Law Firm SEO: Guidebook for Lawyers to Dominate Search Results

Time to read: 19 minutes

Wondering What SEO Strategies Will (and Won’t) Help Attorneys Rank Online?

Did you know that 87% of people continue to go online when looking for legal services? And if your firm’s or individual attorney profiles aren’t featured in Google’s AI overviews or the local pack that shows up at the top of search results, that means that the same number of people are automatically going to your competitors’ websites over yours.

We know your online presence is vital. And while you may think that having a memorable billboard that people talk about on Reddit and Facebook groups counts, it sadly doesn’t cut it in the age of search engines and AI platforms.

You need to be doing marketing practices that will actually move the needle for your firm to bring in more cases. With that said, here is what will, and more importantly, won’t help you appear prominently in search results.

Things That Will Help Improve Your Law Firm’s Rankings

The key areas to keep in mind when you are trying to improve your presence in the current search landscape include:

1. Clear Site Structure and Dedicate Pages

You need to demonstrate what makes your firm different. This will come down to the services you offer, how qualified your firm is, where you serve, and who is on your team. This needs to be showcased in your navigation, as it serves as a list for search engines of which pages are most important on your site.

So be sure to add individual pages for each specific practice area you want on your website; don’t just list them all on one general practice area page. Breaking up pages like this will allow search engines to match regional searches to your specific practice page. Here’s an example of an individual practice page sitemap structure (for a firm that takes on a variety of cases)

• About Us
• Practice areas
  • Car accidents
  • Motorcycle accidents
  • DUIs
• Awards
• Our Team
• Contact
  • Locations
    • Tampa
    • Clearwater
    • Naples

Important: Make Sure All of These Pages Utilize Keywords

While your main navigation structure will tell search engines what pages on your site matter the most, how you optimize each of these pages using keywords tells them what each page is about. For law firms, the pages that win cases are your practice area pages, which historically are the most overlooked.

Once you identify the main keywords of each of your pages and their variants, you’ll need to place them strategically in different areas of the page to optimize for your on-page SEO. Main places include:

• Title tag: Always try to use the keyword first and keep it under ~60 characters, which is Google’s cutoff. Ex: Boston Car Accident Lawyer | [Firm Name].
• H1: Be sure you only have one H1 tag per page; these often mimic the title tag exactly, but minus your brand name.
• URL: Keep these short and sweet, and match the intent of the page. Such as /services/family-law/ not /page13/families/.
• Body copy: Try to use your main keyword in the first 100 words of your main copy, as this is the first area of the page that gets scanned.
• Subheaders: While you can only use one H1 on your page, you are free to use as many H2/H3/H4s as you please, but within reason!

2. Inclusion of Location-Specific Keywords

According to FindLaw, 62% of legal-related searches are non-branded, such as “Boston divorce attorney.” So you’ll want to make sure you include regional/city names (that can be easy for one location but challenging if a firm’s presence is expansive) throughout your website to help signal to search engines where you typically operate.

As a lawyer, typically, you will be utilizing terms such as the following:

• Top [city] lawyers
• Best lawyer in [city] for [specialization]
• [Specialization] attorney
• Law firms near me

Take a look at what starts to populate when you start to search for your terms on Google. This can help indicate popular searches that people are actually looking for:

3. Obeying “YMYL” Rules

Your Money Your Life content is material deemed sensitive by Google because it covers topics that can impact the future happiness, health, financial wellness, or safety of a person. In their documentation, they state:

“For example, our systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people or the welfare or well-being of society. We call these “Your Money or Your Life” topics, or YMYL for short.”

This means that lawyers must be extra careful with the content they produce to ensure that they are labeled as trustworthy. The best guidelines to follow are defined as E-E-A-T, as stated above, which stands for expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. With this in mind, it is important to showcase any case studies, awards, and other material that shows credibility to demonstrate that the legal team is a reliable resource for sharing legal advice online.

Pro-tip: Be sure to also provide important context from your blog authors, such as their education, specialty, and certification for advanced law topics, to demonstrate that they are reliable voices for the topic!

4. Curated Content for Long-Tail Keywords

Regularly publishing relevant content on your website is a great way to show that you are a credible source for legal advice. We suggest trying to center your blog posts around a keyword, even if it doesn’t have much search volume. We love using long-tail keywords in blog posts because the people who search for them are usually looking for something specific.

