Long page - good or bad?

[SirMax]

Our attorney wrote a dozen articles that range from 300 to 700 words on various topics of the certain law area. These articles are all placed on our FAQ page with anchored table of contents.

This page does frequently come up on the first page of the google when people search for the questions discussed in these articles. 90% of these visits are not local therefore they are not potential clients. Attorney views it more like a community service then a marketing tool.

However, I think there might be a problem. People read though the page and close it because usually they can find what they were looking for right there, however GA counts it as bounce because they did not browse to another page.

Would large number of bounces hurt our standing with Google? Would it be better to separate the page into multiple pages for each article to make visitors browse?

[Vahe.Arabian]

You need to keep in mind that the nature of blog posts/articles, is that users typically look for information and once they find it they leave. In general these type of pages have a bounce rate >80%. So it won't affect your standing with Google.

However in working with legal sites, what I have found is that they purposely write long pieces of copy because they can. To be honest most people wouldn't read through all of it, due to their lack of understanding and patience from all the technical terms. The target market is typically middle class income earners.

So just recommend to your client to write content that get's to the point, rather than creating additional pages. More pages does not mean you have a better standing with Google. However if you know for a fact that users typically ask certain questions, then put these on FAQ page.

Regards,

Vahe

[EGOL]

These short articles are a great resource.

If this was my site I would place each article on a separate page.  I would also find at least one image to display with it (a photo or graphic) - and write a generous caption to appear under that image.

This makes the article page a little more substantive.

The value of these pages in my opinion is the potential links that they will attract.

I would also create a side menu that has links to the other short articles. I would also look for opportunities to link to them with in the text of other articles.

Also, if these articles are getting a lot of bounces I would ask myself if they should be more substantive.  Lots of people think that 300 words or 500 words is fantastic for an article... but to my standards that is skimpy.  My goal would be to make each of these articles a best-on-the-web resource for that topic.  That is how links are earned.