What to fix first in your law firm's SEO
Here is the order we would recommend, so you can judge the work no matter who does it.
- Decide which cases you want more of. Pick the practice areas you want to grow, and make sure someone at the firm can take the extra consultations.
- Count what you get now. Before anything changes, set up tracking so every call and form is recorded with the practice area it was about and where the person came from.
- Fix what is broken, then improve what is thin. A contact form that doesn't send comes before a new article. A practice area page with two paragraphs on it comes before a tenth blog post.
- Read the inquiries before you add more. Once the practice areas you chose are bringing in the right matters, add the next one.
Start with the practice areas you want to grow
Decide which matters you want more of before anyone hands you a list of keywords. Be specific enough that the person answering your phone would recognize a good inquiry. If it's personal injury, say which kinds of cases you want more of.
Keep the list short. Three practice areas built with real depth beat seven built thinly. Keep the firm's other services easy to find on the site while the practice areas you chose get the work first. Add the next one when you have time to build its pages and follow its inquiries through intake.
Urgent matters and planned matters need different pages
How fast someone decides depends on what happened to them. After an arrest, a person may search and call that same night. Someone thinking about an estate plan may read about it well before they contact anyone.
| Urgent matters | Planned matters | |
|---|---|---|
| Example | Criminal defense after an arrest | An estate plan |
| What the page has to do | Say what you handle and make it easy to reach you right away | Explain the service and who would handle it |
| What to check first | Who answers when that call comes in | Whether the page answers the questions people have before a first conversation |
One practice area can hold both kinds. Sort your own matters this way before any work starts, because it tells you what each page is for.
Set up tracking before you change anything
We put tracking in place before the first campaign, and every month we report calls and forms split by practice area and by where they came from. That record is how you judge everything after it.
A phone call tells you how someone reached you. It doesn't tell you how they found you. A search result and a paid ad can both end in a call about a divorce, so the record needs to keep the source separate from the contact method.
Your intake team has the last word on what an inquiry was about. Someone who lands on your divorce page may be calling about something else. A "what is this about" field on the form helps, but the conversation settles it. If nobody knows where an inquiry came from, mark it unknown and leave it that way.
Decide how to count repeat contact. If someone fills out a form and then calls about the same matter, that is one inquiry, and it has to be counted the same way every month. Otherwise a change in how you count looks like a change in demand.
Build the practice area pages before you add more articles
We see law firm sites with one page per practice area, each of them thin, and none of them ranking. A page with real depth starts with the matter, so someone recognizes their own situation in the first few lines, before they read anything about the firm.
Take family law. The main page says which family matters your attorneys handle and which counties you serve. If divorce and child custody need different explanations, give them their own pages and link them from the main one.
The attorney who does the work should tell you what goes on the page. Ask them what happens when someone asks for a consultation and who that person would talk to. Then have them list the matters the firm takes. Those answers do more for the page than a sentence about years of experience.
Articles come after that. Write one when a question needs more room than the practice area page has, and link it back to the service it supports.
Check the whole path from the search to your intake
Pick the practice area you most want to grow and open its page on your own phone. See how fast it loads and whether you can read it without zooming. Then tap the phone number and fill out the form yourself. Find out who at the firm got that form, and how long it took to reach them.
Then have someone check the technical side of each practice area page you want found. Search engines should be able to reach it and your menu should lead to it. Its title should name the service, so the child custody page says child custody.
After the repairs, SEO is monthly work
The mix of monthly SEO work changes over time. Early months lean on fixing what is already there. Later months lean on new content and on pages for more of the practice areas and counties you serve.
Say who wrote each legal page and which matters your firm takes
Someone reading about a custody dispute or a bankruptcy is making a serious decision. The page should tell them who wrote it and which matters the firm takes.
Google's guidance on helpful content talks about experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, which it shortens to E-E-A-T. It says, "Of these aspects, trust is most important." It also says its systems give more weight to this for "topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society."
