Law firms
Law firm SEO, where every page has a job and every fact is checked.
Legal search is one of the most contested spaces online. Every firm in town is buying, writing and competing for the same searches. The firms that win are rarely the ones publishing the most. They are the ones whose sites are built so Google can tell exactly what each page is for.
Why legal search is different
Three things set law apart from most local trades. The competition is intense, because a single case can be worth more than a year of marketing, so every firm and every lead-generation directory is fighting for the same terms. The stakes of being wrong are higher, because a page that misstates the law can mislead someone at the worst moment of their life and expose the firm. And the rules on what a lawyer may say about their own services are strict.
The ABA's Model Rule 7.1 forbids false or misleading communications about a lawyer's services. State rules differ, so legal content and claims about a firm's work must be checked against the rules and law that apply to that firm before publication.
A Las Vegas injury firm, shown half a million times and rarely chosen
Google showed this firm to Las Vegas searchers 556,000 times in the three months to June 2026. Fewer than two in every thousand of those turned into a visit. The demand was never missing. The pages being shown were not built to be chosen.
I rebuilt the site around its structure. One hub carries the firm's core search, with every accident type as a proper page beneath it. Four surrounding communities became genuine hubs with practice pages under them. A daily content engine published guides and answer pages, every legal fact verified against the statute itself. The nineteen services on the firm's Google listing were matched one to one with live pages, and titles were rewritten to win the click.
In the Ahrefs rank tracker the firm went from 9 top-three rankings to 44 by July 2026, ahead of the 25 to 40 the engagement promised. Pages accepted into Google's index went from 133 to 543, read on 3 September 2026. Across June to August the share of appearances turning into visits was 0.2%, twice the 0.1% of the three months before: the same demand, twice the visits.
When Search Console listed thousands of unindexed pages
One Las Vegas law firm had 4,144 pages in Search Console’s “Crawled - currently not indexed” report in June 2026. That report does not tell us that all those pages had previously been indexed. Instead of deleting them in bulk, I reviewed overlaps, merged pages where that served the reader, and worked through a link cleanup. By 3 September the count was 2,549. No pages were bulk deleted.
The structure that wins legal search
A pillar per practice area
Personal injury, criminal defence, family, estate planning, immigration, employment. Each practice area gets a page that carries its main search and proves the firm handles that work.
A page per case type underneath
Car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, slip and fall, wrongful death. People search for their situation, not the practice area, so each situation needs its own page linking up to the pillar.
Location hubs with real depth
The communities the firm serves, each with its own hub and practice pages beneath it, written about that place: the courts, the roads, the local procedures, where the firm meets clients.
Answer pages that earn trust
How long a claim takes, what a case is worth in principle, what to do after an accident, statute of limitations questions. Each answered carefully against the statute, each linking to the practice page it supports.
Attorney pages that carry weight
Real biographies with admissions, experience and published work. Who wrote and reviewed a legal page matters to readers and to Google.
How legal content is checked here
The statute is the source
Every statement of law is checked against the statute or court rule itself, read at the source, not against another firm's blog post that may be out of date or wrong.
No outcome promises
No figures for what a case is worth, no guaranteed results, no "we always win". A page can explain how compensation is decided without implying what any reader will receive.
No invented statistics
If a number cannot be traced to a primary source with a date, it does not go on the page.
No borrowed credentials
Awards, ratings and memberships only where the firm actually holds them, stated exactly as the awarding body words them.
Volume, without the quality falling over
Legal search rewards firms that publish steadily, and punishes firms whose steady publishing turns into overlap. In August 2026 I ran four Las Vegas brands at once, including two injury firms: 195 pieces researched, dated and scheduled before the month began, two a day for one firm and one a day for the other. Every piece mapped to a real search, linked into its practice silo, and checked against the law before it was scheduled. The structure is what lets volume and quality live together.
Search brings the call, intake decides the case
The best rankings in the city are wasted on a firm that lets calls go to voicemail at nine at night. Injury and criminal searches happen at every hour, often straight after the event, and the searcher calls the next firm on the list if nobody answers. So part of the work is checking what happens after the click: whether the phone number on every page dials when tapped, whether forms arrive and are answered, and whether after-hours calls reach a person or a message that promises a call back and keeps the promise.
None of that is search engine work in the narrow sense. All of it decides whether search work turns into signed cases.
What gets measured for a firm
Position by practice area
The searches that matter for each practice, tracked by name over a quarter, not the average across everything.
Calls and forms by page
Which pages produce enquiries, so the work goes where cases come from rather than where traffic is easiest.
Pages Google accepts
The index count for the site and whether the practice and case type pages are all in. Law firm sites lose pages quietly; this catches it early.
Signed cases, where the firm shares them
The only number that finally matters. When the firm is willing to share which enquiries became clients, the report can say which pages produced cases, not just calls.
Who this is for
Firms that are visible but not chosen, like the one above. Firms whose sites grew for years without a plan and are now losing pages from Google. Firms entering a new practice area or a new city, who want the new pages to strengthen the site rather than dilute it. And agencies selling search to law firms who need the work done properly under their own name.
Questions law firms ask
Can you guarantee first place for our main search
No, and neither can anyone else. Google says no one can guarantee a number one ranking. What I can show you is dated, sourced results from firms like yours, and the structure that produced them.
Who checks the legal content
I check every legal statement against the statute itself. Where a page gives practical legal guidance, a lawyer at the firm should review it before it goes live, and the page can say so.
Will this work for a small firm
Structure matters more for a small firm, not less, because it cannot outspend the big ones. A clear pillar, the right case type pages and genuine local hubs let a small firm win the searches it can realistically serve.
What about directories and lead-generation sites
They compete for the same searches and will keep doing so. The answer is pages that serve the searcher better than a directory listing can: specific, local, written by people who handle the work.
Do you work with firms outside Nevada
Yes. The structure is the same everywhere; the law, the courts and the rivals are what change, and those are researched fresh for each firm.
Run a law firm, or sell search to law firms?
Send me the site. I will tell you which searches it is being shown for, why it is or is not being chosen, and what the structure needs.