are restructuring an existing website, read the guide to the website relaunch first, so that old addresses are not lost.