What to Do About Old, Low-Quality Content on Your Law Firm’s Website

If you have had your law firm website for many years, you likely have a lot of content up. You may be asking yourself what to do with all this old content and how to deal with low-quality content.

In today's rapidly changing digital landscape, having old, low-quality content is going to cost you your site's ranking position. Outdated content and low-quality content can reflect poorly on your firm. What may have been suitable a few years ago is now either out-of-date, inaccurate or does not represent the firm.

What can be done about the old, low-quality content on the firm's website? There are two options, remove it or rewrite/rework it. When choosing to rewrite or rework content think about what you could add, like a video or a graphic. The choice of how to deal with the content is up to the firm's discretion and what they want to portray as their image.

Low-Quality Content or Bad Quality Content – The Choices

According to Google's John Mueller, when dealing with low-quality content, it is important to evaluate the content from the standpoint of it being old or outdated but still useful. If the content is old but still relevant, it may be worth keeping. Old content is not always bad content.

However, if the content is both outdated and low quality and makes the firm look bad or is not aligned with the firm's reputation and image, improve it, if possible or, remove it. Sometimes a subject cannot be redone or reworked, particularly in the legal industry, if the rules, regulations and procedures change.

Make any rewrites or new content original and stay away from using templates. Search engines do not like templates. Instead, use creativity and add new things to the content. Add a video, a link to a firm YouTube presentation, a link to an attorney answering a popular question, or even link the article to another relevant article to expand a visitor's knowledge. If all else fails, redirect the old and low-quality content to a newer page with updated, current and relevant information.

The saying, "Use it, or lose it," very much applies to tired and questionable content on your law firm's website.