Law firm websites often contain decades of content. Regular content pruning helps keep your firm’s website accurate, relevant, and competitive in search.
- Removing or updating outdated pages eliminates potentially misleading legal information and protects a firm’s reputation.
- Search engines evaluate sites as a whole, so pruning low-quality or duplicate content helps a firm’s strongest pages rank better.
- The pruning process starts by gathering every URL, documenting performance and content quality for each.
- Each page is then assigned an action: keep as-is, combine, update, apply a noindex directive, or remove and redirect.
- Firms should start conservatively, removing pages with outdated information and no recent traffic, and giving newer content time to perform before judging it.
- Pruning works best as a recurring practice that also guides future publishing and helps avoid duplicate content.
The Farmer’s Almanac describes pruning as the “measured removal of parts (such as branches, stems, and flowers) from plants” to encourage healthy growth. It also cautions against bad pruning, which can damage a plant’s structure.
The concept of content pruning is almost identical to the gardening task it gets its name from. Instead of removing dead or diseased branches, content pruning focuses on removing unused and outdated pages from a website. Left alone, these pages can drag down an entire website—but you don’t want to remove too much either.
Law firm websites in particular can benefit from content pruning for two reasons:
- Firms often invested in websites earlier than other types of small businesses, which can potentially mean decades of content now exist on a firm’s site.
- Laws and legal best practices change over time, so information that was once helpful is now outdated and potentially misleading.
The older and larger a website is, the greater impact regular content pruning can have. However, auditing your existing content is a valuable exercise no matter the size or age of your website.
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Why Your Website Needs Content Pruning
The reasons to regularly review old content on your website fall into two categories: user experience and search engine optimization.
Accurately Inform Potential Clients
Over time, content initially published to help readers may no longer provide valuable information. Outdated legal information can be misleading or even harmful to your website readers, whether or not they are potential clients. This not only confuses users, but also casts your firm in a negative light and can become a broader reputation management concern.
If your firm’s practice areas, services, or specialties have changed, you may have content that is still legally accurate but no longer reflects what you offer. Firms also frequently publish content in response to trending topics, new regulations, or internal initiatives. This can lead to a large library of material that is difficult to navigate and lacks a clear content strategy.
Show Up in Search Results
Google prefers high-quality content because it provides a better experience for searchers. This is especially true for topics considered “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL). A law firm—especially one working in personal injury, disability, or workers’ compensation—can directly influence someone’s well-being, finances, and health. This puts legal content in Google’s YMYL category.
Google and other search engines not only judge individual pages and posts by their quality, but also consider websites as a whole. If your firm’s site contains several low-quality, duplicate, or irrelevant pages and posts, it will be harder for your high-quality content to perform well.
How to Determine What Gets Pruned
First, you’ll need to capture all of the URLs on your website and document how they’re performing and whether or not the content on them belongs on your firm’s website.
- Sitemap: Add /sitemap.xml to the end of your domain to see a list of pages and posts accessible to search engines
- Google Analytics: See which pages were visited by navigating to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens
- Google Search Console: See which pages appeared in Google’s search and AI results by navigating to Performance
Tip: Some content pruning guides recommend using Google Search Console instead of Google Analytics. This approach ignores the traffic your website gets from sources besides Google and can lead to removing a page that receives engagement from social media, email automations, or any other channel. Instead, we recommend using both platforms for a more comprehensive look at how your existing content performs.
After you have a list of URLs, compile relevant analytics for each. From Google Analytics, consider views, average engagement time, and key events (which should be valuable actions like a call or form submission). Google Search Console will tell you how many impressions and clicks each URL receives in Google’s organic results, as well as impressions in AI search surfaces.
You’ll also want to review what lives on each of these URLs to ensure it’s high-quality, up-to-date, unique, and relevant to your firm’s expertise. Some of this can be outsourced to AI like Claude or ChatGPT with specific prompts, especially if your website is large. You may want to have your team manually review content as well, particularly pages that get a lot of clicks and/or conversions.
Once you’ve documented all of your URLs with performance and quality metrics, it’s time to decide what happens to each page: keep as-is, combine with another page(s), update, keep with a noindex directive, or remove and redirect the URL to another relevant page.
Digital Marketing Definitions
- A noindex directive tells search engines like Google to keep a page out of the search results. People can still access this page directly or via another platform like Google Ads or LinkedIn.
- A redirect tells a web browser not to show the URL a user clicked on, instead forwarding the user to another URL specified by the website.
Some of these decisions will be simple. A blog post that covers an outdated best practice in an area of law you no longer practice? Remove it. Some decisions will be more difficult, such as a blog post that gets a lot of traffic but never results in any conversions. Once you have all of the data in front of you, there will likely be a cutoff point that makes sense. Start conservatively, perhaps by removing pages and posts with outdated information and no visitors in the last six months. If you’re not sure what to do with a specific URL and it doesn’t contain any outright disinformation, keep it as-is for now. You’ll also want to keep the publish date in mind. New content’s performance data can be misleading, as it simply hasn’t had time to deliver views or conversions.
Tip: Use an SEO-specific tool or AI platform to identify any internal links that now point to a redirect. Remove or update them to point directly to the final URL.
What to Do Next
Content pruning is not a one-time project. While you can remove and redirect some URLs right away, combining and updating the pages and posts you want to keep with high-quality content that demonstrates your firm’s expertise will take time. Updating and consolidating content should also become part of your ongoing strategy. Use your new list of URLs to ensure you’re not creating duplicate content when publishing a new post. Monitor performance regularly to ensure dead and decaying URLs are pruned before affecting your website’s (or firm’s) reputation.
Turn to a Digital Marketing Partner
Better Cases helps law firms share high-quality, search-optimized, relevant content that informs leads and protects our clients’ reputations online. Book a call to discuss how content pruning and other smart SEO strategies can benefit your firm.
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Chris Reilley – Founder
Chris founded Better Cases after years of helping attorneys adapt their marketing to a changing landscape at his first digital marketing agency, Parkway Digital. His experience showed what worked, what didn’t, and what firms actually needed. His approach prioritizes strategy, efficiency, and results that help law firms.