The Short Answer
There's no universal right number — a solo practitioner covering one practice area might need 8 to 12 genuinely deep pages, while a full-service firm covering federal employment law, family law, real estate, and immigration might need 60 or more. The real question isn't a target number; it's whether every practice area you actually want to be found for has a dedicated, properly deep page, and whether the most common questions clients ask about each one are answered somewhere on the site.
The Framework: One Page Per Real Question, Not Per Service
The mistake most firms make is building one page per practice area and stopping there. A stronger structure treats each practice area as a hub with its own supporting pages underneath — see how page count and content depth drive cost for how this scales. A federal employment law practice area page, for example, benefits from dedicated supporting pages on wrongful dismissal, severance calculations, and workplace investigation rights — each answering a specific, real question a federal public servant is actually searching.
This structure does two things at once: it gives prospective clients a genuinely useful answer to their specific situation instead of a generic overview, and it gives search engines and AI systems clear, focused pages to rank and cite for narrow, high-intent queries — which perform better than one page trying to cover everything at once.
Typical Page Counts by Firm Size
Why Ottawa Firms Specifically Should Think Bigger Than They Assume
Ottawa's client base has a few distinctive, high-volume question clusters most firms haven't built dedicated content for: federal-employment disputes and severance questions from the region's roughly 146,000 federal public servants, Kanata tech-sector employment and IP questions from a growing 500-company tech corridor, and interprovincial questions from families and businesses navigating both Ontario and Quebec sides of the Ottawa-Gatineau region. Each of these represents real, searchable demand with very little dedicated competing content right now.
A firm willing to build genuinely deep pages around these specific clusters — not just a generic "employment law" page — is building real topical authority in gaps competitors haven't noticed yet. See AI website design for Ottawa law firms for how this kind of deep, question-led architecture gets built.
Where This Fits Into the Bigger Picture
This question doesn't exist in isolation. It connects directly to What Happens if an Ottawa Firm Stops Paying Its Web Agency?, Is Your Ottawa Law Firm's Website Mobile-Friendly Enough for Clients?, and SEO Agency vs. AI Website Agency: What Does an Ottawa Law Firm Need? — three pieces of the same underlying decision a Ottawa firm has to make. Once those are settled, the natural next questions are Should Your Ottawa Law Firm Build Content for Federal Public Service Employees?, How Much Does SEO Cost for a Law Firm in Ottawa?, How Long Does It Take to See SEO Results in Ottawa?, and How Do I Get My Ottawa Law Firm to Show Up in ChatGPT and AI Search?. For the complete picture of how Lexscale.ai approaches all of this for Ottawa law firms specifically, see AI Website Design for Ottawa Law Firms and AI SEO for Ottawa Law Firms, or start from the Ottawa growth hub and browse everything at once.