Attorney SEO: win it one practice area at a time

Attorney SEO is won practice area by practice area, not at firm level. The unit of work is one page for one practice area, written at the depth of a first client meeting, plus one page for each practice area in each place you genuinely serve. Read your bar advertising rules before you write a single page title, build for the local intent that dominates legal search, and judge the whole programme on signed matters and cost per signed matter rather than positions.

This page is organised around the practice area, because that is where the searches, the competition and the economics differ. It covers the rules, the page anatomy, criminal defence as the hardest consumer case, local intent and the arithmetic behind your budget.

Why the practice area is the unit of work

Nobody searches for a law firm. They search for their problem, and the problem decides everything downstream: how urgent the search is, what device it happens on, how many firms are competing, and what the matter is worth to you.

Practice area	Searcher's state of mind	What the page has to answer
Criminal defence	Frightened, often same day, often on a phone	What happens next, bail and first hearing, what the charge carries, can you call now
DUI and driving offences	Urgent, researching the specific charge	Licence consequences, the test process, first offence versus repeat
Family and divorce	Considering for weeks, comparing several firms	Process and timeline, costs, children and property, confidentiality
Immigration	Procedural, deadline driven, often multilingual	Which route applies, documents, timelines, what disqualifies an application
Commercial litigation	Professional buyer, low volume, high value	Experience in this dispute type, the court, the team, fee structure

A firm page that lists six of these in a paragraph each competes for none of them. Six real pages compete for six markets.

Read the advertising rules first

This is the step firms skip and then unpick at cost. Rules differ by jurisdiction, and the same themes recur.

• Nothing false or misleading. ABA Model Rule 7.1 states that a lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services, and US state bars adopt their own versions. An unverifiable superlative in a page title is the most common breach on a law firm site.
• Specialist and expert wording. Many jurisdictions restrict calling a lawyer a specialist unless an approved body has certified it. Settle this before page titles are written.
• Past results and testimonials. Some jurisdictions allow them with a disclaimer, some restrict them. Decide the policy once and apply it everywhere.
• Paid referrals and lead generation. ABA Model Rule 7.2 governs payment for recommendations, which matters the moment a vendor offers to sell you exclusive leads.
• Mandatory website information. In England and Wales the Solicitors Regulation Authority requires firms to publish specified price and service information, alongside the duties in the Code of Conduct. Those pages answer a real searcher question, so treat them as content.
• One approver. Name the lawyer who signs off every published page, and have the agency send copy to that person.

The anatomy of a practice area page

Write it as the first meeting you have had two hundred times. In order:

1. The plain answer to the question in the title, in the first paragraph.
2. What the charge, claim or process actually involves, in the words clients use.
3. The steps, with realistic timings from your own experience in that court.
4. How fees work for this matter type: hourly, fixed, contingency where permitted, and what moves the number.
5. The named lawyers who handle it, with admissions and matter types, and a real photograph.
6. The five questions clients ask in the first ten minutes, answered properly.
7. What to bring, and one clear way to make contact, including a phone number that is answered.

Your associates hold the material that makes this unbeatable: which form the local court expects, how long a hearing date is realistically taking this year, the mistake in week one that costs clients most. Fifteen minutes of a lawyer talking, written up by a writer, then corrected and bylined by the lawyer, beats anything an agency researches alone. Google's guidance on creating helpful content asks for first hand expertise and clarity about who wrote something, which is what a named attorney byline supplies.

Criminal defence, where urgency changes the build

Criminal defence searches behave differently from every other practice area, and the site has to be built for that.

• Build by charge and by court. Separate pages for the charges you defend, because that is how people search, plus a page for each court you appear in, naming the local process and practicalities.
• Answer the first night questions. Bail, the first hearing, whether to speak to police, what happens to a job, a licence, a visa.
• Make the phone work. Tap to call at the top of every page and a number answered out of hours. A form alone loses these enquiries.
• Write for the family too. Many of these searches are run by a parent or partner, so a page explaining what a relative can do is one nobody else wrote.

Local intent, and the map results

Most consumer legal queries carry a location, stated or implied, so a large share of the enquiry volume comes from the map results rather than the ordinary listings.

• A complete Business Profile for each staffed office, with the primary category set to your main practice area.
• Only offices that are genuinely staffed. Google's guidelines require a real staffed location, so a virtual address is a liability.
• Individual practitioner profiles for public facing lawyers, which the same guidelines allow alongside the firm.
• One location page per office with its own text: the courts you appear in, the lawyers based there, parking, transport.

Google's Local Services Ads with the Screened badge sit above the organic results in many legal markets. That is a separate paid budget, not an SEO outcome.

Case value decides where you spend

Legal search has low volume and high value, so a handful of extra matters can pay for everything. Work it per practice area with your own figures. As an illustration only, with invented numbers to show the method: if a matter type brings in 4,000 in fees, you convert one in four consultations, and the programme costs 3,000 a month, then three consultations a month from organic search break even and six double your money. Do that sum before choosing which pages get built first.

How to measure it

• Consultations booked from organic search, split by practice area.
• Signed matters from organic search, and their fee value.
• Tracked calls from the site and from each Business Profile.
• Cost per signed matter, compared with your paid channels each quarter.

Record the baseline before any work starts. Walk away from vendors who report positions instead of consultations, and note what Google says in its guidance on whether you need an SEO: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a 'special relationship' with Google, or advertise a 'priority submit' to Google."

This page covers organic search organised by practice area. For personal injury, the competitive picture needs its own treatment. On the exact wording your jurisdiction allows, your regulator's rules are the authority.

The Attorney SEO questions worth an answer

How many practice area pages should a firm have?

One for every area you want more of, and none for areas you take only as favours. Six strong pages serve a firm better than twenty thin ones, and the test is whether a lawyer in that area would be happy to be named as the author.

Do I need a page for every city nearby?

Build the location pages you can defend: an office, lawyers who appear in that court, and matters you have actually run there. Mass produced city pages with the name swapped are the single most common reason a law firm site stops performing.

Is criminal defence SEO harder than other practice areas?

It is more competitive in most cities and the searches are more urgent, so intake quality decides the result as much as ranking does. The firms that win it answer the phone at midnight and have a page for each charge.

How long before it produces matters?

Profile and review work often shows movement within weeks. Practice area pages in a contested city are judged over two to three quarters. Judge the first month on the diagnosis: a partner who has named no specific problem on your site by then has told you something useful about them.

One more place clients are asking who to hire

People now put legal questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews in the words they would use with a lawyer, then ask who to call. Those five answer differently, name different firms and cite different sources, and they run no shared ranking, so a strong position in one says nothing about the others. For legal questions they lean on bar directories, legal publishers and review sites.

Very few firms have checked what those answers say about their practice area and their city. Be wary of any vendor selling a promised placement inside an AI answer, the same way you would treat a ranking guarantee, because the output belongs to those companies. Ask the questions a client would ask in two or three assistants, keeping your firm name out of the prompt so the answer is not steered. AI Knows Us tracks what those answers say about a practice area.