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 the playbook barely transfers between them. Personal injury is a local street fight. Patent work is national, technical, and low volume with enormous case value. Workers' compensation sits somewhere between.
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 people actually search
Real query shapes, and what each one tells you about the person typing it.
“truck accident lawyer sioux falls”
Ready to call. City plus practice area plus intent. This is the search worth building a page for.
“personal injury lawyer”
A national bloodbath with no local intent. Ranking here costs more than it returns for a regional firm.
“how long do i have to file a claim in nebraska”
Research, not retention, but the firm that answers it is the firm they remember. Blog territory.
“[attorney name]”
Somebody was referred and is checking you out. Your bio page is the landing page and it is usually the thinnest on the site.
“best workers comp attorney near me”
Map pack decides this one before the blue links get a chance.
What makes search different here
The money is in the long tail, and it is local
Broad practice-area terms are dominated by national directories and firms with budgets that dwarf a regional practice. City-qualified searches have lower volume, far less competition, and a searcher who is ready to act. A page built for one city and one practice area will out-earn a page built for the whole state, every time.
Firms cannibalise themselves constantly
A statewide practice page and a city page competing for the same search is the single most common problem we find on legal sites. Google cannot tell which one you want ranked, so it ranks both weakly, and the firm concludes SEO does not work for them. Consolidating those is usually the first real win and it costs nothing but a decision.
Attorney pages are an asset most firms waste
People search lawyers by name after a referral, and the bio is where the decision actually happens. Most bios are a photo, a law school, and a bar admission year. The ones that work name the kinds of cases the attorney actually handles, in the words a client would use rather than the words a firm would.
Compliance constrains copy, not structure
State bar advertising rules restrict claims, comparisons, and testimonials, and they vary by state. That is real and we work inside it. It does not constrain titles, headings, URL structure, schema, internal linking, or page speed, which is where most of the ranking actually lives.
Directories will outrank you, and that is survivable
Avvo, FindLaw, Justia and Super Lawyers will occupy part of page one no matter what you do. The goal is not to beat every directory. It is to be the first actual firm, and to own the local pack where directories cannot follow.
What we usually find
The same handful of problems, on site after site.
One page for every practice area, in a list
A services page listing eleven practice areas ranks for none of them. Each area that matters needs its own page with enough on it to be the best answer to that search.
City pages that are the same page with the city swapped
Google has detected this pattern for years. If the only difference between your Omaha page and your Lincoln page is the word, neither will rank and both look like spam.
Case results treated as the whole site
Results pages are useful and bar rules often restrict how they are framed. They are not what somebody searching “do i need a lawyer for a car accident” is looking for.
3 clients
OM Trial (Ogborn Mihm)
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Personal injury. City-level pages, consolidated duplicate Sioux Falls URLs so they stopped splitting the same search, attorney contact details fixed across the site.
A patent and intellectual property firm
Omaha
Patent and intellectual property. A different market entirely: national reach, technical language, low volume, high case value.
A workers' compensation firm
Nebraska
Workers' compensation.
How we would approach it
- 01Find where the firm competes with itself first. Two pages chasing one search is self-inflicted and free to fix.
- 02Pick city and practice-area combinations with real 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: the cases they handle, in client language.
- 05Local signals: Google Business Profile per office, consistent name and address, reviews where the bar allows.
- 06Report by keyword and by 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.
Questions we get
How long before a law firm sees results from SEO?+
Three to six months before movement is clearly attributable, closer to a year for competitive city terms. Technical fixes and consolidating pages that compete with each other can show up in weeks, because you are removing a problem rather than building authority.
Can you work within state bar advertising rules?+
Yes, and the rules vary by state so we work from yours rather than a general assumption. Practically, the restrictions land on claims, comparisons and testimonials. They do not touch page structure, titles, schema or internal linking, which is where most ranking comes from.
Should we build a page for every city we serve?+
Only where you can write something genuinely different about that city, and only where somebody actually searches for it. Ten near-identical city pages perform worse than two real ones, because Google treats the pattern as low quality.
Do we need a blog?+
Not for its own sake. Question-shaped searches like filing deadlines and what to do after an accident are worth answering because they reach people earlier than the hire-a-lawyer searches do. If nobody is going to maintain it, the practice-area pages are the better investment.
What about the directories that outrank us?+
Avvo, FindLaw and Justia will hold part of page one regardless. The target is to be the first real firm listed and to own the map pack, which directories do not appear in.
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.