Better to have less pages with more related content?

[MyOwnSEO]

I work with a law firm and we are having a hard time busting into the first page of results for any of our keywords.  I am new at SEO and have been trying to analyze how are competitors have an edge over us when on paper we are better optimized than their websites.  One glaring difference is they have fewer webpages, which possibly makes each of their pages more keyword rich.

Would it be smarter to condense our many webpages/topics into less, more general web pages?

I hope my question is even making sense, thanks for any possible help!

Our site is http://www.utahdefenseattorney.net/

[EGOL]

Give us an example of the keywords that you are concerned about.

I looked at this page....

http://www.utahdefenseattorney.net/criminal-defense/drug-charges/possession-of-marijuana/

It is not optimized well for anything.  The title tag is....

<title>Marijuana Possession Attorney in Salt Lake City | Intermountain Legal</title>

....  but the visible text on the page is not optimized for that.

Also, I see an instance of the title tag higher in the code....

.... which might or might not be causing a problem, but which I would definitely eliminate because you can never be sure of how a search engine will treat it..

[MilesMedia]

How rigorous have you been with your keyword research/planning? Are you sure you're optimizing for the most-searched terms? And then optimizing for those terms across all of your page elements (including body copy)? For example, you've partially optimized for "marijuana possession attorney," but according to Google's keyword planner that term has zero searches in the state of Utah.

Also, I agree with EGOL that you need to eliminate the extra blank title tag. That's definitely not helping your cause.

[MyOwnSEO]

To be honest we haven't yet gotten rigorous with our keyword planning - like I said I'm pretty new at SEO and everything has been a little overwhelming at first.  We are hoping our homepage will rank with "salt lake city criminal defense attorney" and then hope to optimize each of the individual 'charges' pages.  I haven't made it through every page on the site yet because there are so many, so thanks for bringing that particular one to my attention.

So I am wondering since "marijuana possession attorney" isn't a searched for term if it would be better to condense all the drug charge pages into one page instead of having them broken up into 11 more pages specific to each drug charge.

Thanks for your help and patience, definitely a huge learning curve here!

[MilesMedia]

You'd want to decide pages based on how to best optimize for keyword searches. If you find more people search for drug possession than marijuana or cocaine possession, then it would be better to condense all of that info under one page. It really all depends on what is going to net you the most opportunity. You could have one umbrella page for drug charges and then a couple of sub pages with details on each type of possession charge. Beef up your content with info about potential sentencing/outcomes, what to expect during the trial, etc. That will help you capture additional long tail searches as well.