Is Content Creation Mandatory for High Google Ranking?

The numbers are clear: most of the webpages Google delivers on the first page of the search engine results pages, or SERPs, have at least 2,400 words.

But if you look at some of the country’s most popular sites – Upworthy and Facebook are two of them – they have nowhere near that amount of copy on their pages.

How are they pulling that off?

Indexed Pages and Backlinks: The High-Rank Recipe

If you look at what those sites are doing, you’ll see that they have two big things in common: thousands upon thousands of indexed pages and plenty of backlinks.

Each of those things plays a huge role in ranking. Obviously, Google can’t rank your pages if they’re not part of the index (that’s a no-brainer). You’ll need plenty of pages – at least more than your competitors have – for Google to consider your firm a player.

The key is getting all of those pages included in Google’s index and then earning backlinks. That’s what the biggest, most popular sites do.

How Law Firms Can Earn Backlinks

Believe it or not, Google can distinguish between earned backlinks and purchased backlinks. They judge a site by the company it keeps, and if yours is providing valuable information that makes people want to link to it, the Googlebot can tell.

Your first step: create that valuable content. It doesn’t have to be a long-form copy, although that is a bonus. It needs to answer searchers’ questions in a clear, concise and easy-to-understand way. In other words, it needs to be quality.

From there, you need to be proactive in building links. Whether you answer questions on popular sites, get industry recognition and press exposure by using a tool like Help a Reporter Out or you use other methods, quality backlinks are a key metric that Google considers when they’re determining how “worthy” your firm’s website is.

It doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen – and that means there’s hope for the smallest firms to overtake the biggest players.