SEO for Law Firms
A firm does not need to rank for “lawyer.” It needs to rank for the eleven words somebody types at the worst moment of their year.
Legal search is not one market. It is hundreds of small ones, split by city and by practice area, and the difference between position 4 and position 12 on “truck accident lawyer sioux falls” is whether the phone rings.
We work with three firms across three unrelated practice areas, which is how we learned that the playbook barely transfers. What does transfer is the discipline: pick the city, pick the practice area, build the page that answers that exact search, and do not let two of your own pages compete for it.
What makes search different here
The money is in the long tail, and it is local
“Personal injury lawyer” is a national bloodbath. “Personal injury lawyer sioux falls” is winnable, has real volume, and the person typing it is ready to call. We build to the second one.
Firms cannibalise themselves constantly
A statewide page and a city page competing for the same search is the most common problem we find on legal sites. Google picks one, ranks it weakly, and the firm assumes SEO does not work. Consolidating those is usually the first real win.
Attorney pages are an asset most firms waste
People search for lawyers by name, and bios are often the thinnest pages on the site. They are also where trust gets built. We treat them as landing pages, not staff listings.
Compliance is real and it is not an excuse
State bar advertising rules restrict claims and testimonials, and they vary by state. It constrains the copy. It does not constrain titles, headings, page structure, schema, or internal linking, which is where most of the ranking lives anyway.
3 clients, named
OM Trial
South Dakota and California
Personal injury. City-level pages for Sioux Falls, consolidated duplicate URLs, attorney pages rebuilt.
SJGA Patent Law
Omaha
Patent and intellectual property. A different search market entirely: national, technical, low volume, high value.
Serving Injured Workers
Nebraska
Workers' compensation.
How we would approach it
- 01Find where the firm competes with itself first. Two pages chasing one search is a self-inflicted wound and it is free to fix.
- 02Pick the city and practice-area combinations with real search volume and a realistic path to page one. Ignore the vanity terms.
- 03Build or rewrite one page per combination, answering that specific search rather than describing the firm.
- 04Treat attorney bios as landing pages. Name, credentials, the cases they actually handle.
- 05Local signals: Google Business Profile per office, consistent name and address, reviews where the bar allows them.
- 06Report by keyword and page, monthly. “Traffic is up” is not a finding.
Pricing is the same as everything else here and it is on the page. No industry surcharge.
Talk to someone about it
Tell us where you are now. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, we will say that.