A Step-by-Step Framework for Setting Up and Ranking Your Law Firm's Google Business Profile

When a prospective client searches "divorce attorney near me" or "DUI lawyer in [city]," the first organic results they see are not traditional website links — they are the three Map Pack listings. That three-pack is driven almost entirely by Google Business Profile signals, proximity, and local authority. Ranking in that pack for your primary practice area is frequently worth more in new client volume than ranking on page one organically.

In our experience working with law firms, GBP is consistently the fastest path to measurable local visibility improvement — especially for firms that have not yet built substantial domain authority. A well-configured profile can produce Map Pack appearances within weeks of optimization, while organic rankings for competitive legal keywords typically take six months or longer to move.

That said, GBP is not a magic lever. It works in combination with on-page local SEO (location pages, structured data, NAP consistency) and citation building. Treating it as a standalone effort limits results. Think of it as the anchor of your local presence — everything else reinforces it.

This guide covers the setup and optimization decisions that actually move rankings: category selection, service area configuration, profile completeness, post strategy, and review generation within the constraints of bar advertising rules. Each section is designed to be actionable — you or a team member can implement these steps directly.

Who this guide is for: Solo practitioners and small-to-mid-size law firms managing their own local presence, as well as marketing staff responsible for maintaining GBP profiles across one or multiple office locations.

Google uses your primary category as one of its strongest signals for determining which searches your profile is eligible to appear in. Choosing the wrong primary category — or defaulting to the generic "Law Firm" — limits your reach for the specific practice-area searches your ideal clients are running.

How to Choose Your Primary Category

Select the most specific category that accurately describes your primary practice area. Google's legal category library includes options such as:

• Personal Injury Attorney
• Criminal Justice Attorney
• Family Law Attorney
• Immigration Attorney
• Estate Planning Attorney
• Bankruptcy Attorney
• Employment Attorney
• Real Estate Attorney

If your firm focuses on personal injury, select "Personal Injury Attorney" — not "Law Firm." Google reads specificity as a relevance signal. "Law Firm" is appropriate only if your practice is genuinely general and you serve clients across many unrelated areas.

Secondary Categories

You can add up to nine additional categories. Use these to reflect secondary practice areas your firm actively handles. If you are a family law firm that also handles estate planning, add "Estate Planning Attorney" as a secondary category. Do not add categories for practice areas you rarely take on — Google may rank you for those searches and generate unqualified inquiries that waste your intake team's time.

Category Audit for Existing Profiles

If your profile has been live for some time, review your primary category now. Many firms were set up with "Lawyer" or "Law Firm" during initial registration and never revisited it. Updating the primary category is one of the fastest single-action improvements you can make. Note that category changes can temporarily affect rankings — a minor fluctuation for one to two weeks is normal before the profile resettles.

Google's local ranking algorithm rewards profile completeness. A partially filled profile is less likely to surface in competitive searches than a complete one. More practically, an incomplete profile leaves prospective clients without the information they need to decide whether to call — which means you lose them to a competitor whose profile answers their questions.

Fields to Complete in Full

• Business name: Use your actual firm name — no keyword stuffing. "Smith Law" not "Smith Law — Best Personal Injury Lawyer Chicago." Keyword stuffing in business names violates Google's guidelines and can result in profile suspension.
• Address: Must match the address used across all citations and your website exactly (suite numbers, abbreviations, punctuation).
• Phone number: Use a local area code number, not a tracked toll-free line as the primary. Consistency across the web matters.
• Website URL: Link to your primary domain homepage or a relevant location page if you are a multi-location firm.
• Hours: Keep these accurate and update them for holidays. Inaccurate hours generate negative reviews and erode trust.
• Description: 750-character limit. Use the first 250 characters for your most important message — only those appear without clicking "more." Describe your practice areas, geography served, and what differentiates your firm. No promotional superlatives.

Services Section

The services section is one of the most underused parts of GBP for law firms. Add each of your practice areas as a service with a short description. Write descriptions using natural language that reflects how clients search — "car accident claims," "child custody disputes," "green card applications." This content is indexed and contributes to keyword relevance for non-branded searches.

Attributes

Enable any applicable attributes — online appointments, wheelchair accessible entrance, languages spoken. These filter into Google's local search features and can help your profile appear for more specific queries.

