A practice area list instead of practice area pages
Twelve areas named on one page ranks for none of them. Each one needs its own page or it is not competing.
Guide
Local SEO for law firms
Legal search has the widest gap between volume and value of any market we work in. A term with forty searches a month can be worth more than one with four thousand in another trade, because a single matter can be worth several thousand in fees. That changes what a good page looks like. Depth on one practice area beats breadth across twelve, and a page that turns away the wrong enquiry is doing its job.
By Hamza Rivera
Short answer: Local SEO for a law firm means a page for each problem a client searches, written under the practice area it belongs to, a profile filed under the right practice area category, and a real page for each attorney. All of it sits inside the jurisdiction's advertising rules, and nothing should claim a result.
8 steps
Free to read, in the order it pays to do it. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to download.
It is also the market where the client searches the problem rather than the profession. Almost nobody types "lawyer". They type what happens if they are injured at work, how long they have to file, whether they can be dismissed for something. A firm with a page answering that question gets the call. A firm with a practice area list does not.
Everything below sits inside your jurisdiction’s advertising rules, which vary and which are yours rather than ours. Nothing here requires claiming a result.
What law firms are actually competing for
These are the shapes the searches take. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there, which is usually a town, a neighbourhood or a brand.
- personal injury lawyer [city]
- how long do i have to file a claim
- employment lawyer near me
- can i be fired for [reason]
- free consultation [practice area] lawyer
- [attorney name] attorney
The work, in the order it pays to do it
- 1
Decide which practice areas you actually want more of
Not all of them. A firm that lists twelve areas and wants two is spreading its own authority across ten pages it does not care about. Pick the matters worth taking and build there.
- 2
Write a page per problem, naming the practice area inside it
A dog bite, a contested will, a wrongful dismissal. The client searches the event, not the legal category, and the page that names both connects the two. This is the single highest-value thing on the list.
- 3
Set the Google Business Profile category to the practice area
Personal Injury Attorney and Family Law Attorney are different categories and they surface in different map results. A firm filed under the generic Lawyer competes with every firm in the city for everything and wins nothing in particular.
- 4
Give every attorney a real page
Clients search a named attorney after a referral, and the bar directories outrank firms on those names almost every time. A proper page with admissions, practice areas, years and a direct line takes that search back, and it is the easiest win in the trade.
- 5
Say which jurisdictions you are admitted in
Plainly, on the page, not buried in a footer. It filters out enquiries you would have to decline, which is worth more than the extra enquiries it costs.
- 6
Explain how fees work without quoting a number
Contingency against hourly against fixed is the question every prospective client has and almost no firm site answers. Explaining the structure wins more calls than another page about the firm, and it does not require publishing a rate.
- 7
Handle reviews inside the rules
Reply to every review without confirming that the reviewer is a client and without discussing any matter. In several jurisdictions confirming a representation in a public reply is itself a problem, which is why most firms reply badly or not at all.
- 8
Build the city and neighbourhood pages last, and only where you work
A page for a city you do not have an office in, cannot be instructed in, and have never taken a matter from, is the doorway pattern and it earns nothing. Build them for the places you genuinely serve.
What usually goes wrong
Nothing about cost anywhere on the site
Not the number, the structure. A client who cannot work out whether they can afford you does not ring to find out.
Bar directories owning your own attorneys’ names
Search your partners. If Avvo, Justia or the state bar outranks your own site, that is traffic you already earned going somewhere else.
Claiming results
Beyond the rules in most jurisdictions, and it does not convert as well as an honest explanation of the process anyway.
How to tell whether it is working
Rankings are not the measure. These are, and all of them come from accounts in your own name rather than from a report you have to take on trust.
- Calls from the Google Business Profile, split by the practice area the caller names
- Search Console impressions per practice area page rather than for the site as a whole
- Whether your own attorney names now rank above the bar directories
- Consultation bookings, and how many of them were matters you actually wanted
Protecting what you build
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether law firms still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
For a law firm the specific risk is a link campaign somebody else ran. Legal is the most aggressively spammed vertical in search and firms are approached constantly with directory placements and guest posts. A manual action for unnatural links in this market can take a year to unwind, and the firm usually did not know it was being done.
What actually breaks a business in search
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
A redesign or a platform move
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
A plugin or a setting nobody audited
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
Losing control of an account
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
A suspended Google Business Profile
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Letting the work stop
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
What to refuse, however it is sold to you
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
-
Bought links, in any packaging
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
-
Reviews you did not earn
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
-
Keywords stuffed into the business name
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
-
Pages written to have pages
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
-
Anybody who guarantees a position
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
The monthly discipline
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
- Check Search Console coverage once a month and look at the Excluded reasons, not just the errors.
- Watch impressions rather than clicks. Impressions fall first, usually weeks before anybody notices the phone is quieter.
- Open the Business Profile and look for edits the public has suggested and Google has accepted without telling you.
- Reply to every review that arrived since last month, and keep asking, steadily rather than in bursts.
- Before any site change, write down what the URLs are now. After it, check they still resolve.
- Keep one note of what changed and when. Almost every traffic mystery is solved by a change nobody wrote down.
- Re-run the audit checklist once a year, and the first two sections after any redesign, host move or new plugin.
Own your own accounts
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
If you would rather not do it yourself
Everything above is work you can do without hiring anybody, and the profile half of it is worth doing whatever else you decide. If you want it done for you, this is the service that covers it, and we scope it on a call before anything starts.
Other guides
Questions about local SEO for law firms
Legal search volume looks tiny. Is it worth it?
In this market volume is the wrong measure. A practice area with thirty searches a month and one matter worth several thousand in fees is a better page than a thousand searches worth nothing. The value of the matter, not the count of the searches, is what makes the page worth writing.
What about bar advertising rules?
Everything written goes to you before it is published, and nothing claims a result or a specialisation you cannot support. The rules vary by jurisdiction and yours are the ones that apply, not ours.
Do we need a page for every city near us?
Only for the places you genuinely serve and can be instructed in. A page for a city you have no connection to is a doorway page, and Google has been demoting those for years.
Will this bring the wrong enquiries?
Written properly it reduces them. Saying plainly which matters you take, which you do not, and where you are admitted turns away the calls you would decline anyway, before they reach your intake team.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.