A Step-by-Step Framework for Diagnosing Your Law Firm's SEO Health

This guide is written for attorneys and firm administrators who want an honest picture of where their search presence stands before making decisions about SEO investment. It is equally useful for a solo practitioner who has never done any SEO work and a managing partner whose firm has worked with an agency for twelve months but hasn't seen meaningful ranking movement.

Run this diagnostic when:

• You are evaluating whether your current SEO program is working
• You are considering your first SEO engagement and want to understand your starting point
• A competitor's site has outranked yours despite launching after yours
• Your organic traffic has declined over the past three to six months without an obvious cause
• You are expanding to a new practice area or geographic market and need a baseline

This guide does not replace a professional technical audit performed with crawling tools — it is a structured self-assessment that tells you which of the four diagnostic layers needs the most attention and whether you have the internal capacity to address it. This is educational content, not legal or professional consulting advice. Specific technical remediation steps will vary based on your site's architecture and CMS.

Each section below walks through one diagnostic layer. At the end of each, you will assign a score of 1 to 5. The priority matrix at the close of this guide translates those scores into an action sequence.

Technical SEO problems are invisible to the naked eye but directly affect whether Google can crawl, index, and rank your pages. A firm can produce excellent content and earn credible links — and still rank poorly if the technical foundation is broken.

Check these items manually or with a free crawl tool:

• Indexation: Search site:yourfirm.com in Google. The number of results should roughly match your actual page count. Significantly fewer means pages are being blocked or excluded from the index.
• Mobile usability: Use Google Search Console's Mobile Usability report (free). Law firm searches skew heavily mobile — any usability errors here directly suppress rankings.
• Page speed: Run your homepage and a practice area page through Google PageSpeed Insights. Core Web Vitals scores below the green threshold on mobile are a ranking signal disadvantage.
• HTTPS: Confirm every page is served over HTTPS. HTTP pages carry a browser warning that increases bounce rates and signals trust problems to Google.
• Crawl errors: Check the Coverage report in Google Search Console for 404 errors, redirect chains, and blocked resources. Redirect chains of three or more hops dilute link equity.
• Duplicate content: Check whether your site serves the same content at multiple URLs (www vs. non-www, trailing slash vs. no trailing slash, HTTP vs. HTTPS). Unresolved canonicalization splits ranking signals.

Industry benchmarks suggest that many law firm websites built on templated platforms carry at least two or three of these issues without the firm's awareness. Resolving technical issues first is the correct sequence — content and link work built on a broken foundation produces diminishing returns.

Score this layer 1–5: 5 = no issues found; 3 = one or two fixable issues; 1 = multiple crawl/index problems present.

For most law firms, the Map Pack — the three business listings that appear above organic results for local searches — drives more qualified calls than any other search feature. Ranking in the Map Pack depends on your Google Business Profile, review signals, and local citation consistency. It is a separate ranking system from organic results and requires its own diagnostic.

Audit your local visibility with these checks:

• Google Business Profile completeness: Log into your GBP dashboard. Every category field, service area, business hours, and practice area should be populated. Incomplete profiles rank below complete ones, and this is the highest-impact, lowest-effort fix available to most firms.
• Primary category selection: GBP allows one primary category. For law firms, this is the single most important GBP ranking signal. The category should match your dominant practice area (e.g., "Personal Injury Attorney" rather than the generic "Law Firm") where applicable.
• Review volume and recency: Manually compare your review count and average rating to the three firms currently appearing in the Map Pack for your target search query. Recency matters — a firm with 40 reviews earned in the past six months will often outrank one with 120 reviews earned over five years, all else equal.
• Citation consistency: Check your firm's name, address, and phone number (NAP) on the major legal directories — Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, and your state bar's directory. Any inconsistency across these sources weakens local ranking signals.
• GBP posts and Q&A: Active GBP profiles with recent posts and answered Q&A questions signal an engaged, legitimate business to Google.

Important: Any review solicitation practices should comply with your state bar's advertising rules and ABA Model Rule 7.2 guidance. Verify current ethics rules with your jurisdiction before implementing a review generation program. This content is educational and does not constitute ethics or legal advice.

Score this layer 1–5: 5 = GBP complete, reviews competitive, citations consistent; 1 = GBP sparse, few reviews, NAP inconsistencies across directories.

Google's quality guidelines for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics — which explicitly include legal content — require that pages demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). A generic practice area page with 300 words of boilerplate content will not outrank a competing page that signals real attorney expertise and jurisdiction-specific knowledge.