• # of the Top Legal Issues Right Now in [your city]
• 10 Tips for Choosing the Right Lawyer
• Prep for Your Case: Guide to Legal Jargon
• # Main Legal Issues Popping Up in [insert industry]
• Legal Considerations for [marriage, parenthood, etc.]
• What is Pro Bono Work and Is It Really Free?
• Benefits of Hiring a Divorce Lawyer
• When Should I Hire a Family Attorney?
• Breaking Down the Most Notable Cases in [city] History

5. Claim and Complete Local Profiles

You MUST have an optimized Google Business Profile to have any skin in the game when it comes to local search. First step is to claim profiles, verify them, start optimizing, and then import the listing into Bing Places to bypass the postcard verification process.

Be sure you choose your category wisely, as this can be critical to ranking in a specific area (it’s a good idea to Google your local competitors and see who is using what for their primary Google Business Profile category).

Google has over 4,000 categories for you to choose from. You are then allowed to select one category as your main category and add up to 9 others for a total of 10 categories! Here are some of the categories related to the legal industry you can choose from:

There are even a handful of niche attorney-specific categories that you can utilize:

Pro-tip: Make sure to choose the most specific and relevant category as your main category; the other, broader categories are tougher to rank with! Plus, we know that there might be services you offer that aren’t listed above. But thankfully, you are able to add custom services to your GBP. You can add as many as you like, and it’s also a great place to sneak in terms such as “Family Law Services in Chicago” and the like.

6. Clean Up Other NAP Profile Listings

NAP refers to your business name, address, and phone number, and the consistency in their appearance on the internet. The search engines look at a list of about one hundred sites to assess if your business information is the same (Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc.). If they are, then you are rewarded in your local search position. This used to be one of the biggest ranking factors in local search, and while it’s still important, it’s not one of the top things you should do. However, if you:

• Opened a location in a new market
• Moved offices in the past five years
• Bought out another firm at a different address

Then you may want to consider signing up for Yext.com. This service is the best place to go to update your information across a handful of these local citation sites, so you don’t have to do it manually.

7. Build Authoritative and Relevant Backlinks

Gaining backlinks safely and continuously can be hard, especially on a local level. Here are a few ideas to keep in your back pocket:

• Look for local resource pages and ask to be linked. Many city government websites will have these as a courtesy for residents.
• Reach out to Chambers of Commerce in your area. They might require you to fill out a form and pay a small fee, but the links and traffic can be worth it.
• Use reporter requests for link building, where you will be prompted to respond to queries from journalists that will be published in reputable publications.
• Create content on your website that is highly searchable and linkable, such as facts and statistics about niche things related to your field or area (ex, We Handled 300+ Divorce Cases in 2026; Here Is What We Found)

8. Don’t Overlook Internal Link Structure

While building external links can help strengthen your domain, internal linking is the other link strategy that can help individual pages shine. It’s another side of on-page SEO that is often overlooked, but when it’s done right, it’s where firms with lots of practice areas pull ahead.

Be sure you are linking from each practice page to closely related ones. For instance, your main vehicle accident page should link to child pages, such as motorcycle accidents, and then also to broader personal injury pages. Using your main pages to help branch off to relevant pages will thus keep people on your site, increasing their probability of converting.

Pro-tip: Don’t neglect blog posts! Alongside targeting long-tail terms, they act as great places to add relevant links with strong anchor text. This passes authority to the pages you most want to rank and helps Google understand how your topics relate.

9. Answer Questions for AI Searches

Most people turn to Google for things such as “lawyer near me,” but now with all the different AI technologies out there, they are going elsewhere when they want to ask, “How much does it cost to hire a divorce attorney in Atlanta?”

This is a great reason to ensure you have relevant blog posts and FAQ areas on your site to answer questions like this when people are in the beginning stages of looking for help. Here are two high-level content ideas for AI search we suggest:

• Have an FAQ page to answer questions directly and early.
  AI-generated answers are directly pulled from content that they can understand as an answer to a question. But be sure to leave things uncomplicated and not spammed with keywords. The best part about an FAQ page is that it hits two birds with one stone: it serves potential clients while also providing AI crawlers with easy-to-digest content.
• Use your own data to become a source.
  AI loves data. Publishing anything that can make you their go-to source to cite can be a goldmine. So if you have studies you can publish or trends you’re seeing, it can work in your favor! Try sending out a survey, crafting your own statistics, or publishing case studies.