Service area settings tell Google which geographic markets you want to appear in beyond your immediate office location. This is especially relevant for attorneys who serve clients across county or state lines, handle remote consultations, or operate in metro areas where clients search using multiple city names.

When to Add Service Areas

If your firm actively serves clients in surrounding cities or counties — and you want to appear in searches from those locations — add them as service areas. You can add up to 20 service area locations. Be honest about where you actually serve clients. Adding service areas for markets where you have no realistic ability to serve clients generates calls you cannot convert and may trigger geographic spam flags.

Address-Only vs. Service Area Business

Law firms with a physical office open to clients should display their address and optionally add service areas. Do not hide your address unless your office is genuinely not a place clients visit (rare for most practices). Hiding your address removes you from proximity-based ranking factors, which is a significant disadvantage.

Multi-Location Firms

If your firm has two or more physical offices, each location should have its own separate, verified GBP profile. Do not attempt to cover multiple office cities from a single profile — Google's guidelines require a distinct profile per location, and a single-profile approach limits your Map Pack eligibility in each city. Each profile should have location-specific photos, hours, and (where possible) location-specific phone numbers.

For firms with multiple offices, coordinate GBP management carefully. Inconsistent NAP data across profiles — mismatched suite numbers, different firm name formats — creates citation conflicts that suppress rankings. A single internal owner or your SEO partner should manage all profiles with a consistent naming and data convention.

Reviews are one of the three primary Map Pack ranking factors, alongside relevance and proximity. Review velocity (how frequently you receive new reviews), review recency, and average rating all influence where your profile ranks. Firms that treat review generation as a passive, hope-for-the-best activity consistently underperform against competitors who have a system.

What You Can Do

Most state bars permit attorneys to ask satisfied clients for honest reviews. The ABA Model Rules 7.1–7.3 govern attorney advertising broadly, and review solicitation falls within this framework in most jurisdictions — but rules vary by state. Verify your state bar's current advertising rules before implementing any review solicitation program. This is educational guidance, not legal ethics advice.

Generally permissible practices include:

• Asking clients directly at case close whether they would be willing to share their experience on Google
• Sending a follow-up email with a direct link to your GBP review page
• Including a review link in your post-matter client survey

What to Avoid

• Incentivizing reviews: Offering discounts, gifts, or any benefit in exchange for a review violates both Google's policies and most bar advertising rules.
• Purchasing reviews: Fake reviews are a Google policy violation and create significant professional responsibility exposure.
• Posting responses that reveal client information: When responding to negative reviews, do not disclose case details or confirm the reviewer was a client. Bar confidentiality rules apply even to public review responses.

Responding to Reviews

Respond to every review — positive and negative. For positive reviews, a brief, genuine acknowledgment is sufficient. For negative reviews, keep your response professional, factual, and general. Never argue, never disclose client information, and never confirm or deny the specifics of a matter. A calm, professional response to a negative review often reassures prospective clients more than a perfect five-star record.

A completed and verified GBP profile is not a set-and-forget asset. Google rewards active profiles — those that post regularly, update information, respond to reviews, and add new photos. Profiles that go dormant can gradually lose ranking position to more active competitors, even if the dormant profile was once well-optimized.

Google Posts

Google Posts appear directly on your profile in search results and in the local panel. They have a default display lifespan of approximately seven days for standard posts (event posts display until the event date). A weekly post cadence keeps your profile visually active and signals to Google that the business is engaged.

Effective post types for law firms include:

• Educational posts: A brief answer to a common client question ("What should I do after a car accident?"). These demonstrate expertise and generate profile engagement.
• News or law change updates: Changes to local ordinances, court procedures, or legislation relevant to your practice area — framed as informational, not legal advice.
• Firm updates: New office hours, attorney additions, community involvement. Keep these brief.

Posts should not make specific outcome promises or violate bar advertising content rules. Frame all posts as general information, not legal advice, and include a brief disclaimer where appropriate for your jurisdiction.

Photos

Add interior and exterior photos of your office, headshots of attorneys, and team photos. Profiles with photos receive meaningfully more click-throughs than those without, based on industry benchmarks. Aim for at least ten photos at setup, then add new images quarterly.

Q&A Section

The Q&A section on your GBP profile is publicly editable — anyone can post a question, and anyone can answer. Monitor this section regularly. Seed it with two or three common questions prospective clients ask, and answer them yourself. This both controls the narrative and adds keyword-relevant content to your profile.