Evaluate each core practice area page against these criteria:

• Attorney attribution: Is the page written by or attributed to a named attorney with visible credentials? Anonymous firm-voice content scores lower on E-E-A-T signals than content tied to a named, credentialed professional.
• Jurisdiction specificity: Does the page reference applicable state statutes, local court procedures, or jurisdiction-specific timelines? Generic content that could apply in any state provides weak relevance signals for local searches.
• Depth and intent match: Open the top three results for your target keyword and compare word count, structure, and topic coverage to your own page. This is not a directive to match word count mechanically — it is a signal of whether your page is substantively covering the topic at a competitive level.
• Schema markup: Check whether your pages use LegalService or Attorney schema markup. This structured data helps Google correctly categorize your pages and can produce rich result features.
• Internal linking: Practice area pages should link to relevant location pages, attorney bio pages, and related practice areas. Isolated pages that don't connect to the site's broader structure receive less crawl priority.

In our experience working with law firm websites, the content layer is where the most recoverable gains exist. Thin practice area pages are common — and rewriting them with jurisdiction-specific depth and proper E-E-A-T signals produces measurable ranking improvement within three to five months in most competitive markets.

Score this layer 1–5: 5 = attributed, specific, comprehensive, schema-marked pages; 1 = short, generic, unattributed pages with no structured data.

Links from external websites to yours — particularly from credible, relevant sources — remain one of Google's strongest ranking signals. For law firms, the relevant link universe includes legal directories, bar association websites, local news outlets, community organizations, and academic or government sources. A technically sound site with strong content but a thin link profile will consistently underperform against competitors who have earned external validation.

Audit your link profile with these steps:

• Referring domain count: Use a free tool like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools or Moz Link Explorer to pull your referring domain count. Compare this to the top three ranking competitors for your primary target keyword. A significant gap in referring domains often explains ranking gaps that content improvements alone cannot close.
• Directory presence: Confirm your firm is listed (with a link) on Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Martindale-Hubbell, and your state and local bar association directories. These are foundational legal citations and are among the most trusted sources in the legal link graph.
• Link quality: Scan your referring domains for any links from low-quality, unrelated, or penalized sites. These do not contribute to ranking and, in aggregate, can create a trust signal problem.
• Anchor text distribution: An over-optimized anchor text profile — where a high percentage of links use exact-match keyword anchors — can trigger algorithmic scrutiny. A healthy profile contains a mix of branded, navigational, and topical anchors.
• Unlinked mentions: Search your firm name in Google News. Any media mention that does not include a link back to your site is a recoverable link opportunity — a simple outreach email requesting a link addition converts at a reasonable rate from credible sources.

Score this layer 1–5: 5 = strong referring domain base competitive with top-ranking peers, quality directory presence, clean profile; 1 = fewer than 10 referring domains, missing major legal directories, no local editorial links.

Once you have scored all four layers, use the framework below to sequence your remediation work. Resources spent on the wrong layer in the wrong order produce slow results.

Score interpretation:

• Any layer scoring 1 or 2: This is a blocking issue. Address it before investing further in other layers. A Layer 1 (technical) score of 1 means content and link work is largely wasted until crawl and indexation problems are resolved.
• Layers scoring 3: Functional but not competitive. These layers benefit from improvement but do not block progress in other areas.
• Layers scoring 4 or 5: Defensible position. Maintain and monitor rather than over-investing here.

Decision framework — when to handle internally vs. hire professionally:

• Handle internally: GBP profile completion, NAP consistency correction, requesting links from existing directory listings, adding attorney attribution to existing content pages. These tasks require time but not technical expertise.
• Consider professional help when: Your technical audit reveals crawl errors, canonicalization problems, or Core Web Vitals failures that require developer intervention; your content layer score is low and your internal team lacks legal content writing capacity; your link profile is significantly behind competitors and you need a structured acquisition strategy; or your scores are low across all four layers simultaneously.

Attempting to self-remediate multiple low-scoring layers in sequence without a structured program typically extends the timeline by six to twelve months compared to a coordinated professional engagement. This is not a sales argument — it is a practical observation about where attorney time is most efficiently allocated.

If your audit reveals a score of 1 or 2 across two or more layers, request a professional SEO audit for your law firm to get a technical assessment with specific remediation priorities rather than working from a general framework.