Things That Will Not Help Your Law Firm’s Online Presence

Now that you know a handful of things that will help your rankings, it’s time to go over some other SEO tactics we see law firms doing that you should avoid:

1. Keyword Stuffing Your GBP

Adding keywords to your business name in your Google Business Profile or Bing Places for Business profile, unless you have filed a DBA (doing business as) license that matches. This is a huge “no-no” and could get you kicked off the platform altogether, as it violates guidelines set forth by both Bing and Google.

2. Buying Links in Mass

This is something that more law firm owners are aware of, but the days of buying 500 links for $50 are over. People still offer those types of services, so please beware of them, but the fact is that these will do nothing to help your law firm’s SEO standing and could actually hurt your site in the long run.

3. Creating Scholarships to Get Links

Many law firms still do this, but the search engines say that you should no longer do this, and it could cause you to get a manual penalty, per Search Engine Journal.

4. Creating Numerous, Single-Keyword Local Profiles

This approach violates the Google Business Profile guidelines and will likely get you kicked off Google Maps altogether. An example of this would be “Dog Bite Lawyer Buffalo, NY” as the title of your GBP listing. This is a tactic we often see for home services businesses, such as garage repair businesses. Google has been catching on to this approach and heavily penalizing the Google accounts that manage them, so it’s best to avoid it altogether.

5. Investing in Syndicate Content

Using syndicated content that is indexed by Google. If you subscribe to a service that provides blog content to many other law firm websites, make sure the search engines don’t see that content, as it is essentially treated as duplicate content. Utilizing duplicate, syndicated content on your law firm site will hurt your SEO more than help it.

Be Aware: Important Note on Your GBP Location and Proximity

We find that many attorneys opened offices decades ago in downtown metro areas. This is great, as this helps you rank well in that exact vicinity and for keywords for that major city (e.g., a personal injury lawyer trying to rank in San Diego)

However, proximity is a HUGE local ranking factor, so that means that if your address is not located in the city you are trying to rank in, it is going to be very, very difficult to do so. This is why supplementing your site with location pages for other suburbs you want to rank in is important, because you can still get customers through organic listings below the local pack.

If this is a major issue for you, we recommend that you rent (and staff) an office space in the suburb of your choice and see if you can get the profile to rank via the optimization tactics mentioned on this page.

Bonus Secret Tip for Lawyers: Emphasize Your Phone Number

74% of people beginning a search online for legal services end up contacting the office via phone, according to FindLaw. So if you find that you are getting adequate traffic, but no conversions, it may be because:

1. Those looking for legal advice don’t want to share personal information via a form
2. Sensitive or timely cases are looking to speak to someone immediately
3. Situations have a lot of detail, and it is too lengthy to type

So we are not saying you can’t have forms on your website, but mostly ensure your phone number is front and center on your website and local profiles.

Pro-tip: We suggest investing in call tracking software like CallRail so you can see where calls are coming from (direct, organic, or paid) and get insights such as abandoned calls and more. We use it for all our clients!

Still Not Convinced You Need SEO Services for Your Law Firm?

These statistics about legal marketing strategies should change your mind:

