TL;DR
Somebody hit by a truck is not searching for a personal injury attorney. They are searching what happened to them. Most firm sites answer fifteen different questions with one page and a bulleted list. Five to eight case type pages, on cases you take, where the process genuinely differs.
Somebody hit by a truck on the interstate is not searching “personal injury attorney”. They are searching what happened to them.
Most firm sites have one Personal Injury page with a bulleted list underneath: car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle, slip and fall, dog bites, wrongful death. That page is trying to be the answer to fifteen different questions asked by fifteen different people in fifteen different states of mind.
Why the single page loses
The head term is also the most expensive and most defended query in the vertical. Competitive personal injury clicks run into the hundreds of dollars precisely because everybody is fighting over them, and a general PI page is fighting there with no differentiation.
The case-type queries are a different market. Lower competition, far higher intent, and the person searching has already self-selected into a case you can evaluate. “Truck accident lawyer” is a person with a case. “Personal injury attorney” is often a person browsing.
There is also less room on the page than there used to be. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb’s US clickstream found 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, up from 60.45% two years earlier. Competing broadly for a shrinking share of clicks is a worse bet every year. Competing specifically, where the query is unambiguous, is not.
Where the line is
A page per case type is legitimate. A page per case type per city is usually not, and Google’s spam policies name the difference: doorway abuse includes “pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page” and “substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.”
A truck accident case and a dog bite case have nothing in common: different defendants, different insurers, different regulations, different evidence, different timelines. Writing both is writing two documents.
“Car accident lawyer Springfield” and “car accident lawyer Shelbyville” are the same document with a noun swapped. Same test as always: could you write the second page without looking at the first?
Which case types get a page
- The ones you actually take. Stated plainly because it is routinely ignored. A medical malpractice page on a firm that refers malpractice out generates calls you will hand away and dilutes the pages you want ranking.
- The ones with real volume. Car accidents carry most of the searches in most markets. Truck, motorcycle and premises liability are usually worth their own page. Beyond that it thins out fast.
- The ones where the process genuinely differs. Trucking cases involve federal regulations, a corporate defendant and evidence that disappears if nobody sends a preservation letter in the first fortnight. That is a page. “Bicycle accident” on a firm that treats it identically to a car accident is a section, not a page.
For most firms that is five to eight pages, not fifteen.
What goes on one
The questions in the order the person has them. Who pays. How long this takes. What happens to my medical bills in the meantime. Do I have to go to court. What is my case worth, all answered honestly, including why nobody can tell them precisely.
Then the part only you can write: what you do first on this case type, what evidence you go after, what you have seen go wrong. On a truck case that might be the preservation letter and the electronic logging data. That paragraph is the difference between a page and a brochure.
What this does not fix
Better pages produce more leads, and leads are not cases. The economics only work if the intake works. A firm converting well at $442 a lead is in a better position than one converting badly at $183, and no amount of page structure touches that.
The short version
- People search the case type, not the practice area.
- The head term is the most expensive and least differentiated query you can chase.
- 68% of searches now end without a click. Broad competition is a worsening bet.
- Case type pages are a hierarchy. Case type × city pages are a doorway.
- Five to eight pages: ones you take, with volume, where the process genuinely differs.
- The paragraph on what you do first is what makes it a page rather than a brochure.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Personal injury SEO covers the page set, the profile and the economics. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
