When the majority of firms decide to do a content audit, they think they’re getting a tidying exercise. Maybe things have gotten a bit cluttered and overwhelming… perhaps they don’t have a clear idea of what they’ve got in there.
So, someone will go through the website, flag the pages that haven’t been updated since 2019 and recommend pulling the ones with no traffic. The site comes out looking cleaner. Job done. Isn’t it?
Well, no. That’s not a content audit.
A proper content audit doesn’t ask ‘what’s out of date?’ It asks ‘is this website doing its job?’ Those are very different questions, and the gap between them is where most firms’ websites quietly fail.
What the website is actually for
Let’s go back to the fundamentals. Your website is not a brochure. Clients and researchers use it to assess whether your claims about being experts in things… experienced… the law firm of choice… hold up. If you tell Chambers that your finance team has market-leading expertise in infrastructure debt, the first thing a researcher does is check whether your website reflects that. If your finance practice area page is three paragraphs of generic description with no cases, no clients, and no signal of what you actually do, the submission takes a hit.
The website is also where clients decide whether to pick up the phone. Not always consciously, but the decision is being made. Vague practice area pages, inconsistent positioning, and copy that sounds like it was written for nobody in particular all contribute to the same outcome: the firm looks less credible than it is.
What we see regularly
Across the firms and chambers we work with, a few patterns come up repeatedly with content audits.
Mistake 1: Practice area pages that describe what the team does in general terms, with no connection to specific cases, sectors, or outcomes that would actually differentiate them. If someone looking for evidence of a team’s genuine strength in, say, cross-border disputes finds nothing they can point to, this practice area page is clearly doing very little work.
Mistake 2: A newly-designed website with the same old messaging. Using vague copy from three years ago doesn’t suddenly become meaningful because you’ve used a fun font. Hollow buzzwords ( ‘a pragmatic, client-focused team with expertise across a broad range of sectors) don’t bring any commercial return if every firm uses them (and trust us, they do).
Mistake 3: Content that was written for internal audiences, or for no audience in particular. It reads fine internally, where everyone already knows what the firm is good at. To an outsider, it’s impenetrable. Clients and researchers are outsiders.
Mistake 4: Content that could apply to any firm. So often we see content that, were we to remove the logo, could apply to anyone. Where’s the distinguishing personality and style? The tone of voice. If it could go on another law firm’s or chambers’ website and work for them, it doesn’t work for you.
The directory submissions connection
This is where many firms are losing rankings without realising it.
Directory submissions and website content are not separate workstreams. They should be telling the same story. When they don’t, the inconsistency shows. A firm might claim in its Chambers submission that a particular partner leads the market in a specific niche, while the website barely mentions that niche at all. Researchers notice this. So do clients.
A content audit that looks at your submissions alongside your website surfaces exactly this kind of misalignment. It shows where the two narratives diverge and where the website is actively undermining the case you’re making to directories.
The cost of not doing it
Firms compete for clients and directory rankings on the strength of how they present themselves.
If your website content is vague, inconsistent, or out of step with your actual positioning, the penalty isn’t obvious. You’re being passed over, repeatedly and invisibly, by researchers who can’t find the evidence they need and clients who click away without quite knowing why.
What a good audit does differently
Checking for out-of-date content and SEO/AEO/GEO wins is important. But it’s not all a website and content audit should do. There are three best practices a thorough content audit delivers that a surface-level review doesn’t.
It identifies the gaps between what the firm does and what the website says. Not just missing pages, but missing specificity. The finance team that handles complex restructuring but whose website reads like it handles general finance work. The disputes team with a strong arbitration practice that isn’t mentioned anywhere.
It flags messaging that is inconsistent or misaligned across the site. Firms evolve. Strategies shift. Practice area emphasises change. The website often doesn’t keep pace, which means different pages are making different arguments about what the firm stands for.
It connects content to commercial outcomes. The question isn’t ‘is this page well-written?’ It’s ‘does this page support a strong directory submission? Does it give a potential client a reason to believe?’ Those are the tests that matter.
Most firms find more gaps than they expected. If your website is costing you rankings (directories or search) or losing you clients before they pick up the phone, that’s where we come in. We work with firms on web content rewrites, and content drawn directly from your directory submissions.
Get in touch to talk about where to start.