• 65% of law firms allocate most of their marketing budget to digital (Clio)
• 25% of law firms do not track their leads (Attorney At Law Magazine)
• 83% of law firms will hire an outside marketing firm to do their marketing work (CallRail)
• 91% of law firms handle the same client multiple times (CallRail)
• 46% of law firms remarket themselves by creating targeted content (On The Map Marketing)
• Each year, on average, a law firm will typically invest 49% of its budget toward marketing (CallRail)
• 68% of law firms have focused on marketing because of internal pressure to increase revenue (FinancesOnline)
• The top 200 law firms in America had an average marketing budget of $2,354,946 (On The Map Marketing)
• A law firm will, on average, spend $150,000 on SEO (FirstPageSage)
• Small law firms will usually spend around $2,500-5,000 on SEO campaigns (On The Map Marketing)
• 79% of law firms believe that SEO is the most effective marketing channel (The National Law Review)
• 89% of law firms believe content marketing is “very important” to their overall marketing strategy (Comrade Digital Marketing Agency)
• 87% of people who contact an attorney go on to hire an attorney, and 72% of them only contact one attorney (National Law Review)
• Law-related websites with video content are 53 times more likely to rank on Google’s first page (Grow Law Firm)
• SSL-encrypted law firm sites are 32% more likely to rank higher in search results (Grow Law Firm)
• 26% of law firms use an email newsletter as a form of marketing (Commwiser)
• 5% of ranking pages from law firm sites use relatively recent and professional photos (On the Map Marketing)
• Law firms in Google’s local “3-pack” receive 70% of clicks from local searches (Esquire Interactive)
• “Near me” searches have grown by over 900% in recent years, emphasizing the importance of local optimization (Law Leaders)
• 64% of law firms optimizing their Google Business Profiles report increased local traffic (Grow Law Firm)
• 87% of people use online to search for legal services (Attorney at Work)
• The legal services category is one of the most competitive Google Business Profile categories in local search (Local Falcon)
• Specific categories (such as “Personal Injury Attorney” instead of “Law Firm”) are preferred for better visibility on Google Business Profiles (Grow Law Firm)
• The first 250 characters of the business description are crucial and should be compelling while including key services and location information (Grow Law Firm)
• 33% of law firms will use Facebook daily for marketing (On The Map Marketing)
• 16% of law firms will use Twitter to market themselves (On The Map Marketing)
• 84% of law firms were able to obtain leads by organic social media traffic (CallRail)
• 85% of attorneys used social media in their marketing strategy in 2018 (FinancesOnline)
• There has been a 15% increase in attorneys using social media as a part of their marketing strategy from 2015 to 2018 (FinancesOnline)
• 81% of lawyers participate on social media for professional purposes (American Bar Association)
• The American Bar Association reports that 87% of lawyers have a presence on LinkedIn (American Bar Association)
• 71% of law firms use social media for marketing purposes (Comrade Digital Marketing)
• 49% of law firms say that mobile optimization is a challenge for them (CallRail)
• 51% of law firms say the biggest challenge regarding digital marketing for law firms is website optimization (CallRail)
• 66% of law firms plan on spending more on their website (On The Map Marketing)
• 38.9% of law firms brought in more leads by investing in their website (Justia)
• 27% of lawyers have blogs on their website (On The Map Marketing)
• 97% of law firms don’t have any kind of personal content present on their website (FinancesOnline)
• 40% of smaller law firms do not have a website (FinancesOnline)
• 35% of smaller law firms have not updated their website design or content in the last 3 years (FinancesOnline)
• Common issues that law firms have include slow loading speeds (affecting 25% of websites) and a lack of clear calls-to-action (38%), which hinder conversions (Grow Law Firm)
• 11.1% of law firms saw more leads when investing in Google local service ads (Justia)
• 17% of lawyers predicted that Google local service ads will be the most important marketing strategy (Justia)
• 90% of people who are on the internet will view a Google advertisement (Sixth City Marketing)
• For small to mid-sized law firms, a starting PPC budget of $1,500 to $5,000 per month is typically recommended (Beacon Live)
• 49% of law firms described their best marketing channel as purchasing web leads (Attorney At Law Magazine)
• 46% of clients will contact a law firm first by phone (CallRail)
• 42% of law firms take an average of 3 days to respond to a potential customer (Clio)
• 86% of law firms do not collect email addresses (Clio)
• 45% of law firms do not collect phone calls from a potential lead’s call (Clio)
• 35% of the time, when a potential lead calls a law firm, the call is not answered (Clio)
• 67% of people said that they’d prefer a law firm that answers quickly to a call or email (Attorney At Law Magazine)
• 22% of people will hire an attorney within a week of submitting a lead (Attorney At Law Magazine)
• 70.7% of lawyers will respond to a potential lead within an hour (Attorney At Law Magazine)
• There has been a 29% increase in organic traffic for business law (FirstPageSage)
• Criminal defense attorneys have an average annual SEO spend of $165,000 (FirstPageSage)
• Family & estate attorneys will see a 7.1% visitor-to-lead conversion rate (FirstPageSage)
• Personal injury law firms have a $620 cost per SEO lead (FirstPageSage)
• It will take a business law firm 10 months to break even from their annual SEO spend (FirstPageSage)
• Criminal defense law firms will allocate 50% of their marketing budget to SEO (FirstPageSage)
• Business law firms will allocate only 5% of their budget to social (FirstPageSage)

Have a Question on Something We Covered? Or Ready to Partner with Our SEO Agency?

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