The Firms Winning Local Search All Share These Four Practices

Many attorneys invest in SEO and assume the same work that improves their organic rankings will also move them into the Map Pack. That's only partially true. Google evaluates local results through a separate — though overlapping — set of signals, and understanding that distinction changes where you spend your effort.

For organic search, Google weighs page authority, content depth, backlink quality, and on-page relevance. For local search, three primary dimensions dominate: proximity (how close the searcher is to your office), relevance (how clearly your profile and website match the search intent), and prominence (how well-known and trusted your firm appears based on reviews, citations, and links).

Proximity is the one factor you can't engineer — your office address is your office address. But relevance and prominence are entirely within your control, and they're where most firms leave significant ground unclaimed.

Relevance is shaped by your Google Business Profile categories, the services you list, the keywords in your business description, and how well your website content reinforces those signals. Prominence is built through consistent citations, review volume and recency, local backlinks, and the authority of directories where your firm is listed.

The practical implication: a firm with a modest website can outrank a firm with a polished site if its local signals are stronger. Conversely, strong organic authority won't automatically translate into Map Pack placement without deliberate local optimization work.

This is why local SEO for law firms deserves its own strategy — not just a line item inside a broader SEO engagement.

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the most direct lever you have over Map Pack performance. Incomplete or inconsistently maintained profiles are one of the most common reasons law firms stall outside the top three positions.

Primary Category Selection

Choose the most specific category that matches your dominant practice area. If you're primarily a personal injury firm, select Personal Injury Attorney rather than the generic Lawyer category. You can add secondary categories for additional practice areas, but your primary category carries the most weight in search matching.

Services and Descriptions

Use the Services section to list each practice area explicitly — not as a marketing statement, but as a clear signal to Google about what your firm does. Your business description (750 characters) should naturally incorporate the practice areas and city or region you serve. Avoid keyword stuffing; write for a prospective client reading it cold.

Photos and Posts

Profiles with recent, high-quality photos — office exterior, interior, team — tend to perform better than profiles with stock imagery or no photos at all. Google Posts (short updates published directly to your profile) signal active management. Publishing one post per week covering a recent case type, FAQ, or legal update keeps your profile fresh without requiring significant resources.

Review Volume and Recency

Reviews are both a ranking signal and a conversion factor. A firm with 80 reviews averaging 4.6 stars will typically outperform one with 12 reviews averaging 5.0 stars in Map Pack placement — recency and volume matter alongside rating. Build a consistent process for requesting reviews from satisfied clients post-matter, subject to your state bar's guidelines on client testimonials. (Note: Review solicitation rules vary by jurisdiction. Verify current requirements with your state bar before implementing any review request process.)

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. Google uses your NAP data — collected from dozens of directories, data aggregators, and mentions across the web — to verify that your firm is a legitimate, established business at a specific location. Inconsistencies in that data create ambiguity, and ambiguity reduces confidence in your local signals.

Common NAP problems that affect attorney listings include:

• Suite numbers listed on some directories and omitted on others (e.g., "Suite 400" vs. no suite)
• Phone number formatting inconsistencies (local number vs. toll-free, different area code formats)
• Firm name variations across platforms ("Smith Law Group" vs. "Smith Law Group, LLC" vs. "Smith & Associates")
• Old addresses persisting after a firm relocation
• Multiple GBP listings created over time, creating duplicate conflicts

The fix is an audit, not a guess. Pull your firm's listings from the four major data aggregators — Neustar Localeze, Data Axle, Foursquare, and Factual — plus the top legal directories and verify each entry against your canonical NAP. Your canonical NAP is whatever you list on your website's contact page and in your GBP.

Corrections take time to propagate. Data aggregators push updates to downstream directories on their own schedule, so don't expect overnight results. In our experience working with law firms on citation cleanup, most markets stabilize within 60 to 90 days after corrections are submitted at the aggregator level.

Going forward, the simplest way to maintain NAP consistency is to designate one person responsible for updating all directories whenever any contact detail changes. Firm relocations and phone number changes are the most common sources of ongoing inconsistency.

Not all citations carry equal weight. A listing on a high-authority legal directory tells Google more about your firm's credibility than a listing on a generic local business directory. For law firms, there's a clear priority tier.

Tier 1: High-Authority Legal Directories

• Avvo — Widely recognized by consumers; claims and fills out your profile to prevent an unclaimed stub from appearing in searches
• Justia — Strong domain authority; frequently ranks well for attorney name searches
• FindLaw — High consumer traffic; Martindale-Hubbell parent company network
• Martindale-Hubbell — Long-established legal directory with peer review ratings that carry credibility signals
• Lawyers.com — Connected to the Martindale network; high authority
• Super Lawyers — Selection-based but a claimed profile still passes citation value

Tier 2: Bar Association and Court Directories

State bar member directories and local bar association listings are authoritative because they're verified by a governing body. If your state bar publishes a public attorney directory, your listing there is one of the strongest local citations available.

Tier 3: General Business Directories

Yelp, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, and the Better Business Bureau are general-purpose but still worth maintaining because of their reach and the NAP signals they send. These are table stakes, not differentiators.

The goal isn't to be listed everywhere — it's to be accurately listed on the directories that carry real authority in the legal vertical and that Google's local algorithm references when assessing prominence. A handful of strong, accurate citations outperforms dozens of low-quality ones.

One of the most consistent errors in attorney SEO is trying to rank a single homepage or practice page for every service the firm offers. Google's local algorithm — and its organic algorithm — rewards specificity. A dedicated page for each practice area, optimized for the local intent variant of that keyword, will outperform a catch-all page almost every time.

The framework works like this:

1. Identify your highest-value practice areas — usually the cases that generate the most revenue or that you want more of, not necessarily every service you offer
2. Map one page to each area — e.g., a standalone page for "personal injury attorney in [city]," a separate page for "car accident lawyer in [city]," and so on if case volume justifies it
3. Build the local intent into the page — title tag, H1, opening paragraph, and meta description should all include the practice area and the geographic qualifier
4. Add supporting content — FAQs specific to that practice area in your market, local court information, relevant statutes (framed educationally, not as legal advice), and any neighborhood or county specifics relevant to where you serve clients

For multi-location firms or firms serving a wide geographic area, location pages follow the same logic — one page per city or county you meaningfully serve, with content that reflects genuine knowledge of that market rather than a templated swap of the city name.

Thin location pages — where the only local signal is a swapped city name on an otherwise identical page — are a common target for Google's quality filters. Each location page should justify its existence with content a prospective client in that market would actually find useful.

Keyword research tools will tell you search volume, but your intake data will tell you which case types actually convert. Cross-reference both before deciding where to invest content effort.