Local SEO for Lawyers and Law Firms

The profile is the center of lawyer local SEO. Each office where you meet clients gets its own profile, linked to its own office page on the website.

Choosing Google categories for a law firm

Google has categories by practice area: “Family law attorney”, “Divorce lawyer”, “Immigration attorney”, “Criminal justice attorney”, “DUI attorney”, “Employment attorney”, “Personal injury attorney” and others; the list changes, so I check it when setting up the profile. The primary category should be the practice that brings the most valuable cases; secondary categories cover the other practices you really handle. “Law firm” alone is too broad to win specific searches.

The firm name in the profile: no keywords added

The name must match what is on your sign, your letterhead and your bar registration. “Smith & Lee Law” is correct; “Smith & Lee Law — Best Divorce Lawyer Chicago” breaks Google’s guidelines, invites edits from competitors and can get the profile suspended.

What else to fill in on a lawyer’s profile

• services listed per practice area, each with a short plain description
• hours, including whether you take calls after hours
• photos of the office entrance, the reception and the attorneys
• attributes such as languages spoken, online appointments and wheelchair access
• the website link pointing to the matching office page, not to the home page

Google treats lawyers, like doctors, as individual practitioners: a public-facing attorney may have a profile of their own in addition to the firm’s profile. That brings rules firms often get wrong:

• an attorney’s own profile carries only the attorney’s name, with no firm name or practice keywords added
• a solo attorney whose name is the firm usually needs one shared profile, not two that compete with each other
• when an attorney leaves, their profile is not deleted but marked as moved or closed, so calls do not go to a dead number

Several profiles at one address with overlapping categories split reviews and can trigger suspension. I decide with you which profiles should exist and merge or close the rest.

A profile needs a real office where clients are received and where someone is present during the hours shown. Firms that want to appear in a neighboring city often rent a virtual office or a mail address there. Google checks such addresses, often by asking for video verification, and suspended profiles disappear from the map until reinstated.

What works instead is an office page for each real location: the address with directions and parking, the attorneys who work there, the courts nearby, office hours and reviews from clients of that office. For areas without an office, a firm can still rank in the regular results with practice-area content about that county, while the map stays tied to real addresses.

Reviews are what a prospective client reads before calling, and the number, freshness and wording of reviews also lift a firm in the map. Lawyers have to collect them with more care than other businesses.

Asking clients for reviews without breaking the rules

Ask after the matter is closed, with a direct link to the review form, and ask every client rather than only those you expect to be happy. Do not offer anything in exchange — a discount or a gift card breaks Google’s policies and, in many states, bar rules as well. Some bars also limit how reviews may be quoted on your own website, and may require a disclaimer next to testimonials; check your state bar’s rules before republishing reviews.

Replying to lawyer reviews without revealing client confidences

A negative review tempts an attorney to explain what really happened. Bar ethics opinions have warned that such a reply must not reveal anything about the client’s matter. A short reply that thanks the reviewer, states that the firm cannot discuss client matters and invites them to call the office protects the firm and still shows future clients that you respond.

Legal directories work as citations: listings with the firm’s name, address and phone that Google and AI assistants compare with your profile. The ones that matter for most US firms:

• Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Nolo and Martindale-Hubbell profiles for the firm and each attorney
• Super Lawyers, where an attorney has been selected — if you display such a badge on the site, check how your state bar treats references to ratings
• your state bar’s lawyer directory and local bar association referral lists
• Apple Business Connect, Bing Places and Yelp for general map apps

For firms in the UK, Canada or Australia, the regulator’s and law society’s registers play the same role. What counts is consistency: one version of the firm name, address and phone everywhere, including old directory profiles left after a move or a name change. A few dozen accurate listings beat hundreds of automatic submissions.

Local Services Ads appear above the map for many legal searches. Firms that pass Google’s checks — including a state bar license check for each lawyer — get the Google Verified badge, which replaced Google Screened on 20 October 2025, and pay per lead rather than per click. They bring calls from the first weeks; credits for invalid leads are now applied automatically.

Organic local SEO is slower but does not charge per call, and the profile, reviews and listings stay when the budget stops. The reviews you collect on the profile also feed LSA. Many firms run both: Local Services Ads for steady calls, local SEO so they depend on them less over time. I do the organic side and track calls from the profile separately from LSA, so you can compare them.

In personal injury, the map for “car accident lawyer” in a large city is filled by firms with hundreds of reviews and offices placed across the metro area. Local work there starts with the suburb or town where your office is, not the whole city. The rest of PI strategy — case-type pages, city pages, intake and competition — is on the personal injury SEO page.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews to recommend an immigration lawyer in their city who speaks Spanish, the assistant builds the answer from map data, reviews, legal directories and firm websites. Getting into those answers is called generative engine optimization (GEO) or answer engine optimization (AEO), and for a law firm it rests on local SEO:

• the same firm and attorney details on Google, Avvo, Justia, the state bar directory and your site
• reviews that describe the kind of matter in the client’s words, which assistants summarize
• practice areas, languages, offices and counties served written as text on the office pages
• structured data that connects each office page with its Google profile

I check how assistants describe your firm before the work and after it. More on the AI SEO and GEO optimization page.

Checking the map from your office tells you little, because results change with where the searcher stands. I report calls, direction requests and website clicks from each profile; map positions on a grid of points across your area for your main practices; reviews and rating per office by month; and visits from the profile in GA4, separated with UTM tags. Calls from the profile, from Local Services Ads and from the website are kept apart.

• Local SEO audit for a law firm — profiles, categories, directories, reviews and office pages: from 250 €, one-off, with fixes ranked by impact.
• One-off set-up — profiles per office, categories, directory clean-up, review routine: 250–700 €.
• Monthly local SEO for a law firm — updates, reviews, directories, office pages and reporting: from 800 € per month; in very competitive cities from 1,300 € per month.

For a firm with one office, a correct profile, clean directories and a review routine often bring most of the result. If you need more than the map — practice-area pages, content, technical fixes — see law firm SEO. Local SEO for other kinds of businesses is described on the local SEO services page, and all prices are on the pricing page.