Lawyer SEO marketing for US law firms

People search a matter and a place

People rarely search for a full-service law firm. They search a problem, often with a city or the words near me: a collision, a charge, a dismissal, a visa, a custody filing.

Others already have the firm's name, from a referral, and want the phone number, the office, and a reason to trust what they were told.

Those need different pages. Write down the matters the firm wants more of, the matters it will refer out, and the states it practises in.

Marketing for lawyers starts with that list. A site that tries to say everything gives a stranger no page they can land on and recognise.

What a practice page has to contain

Give each matter its own page. The heading should use the words a client would type.

The page then answers the questions that person has before they call.

• Who the matter is for, and who the firm will not take.
• What the firm does, in the order it happens.
• What to bring to the first conversation.
• Which lawyer does the work, in a bio only that lawyer could have written.
• How to get in touch: a phone number, and a form that asks for a name, a way to reply, and a short note.

Fees are the firm's decision, and often the state bar's. If the firm can state a charging method, the page should say it.

If it cannot, the page should say how the fee is explained at the consult. Do not leave the fee as a surprise, and do not invent a number.

The Google profile is part of the same job

For a local search, Google commonly shows a map and three listings above the ordinary results. The Google Business Profile needs the same care as the website.

• The name is the firm's name. Stuffing a keyword into the business name is a good way to lose the listing.
• The primary category matches the work. A family practice should not list itself as a personal-injury firm to chase a volume term.
• The address is an office clients can visit. If there is no such office, set the listing up as a service-area business.
• Do not borrow a virtual office and pretend people walk in.
• The phone number matches the number on the site.
• Photographs are of the office and the people. A stock photo of a gavel does not help a client choose the firm.
• Reviews are answered, including the unhappy ones. Paying for a review, or offering a discount for one, cuts against Google's review policies.
• So does asking only the clients who are likely to be pleased and discarding the rest.

City pages, and why this site has none

A page that swaps the city name and keeps the same three paragraphs tells the person in that city nothing that is true only there. Google has spent years pushing that pattern down.

A location page is worth writing when the firm has something specific: a lawyer who sits in that office, a court it appears in, or a local procedure it can describe from its own files.

UDG does not publish local town pages here. If a firm needs them later, they are written one at a time, for places the firm really serves, after the practice pages exist.

A hundred thin pages will not do the work of one specific page. The wider marketing decisions are on our law firm marketing page.

This page is about search.

The technical list worth doing

Keep the technical work short. Give the page one H1, and write a title and a meta description for that page alone.

Put the words in the HTML, so they are not locked inside an image, and serve the page over HTTPS. Use one canonical host, so the www and non-www versions are not two copies of the same firm.

Link to a related matter from the page. A footer that lists every town in the state does not help.

A search result and an AI answer can both quote a plain answer. A slogan gives them nothing to quote.

People open these pages on a phone, between other things. The phone number has to be visible straight away.

We will not quote a speed score we have not measured on your site. We will refuse a design that hides the number under an intro animation.

How to read an agency pitch

Ask which pages they will write, and ask to read one they are proud of for a firm other than yours. Ask what they will not publish.

A page for every town in the state is selling volume. A guarantee of a first-page position is the same kind of offer, and so is a daily post with no subject.

We do not guarantee positions. Google does not sell rankings, and a firm that promises one is guessing with your name on it.

State bars also set the advertising rules, and the rules differ from state to state. Outcomes and client stories are the usual problems.

The words specialist and expert cause the same trouble. We are not your ethics counsel.

You check every state you practise in before any of that goes on a page. We would rather cut a line than invent a result.