Law firm SEO built around the cases you actually want
Law firm SEO is the work of ranking one practice area in one county at a time: separate pages, separate link profiles, separate reporting. We run it monthly against your own Search Console data.
Your firm is not one business chasing one phrase. An injury department and an estate planning department share a domain and almost nothing else: different searchers, different rivals, wildly different money per signed matter. Run them as one campaign and the retainer goes flat by month five.
The head term you typed to get here is also the wrong thing to measure. Nobody hires you off a search for law firm seo. They hire you after searching for a car accident attorney in one county, or a probate lawyer at nine at night.
Andmotive has built WordPress sites since 2018 and now sells SEO monthly. No legal client results to show you: the retainer half is newer. What there is: code and reports you can open.
More on this:how our monthly SEO retainers are run·law firm website design and build·fixing Core Web Vitals on a WordPress site·a written quote for one practice area
Where legal retainers stall
One page trying to win four practice areas
A Services page listing injury, family, criminal defense, probate and immigration ranks for none of the five.
Directories sitting on top of you
Justia, Avvo, FindLaw and Super Lawyers hold most of page one for attorney queries. An agency that cannot name the unwinnable phrases is selling you the chase.
Compliance discovered after publication
Copy goes live quoting a past result with no qualifying language, written by somebody who never opened your state's rules. Your bar decides.
Reporting that never reaches a signed case
Rankings climb, intake stays flat. Ask which query produced a consultation and the room quietens.
What the retainer covers
A page per practice area
Each area gets its own URL, its own H1, and an FAQ block built from what intake hears weekly. Two pages carrying the same sentences get merged.
County level targeting, not statewide
Three offices want three pages carrying different courthouses, different local rules, different attorneys. Swap the city name and Google reads them as one.
Attorney bios as ranking assets
Bios pull links from bar sections, alumni listings and press quotes far more reliably than blog posts. We write them around credentials that can be corroborated, then wire them into the practice areas.
Drafts read against the rules that bind you
Model Rule 7.2(d) requires any communication about a lawyer's services to carry the name and contact details of at least one lawyer or law firm responsible for its content, so naming the firm satisfies it. Model Rule 7.1 bars anything false or misleading. Your state's version binds you, and several go further on past results.
Included every month
- A month one audit of index coverage, canonicals, overlap and Core Web Vitals
- Reporting from your own Search Console property, reconciled against the chart totals
- On page and template edits carried out by us, schema and internal linking included
- A compliance read of every draft against the rules your state bar publishes
- A quarterly review that reforecasts, or says the money buys more elsewhere
What SEO for law firms actually competes on
How we run a legal retainer
Month one is triage. We pull sixteen months of Search Console data, crawl the site, and set every practice area URL against the queries it genuinely earns impressions for. Most firms find two pages fighting each other and one page carrying four areas on its own.
Then we pick the fight. A retainer cannot fund every practice area at once, so you choose one or two to resource properly for two quarters. The right choice is usually the highest value per signed matter rather than the highest search volume, and those are rarely the same area.
From month two the hours split between building out that area and clearing the technical backlog. Pages reach you before they go live, always. The compliance read happens at draft stage rather than after publication, which is cheaper than pulling a page down and explaining why it was up.
Outreach for a firm looks nothing like outreach for a plumbing company. Bar association sections, law school alumni pages, the charity gala your firm already sponsors, being the lawyer a reporter calls when a statute changes: those links hold value over a decade. We ask for them and never buy them. You get told which requests failed.
- One practice area funded properly beats five funded thinly
- Drafts reach your compliance partner before they reach the site
- Every change ships as a commit you keep
- Rolling monthly, thirty days notice either way
How the first quarter runs
- 01
Week one, the practice area map
Every URL gets matched to the queries Search Console says it actually earns impressions for. Overlaps get marked for merging first.
- 02
Week two, the technical backlog
Redirect chains from the last move, the staging subdomain still in the index, the duplicate paginated blog URLs nobody knew were there. None needs a design decision, so it all ships this week.
- 03
Week three, the target and the brief
You pick the area to fund. Each brief names the queries, the links in, and the questions the page must answer.
- 04
Monthly, write and ship
Drafts come to you, then to compliance, then to the site. Technical work runs in parallel.
- 05
Day 90, and every quarter after
Impressions, clicks and average position get set against the dated month one baseline. If the funded area has not moved and we cannot say why, you hear that first, and from us.
What it costs
How many practice areas you fund
One area properly resourced is a smaller retainer than four maintained badly, and it wins more often. We would rather sell you the first one.
The county you are fighting in
Injury work in a metro county where twenty firms buy links is a different budget from probate in a rural one. Difficulty sets the hours, not volume.
Where compliance review sits
A partner who reads drafts inside two days costs nothing. A committee meeting monthly adds a month to every page.
The state of the site
A WordPress site built last year on one theme is cheap to work on. A 2014 build with three page builders stacked on it is not, and every page costs hours.
The report line nobody reads
Open the Pages report in Search Console and find the status Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical than user. On a firm with separate pages for car accidents, truck accidents and motorcycle accidents, that label usually sits on two of the three, because all three came off one outline with the vehicle swapped out. URL Inspection names the URL Google picked instead. The fix is merging two of them, not commissioning a fourth.
Sources:ABA Model Rule 7.2 on communications concerning a lawyer's services·Google's guidelines for individual practitioner Business Profiles
Name the one practice area you would fund for two quarters, and the county it sits in. That is the whole brief. Back comes a written answer on whether that area is winnable at the budget you have, which firms hold the page today, and what the first three months would go on. Three paragraphs, not a deck.
If the honest answer is that intake would earn you more this year than search, you get that answer too, and no proposal follows it a week later, because that is not how this works.
Get a fixed-price quote Back within 1 business day
Questions firms ask first
What is law firm SEO?+
Law firm SEO is the work of making your pages the result Google shows for the legal problems you handle, in the counties you handle them. In practice: a page per practice area, a page per office, attorney bios and local links.
How much does SEO cost for a law firm?+
Hours, not packages. We scope after reading the site and the results pages you care about, so the figure arrives with a list of what it buys. What moves it: practice areas funded, how contested the county is, how fast drafts get approved.
Is SEO worth it for a law firm?+
It depends on the value of a signed matter and the difficulty of the phrases. A probate firm in a quiet county can earn a retainer back on two matters a year. An injury firm in a metro market meets budgets that dwarf any retainer here.
How long does it take for a law firm website to rank?+
It runs practice area by practice area, not site by site. Probate or estate planning in a county nobody fights over can move inside a quarter. Car accident work, where page one holds firms with thousands of referring domains, is a two year link programme and nothing less.
Can each attorney have a Google Business Profile?+
Google's guidelines allow an individual profile for each public facing practitioner reachable at the verified location, alongside the firm's own. The exception matters: a sole practitioner gets no second profile, because the lawyer and the firm are one entity there. A duplicate gets merged.