Google doesn't list legal matters there by name. We still recommend holding your firm's pages to that standard. Have the attorney responsible for the practice area write or review the page, name them on it, and link to a profile that says what kinds of matters they handle.
Check your law firm's local SEO across the whole area you serve
For a search like "divorce lawyer near me," start with your Google Business Profile. Google's guidance on local ranking says, "Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity."
Make your Google Business Profile match the services you offer
We see law firm profiles categorized as "lawyer" and nothing more. Check which categories the profile carries and whether they match the services you provide. Then compare the services listed on the profile with what your website says.
Tap the phone number and the website link from the profile itself. Check the address and the hours. If you take urgent criminal defense calls, find out what happens when someone calls after the hours on the profile.
Google also says, "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." Read what your reviews say about the help people got, as well as the star rating.
See where you come up on the map across the county
Your map position changes across the area you serve. When you search from your desk, you are seeing where the firm comes up at your desk. Our free visibility report shows where the firm comes up across the county.
Look at it one practice area at a time. Where you come up for criminal defense doesn't tell you where you come up for estate planning.
Keep the firm's listings consistent
The firm's name, address and phone number should match on your site, your profile and the directories that list you. Get them matching once, and check again when an office moves or a number changes.
Check whether AI answers name your firm
You can check whether AI assistants name your firm when someone asks which firm to call about the matters you want. Ask about those services in the area you serve, and keep the exact question with the answer you got.
We keep a log of the questions we asked and the answers as they were recorded, with the date and the platform. Each entry shows what one platform said on one day. No one can guarantee your firm appears.
Keep those answers next to your inquiry record, so you can see whether the practice areas where AI answers name you are also the ones bringing in inquiries. Read what the answer says about your services as well as whether it names you.
How SEO and paid search work together for a law firm
For urgent matters, we would consider paid search early, as long as someone answers the calls it brings. Paid search can start while the pages are being built. For a planned matter such as an estate plan, the page a person reads while they decide comes first.
SEO and paid search work together when both are planned around the practice areas you chose. A problem we see is paid search running on the firm's name and one broad practice term. Plan the ads the way you plan the pages, one practice area at a time, and count their inquiries separately. Our PPC page explains how we manage paid search.
How to tell whether your law firm's SEO is working
Read the monthly report against the practice areas you chose. Start with the one you most want to grow, and look at where its inquiries came from. If paid search explains the increase, give paid search the credit. If search stayed flat, that flat result should be on the page in front of you too.
Rankings and website visits can help you decide which pages need attention. If people find a page and few of them contact you, reread the page as if you were the person with the problem. If the inquiries are for matters you don't take, compare what the page says with what those people were looking for.
Then follow the inquiry through intake. An inquiry, a consultation and a signed matter are three different stages. A bigger total doesn't mean you are getting the matters you wanted.
Ask whether your report can say what a signed case cost to acquire. To get that number you need what was spent, where each inquiry came from, and which inquiries became clients. Your intake team needs to record that last part.
When that practice area is bringing in the matters you want and intake is keeping up, start on another.
What thirteen months of inquiry reports show, and what they can't
A California law firm's inquiry reports cover thirteen consecutive months. In the closing month the firm received 113 inquiries, against 44 in the same month a year earlier. Those are inquiries, not signed matters.
The published figures count calls, forms and chats. They aren't split by search, ads and other sources, so they can't tell you which marketing brought those inquiries in. That limit is the reason to track source from the first day. The full thirteen-month record is on our law firm marketing page.
What decides how much law firm SEO costs and how long it takes
The cost and the time depend on how many practice areas you build properly, how much competition there is in your county, what state the website is in, and whether paid search runs alongside. We go through each of those factors for law firms on a separate page.
See where your firm stands for each practice area
Our free visibility report shows where your firm comes up for each practice area across your county, and how your site covers the practice areas you want to grow. It also checks whether your profile makes contacting the firm the obvious next step, and whether AI answers name your firm for those practice areas.
Where you rank on Google for the searches that matter
We audit your site and your search results first. The work and the price come to you in writing.
Built in-house by our U.S. team, doing this since 2011.