Here is how this usually happens. A firm launches with a “Personal Injury” page. A year later someone adds “Car Accident Lawyer” because a competitor has one. Then “Truck Accidents,” then a blog post called “What to Do After a Car Accident,” then three location pages that each mention car accidents in the first paragraph. Each page made sense the week it went up. Together, they form a site where five pages loosely answer the same question and none of them clearly owns it.

Meanwhile, the posts your intake team would actually send a caller, the ones explaining what happens after a claim is filed or what to bring to a consultation, link to the homepage and the contact form and nowhere else. They answer real questions and lead the reader nowhere.

Why your practice pages end up competing

Competition between your own pages is a structural symptom, not a penalty. Google uses links as a signal when it works out what a page is relevant to and to find new pages to crawl. When your own site sends mixed signals, with three pages all linked with the same phrase and no page clearly designated as the parent, you make that job harder for Google and for the person trying to find the right page.

The patterns below show up again and again on firm websites. You may recognize more than one.

Two of those patterns deserve a closer look, because Google names them directly in its spam policies rather than treating them as minor inefficiencies. We cover them in the anchor section below. The rest are simply wasted opportunities: pages that could help a reader take the next step and do not.

Start with one clear hub per practice area

A practice-area hub is the page that answers “what does this firm do in this area of law, and is it right for my situation?” It is the page you would want a prospective client to land on if they searched the broad version of the question. Every other page about that practice area exists to support it.

For most firms, the hub already exists. It is the main practice page. The work is not building something new; it is deciding, page by page, which one is the hub and then making the rest of the site behave accordingly.

That last point matters more than many marketing teams expect. A hub page is a communication about your services, so it falls under your state’s version of Rule 7.1. Architecture work is a good moment to clean up headings and summaries that overstate what the firm does or imply outcomes. A tidy structure built on inaccurate copy is still inaccurate copy.

Where firms get stuck

The hard call is usually the broad-versus-narrow pair. Should “Personal Injury” be the hub, with “Car Accidents” as a support page? Or does “Car Accidents” deserve its own hub because the firm handles enough of those cases to say a lot about them?

There is no universal answer, and anyone who gives you one without looking at your caseload is guessing. The question to ask is practical: does the narrower area have enough distinct client questions to support its own set of pages? If a car accident client asks things a slip-and-fall client never would, it may justify its own hub. If the questions are mostly shared, keep one hub and make the narrower page a strong support page under it.

Choose support pages from real client questions

Support pages are where most firms either overbuild or underbuild. Overbuilding looks like dozens of thin pages written to match keyword variations. Underbuilding looks like a single hub that tries to answer everything and answers nothing well.

The better source for support pages is already inside your firm. Your intake calls and consultations surface the questions prospective clients actually ask, in their words, before they have learned your vocabulary. Those questions are the most reliable map you have of what a reader needs next.

This approach also makes the content more useful to the people reading it. A page that answers “What happens after I file an insurance claim?” in plain language, written by someone who hears that question every week, will read very differently from a page written to target a keyword variation. Google’s own guidance on AI features makes the same point from the other direction: the opportunity is helpful, reliable content written for people, not new tricks.

Use anchors for clarity, not manipulation

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. It tells the reader what to expect, and Google says it also helps search engines understand what the linked page is about. That second point is where firms get into trouble, because it tempts teams to pack every anchor with the exact phrase they want to rank for.

Google’s link best practices documentation is specific about what good anchor text looks like and what it does not.

Notice what Google does not say. It does not say anchors can never contain the topic of the page. A link reading “our car accident claims process” is descriptive and includes the topic naturally. The problem is forcing the same exact-match phrase into every link, or stringing keywords together until the text stops reading like a sentence.

A practical way to write better anchors: describe what the reader will get, not what you want to rank for. “how fault is decided in a multi-car collision” tells a reader what is behind the link. “multi-car collision lawyer” tells them only that you want the click.

Audit orphan and competing pages

An audit turns the principles above into decisions about specific URLs. You do not need specialized software to start, though a crawler helps on larger sites. A spreadsheet with one row per page and the columns below is enough for most firms.

Once each page has a job, the decisions mostly make themselves. A page with no job is either a support page waiting for a purpose or a page that should go. Two pages with the same job need to become one.

The checklist we run on firm sites

• Does every practice area have one page clearly acting as the hub?
• Does every support page link up to its hub with descriptive anchor text?
• Does every hub link down to its support pages where a reader would need them?
• Does every blog post about a practice area link to the matching practice page?
• Do attorney bios link to the practice areas each attorney handles, and do those pages link back?
• Are there pages with no internal links pointing to them at all?
• Do any two pages answer the same question for the same reader?
• Are there location pages that differ only by the city name?
• Is there a sitewide block listing towns or practice keywords?
• Read the anchors alone: does each one tell you where it goes?
• Do practice-page headings and summaries describe services accurately, without implied outcomes?

Expect friction on the merge decisions. Someone at the firm will be attached to a page, often because it was expensive to write or because a partner asked for it. The question to bring back to that conversation is simple: which page should a prospective client land on for this question? If the answer is “either,” one of them is in the way.

What about AI Overviews and AI Mode?

Many firms are now being told they need a separate strategy for AI search, sometimes sold as “GEO.” Google’s own documentation on AI features and your website is direct on this: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, no special optimizations, no special files or markup. The same SEO fundamentals apply.

Google lists those fundamentals, and making content easy to find through internal links is one of them. So the architecture work in this guide is not separate from AI search. It is the same work. A clear hub, useful support pages, and descriptive links help a person, a crawler, and an AI feature find the right page for the right question.

Google also says something firms should hear plainly: meeting every requirement does not guarantee that a page will be crawled, indexed, or shown. Anyone promising AI Overview placement is promising something Google itself does not.

This is the same logic behind how we build content through Megaphone, our publishing system. About 40 percent is AI-assisted structure and research; the other 60 percent is human strategy, which is where decisions like “which page is the hub” and “is this anchor honest” actually get made. Internal linking is part of that system, not an afterthought added once a page is live.

What we never promise, and where to start this month

We will not promise that fixing your internal links will raise your rankings, traffic, or case inquiries by any amount, or by any date. Internal linking clarifies your site for readers and for Google. What happens after that depends on your content, your market, and factors no one controls.

We will not prescribe a number of links per page. Google says there is no ideal number, and neither do we.

We will not build near-duplicate city pages or keyword-stuffed footers, even when a competitor has them. Google names both in its spam policies, and they create cleanup work later.

And we will not write practice pages or anchors that imply results your attorneys cannot stand behind. Your state’s version of Rule 7.1 applies to your website the same way it applies to any other communication about your services.

A realistic first month

1. Week one: list every practice, support, location, and blog page, and assign each a job.
2. Week two: pick the single practice area that brings in the most consultations and fix its hub and support-page links first.
3. Week three: resolve the obvious overlaps in that practice area. Merge or redirect duplicates, and rewrite generic or stuffed anchors.
4. Week four: link every related blog post and attorney bio to the hub, then repeat the process for the next practice area.

Starting with one practice area keeps the work manageable and gives you a model the rest of the site can follow. Trying to fix every page at once is how audits stall halfway.

If you want to see how this fits alongside website, content, and search work for your firm, our services page lays out what we build.