SEO · Law firms
Law firm SEOthat reaches intake.
Practice area, city, and a form a person can finish on a phone. Rankings that do not become consultations are a cost.
The short answer
What law firm SEO is accountable for.
People hire a lawyer after a specific event: a charge, an injury, a filing, a dispute. They search the problem and the city, then they look for a human who handles that problem. Law firm SEO is the set of pages and the technical cleanup that make that path obvious. It is not a blog about 'justice' and it is not a promise of a verdict.
Buying cycle
Intake is the product, not the ranking.
The cycle is short and emotional for plaintiff and criminal work, and slower for business, estate, and immigration matters that are not an emergency. The page has to match that speed. A car-crash page that opens with the history of negligence law loses the person who is calling from a parking lot.
Multiple practice areas on one domain compete with each other if every page targets 'lawyer' plus the city. We pick the revenue practices, give each a URL, and let the thin practices stay off the roadmap until the main ones earn consultations.
Constraints
Ethics rules beat keywords.
Bar rules on advertising, testimonials, and specialization claims vary by state. We do not write 'the best' or 'expert' unless you already have a designation you are allowed to use, and we do not invent case results. If a result is public and you want it on the site, counsel approves the sentence.
- No stock photos of gavels presented as your courtroom.
- No pages that imply a result the firm did not obtain.
- Office pages only for offices where a lawyer actually sits.
- Spanish or other language pages only when someone at the firm can take that call.
Channels and KPIs
Consults, not clicks.
We track qualified intake: calls and completed forms that match the practice area, by city. Cost per organic consult sits next to cost per paid consult so you can see whether SEO is actually cheaper. Rankings for vanity head terms stay in the appendix.
- Consults by practice area, so a busy estate practice does not hide a quiet injury page.
- After-hours calls, because a lot of legal demand does not happen at 10 a.m.
- Page-level conversion, so a page with traffic and no form fills gets rewritten or removed.
Mistakes
The patterns that waste a year.
The usual failure is a hundred city pages written by swapping the county name, plus a link vendor. The second failure is a beautiful site where every practice area is an anchor on one URL, so Google has nothing specific to rank and the visitor has to hunt.
- No doorway city pages.
- No guaranteed placement language anywhere in the footer or the blog.
- No attorney bios that omit the bar admissions and the office.
- No content calendar that outruns the partner who must approve claims.
Example engagement
A plaintiff firm with two offices.
Plaintiff firm, two offices, heavy spend on a short list of paid injury terms. Organic pages existed but they targeted the firm name and a generic 'personal injury lawyer' phrase. Intake could not tell which calls came from which page.
We rebuilt two practice-area templates and separated the offices. Over eight months, organic form submissions on those two practices rose from 14 a month to 23. Cost per organic lead landed near $180, against about $420 on the paid terms they were already buying. The paid account stayed. SEO did not 'replace' it. It made the expensive terms less responsible for every consult.
14 to 23
Organic forms a month, two practices
$180
Approximate cost per organic lead
The example uses anonymized results from a Quorum engagement. It is one account, not a benchmark you should budget against.
Questions
Law firms questions.
Can you guarantee the first page for 'personal injury lawyer'?
No. In a large city that term is a paid-media and brand fight as much as an SEO fight. We would rather own the queries that match the cases you actually want, in the cities where you can file.
Do you write legal advice on the blog?
We draft explainers for a lawyer to edit. Nothing publishes as advice, and nothing publishes without a named reviewer at the firm. Unreviewed legal content is a liability, not an asset.
What about Google Business Profiles for lawyers?
Each real office gets a profile with the right category and a consistent name. We do not open profiles for virtual offices. Local SEO details live with that system, and this engagement includes them when the firm is local.
Should we have a page for every county?
Only if you take cases there and can say something true about that venue. A swapped county name is a doorway page. We will not build the set.
How do you handle paid and organic together?
We compare cost per consult. If a query converts on organic, we do not automatically pause the ad. Brand and high-intent terms often need both, with the waste removed from the broad match pile.
How long does this take?
Technical and page fixes show leading indicators in a quarter. Competitive injury terms in major metros are a longer hold. The proposal says which practices are in the first six months.
Talk through law firms.
One conversation. A diagnostic. A plan you can kill if it is not the work.