The Firms Winning Local Search Across Every Office Share These Three Structural Habits

This guide is written for mid-size and large law firms operating two or more physical office locations — whether that's a regional firm with three city offices or a national practice with locations across a dozen states.

If your firm has a single office, the tactics here are premature. Start with the local SEO for law firms foundational guide instead.

This guide is relevant to you if:

• Your firm has distinct physical addresses in different cities or metro areas
• Each office serves different client populations or geographic markets
• You've noticed that only your headquarters ranks well while branch offices are invisible in local search
• Your marketing team is managing (or neglecting) multiple Google Business Profiles without a consistent process
• You've launched location pages in the past that Google hasn't indexed, ranked, or taken seriously

The problems multi-office firms face aren't just technical — they're organizational. SEO across locations breaks down when there's no clear ownership over each GBP listing, no template for what a location page must contain, and no process for building local citations at the city level. This guide addresses all three.

Note: This is educational content covering SEO strategy, not legal or advertising compliance advice. Attorney advertising rules vary by state bar jurisdiction — verify any marketing approach with your firm's ethics counsel before implementation.

The most common mistake multi-office law firms make is treating their office locations as a list rather than as individual ranking assets. A single /contact page with all office addresses listed does nothing for local search. Google needs a dedicated, substantive page for each location to associate that office with local search queries.

The Right URL Structure

For most law firms, a subdirectory structure performs better than subdomains:

• Recommended: yourlawfirm.com/locations/dallas/
• Avoid: dallas.yourlawfirm.com (splits domain authority, harder to manage)

Each location URL should be permanent, self-consistent, and mapped 1:1 to a physical office address.

What Each Location Page Must Contain

A location page that actually ranks needs more than an address and a phone number. Each page should include:

• The office's full NAP (Name, Address, Phone) in text — not just an image or iframe
• An embedded Google Map of the specific office location
• Office-specific content: which attorneys are based there, what practice areas that office handles, local landmarks or neighborhoods served
• Schema markup: LocalBusiness (or LegalService) structured data with the location-specific address
• A link to that office's Google Business Profile
• Location-specific client testimonials or case context where ethically permissible under your state bar's advertising rules

Canonical Tags

Each location page should have a self-referencing canonical tag. Never canonicalize location pages to the homepage or a parent /locations/ index page — doing so tells Google the individual pages are duplicates and suppresses their ability to rank independently.

The /locations/ index page itself should exist as a navigational hub but should not compete with individual location pages for local queries.

Every physical law firm office that serves clients at that location qualifies for its own Google Business Profile. This is not optional if you want that office to appear in the Map Pack — a single GBP for your headquarters will not surface your other offices in local search.

Verification and Ownership

Each GBP must be verified separately. Use a centralized Google account (a firm-owned email, not an individual attorney's personal Gmail) to own all profiles. This prevents access loss when staff turns over — a problem that's more common than it should be in law firms managing multiple locations independently.

Consistency Across Profiles

Every GBP listing for your firm should share:

• Consistent business name format (no location suffixes like "Smith Law — Dallas" unless that's your legal DBA)
• The correct primary category — for most law firms, this is Law Firm or a practice-specific category like Personal Injury Attorney
• Matching NAP to what appears on the corresponding location page and across local directories
• Accurate hours for that specific office

GBP Posts and Q&A

Many multi-office firms publish GBP posts only on the headquarters profile. In our experience, offices with active posting schedules — even monthly — maintain stronger engagement signals than dormant profiles. Each location's GBP should have its own post cadence, even if the content is adapted from firm-wide announcements.

Monitor the Q&A section on every profile. Unanswered questions on a GBP listing can influence prospective clients before they ever visit your website.

Review Strategy by Location

Review signals are location-specific. Your Austin office cannot benefit from reviews left on your Houston GBP. Each location needs its own review generation process — typically a follow-up workflow that directs clients to the GBP for the office they worked with. Comply with your state bar's rules on soliciting testimonials; most jurisdictions permit review requests but prohibit incentivization.

Local citations — mentions of your firm's name, address, and phone number on external directories — remain a foundational local ranking signal. For multi-office firms, citation management is multiplicatively more complex: every directory listing that exists for your headquarters may need a parallel, location-specific listing for each branch office.

Priority Directories for Law Firms

Focus citation building on directories that carry genuine authority in the legal vertical:

• Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, Martindale-Hubbell, Super Lawyers
• State bar attorney directories (these carry high trust with Google)
• General directories: Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, BBB
• Chamber of commerce listings in each office's city

The NAP Consistency Rule

Every citation for a given location must match the NAP on that location's website page and GBP listing exactly — same abbreviations, same suite format, same phone number. Inconsistencies across directories create conflicting signals that suppress local rankings. Industry benchmarks suggest that NAP inconsistency is one of the most common and most correctable local SEO problems for multi-office firms.

Auditing Existing Citations

Before building new citations, audit what already exists. Tools like BrightLocal or Whitespark can surface duplicate or inconsistent listings that need to be corrected or suppressed. Firms that acquired other practices or rebranded offices frequently inherit citation pollution — old addresses, old phone numbers, or old firm names that still appear on directories.

Correct existing inconsistencies before scaling new citation building. Adding correct citations on top of wrong ones reduces — but doesn't eliminate — the negative signal from the bad data.

Location pages alone don't rank for competitive practice area queries — they rank for geographic queries tied to that location. To capture higher-intent searches like "personal injury attorney Dallas" or "estate planning lawyer Austin," location pages need to connect to your firm's practice area content and vice versa.

The Location-Practice Area Matrix

Think of your site structure as a matrix where location pages and practice area pages intersect. Each location page should link to the practice area pages most relevant to that office. Each practice area page should link back to the location pages where that service is available.

For example:

• Your Dallas location page links to your firm's Personal Injury and Business Litigation practice area pages
• Your Personal Injury practice page includes a section listing the offices that handle those cases, with links to each location page

This bidirectional linking tells Google which offices are associated with which services — critical for ranking branch offices for practice-specific queries, not just the firm's name.

City-Level Landing Pages vs. Location Pages

Some firms confuse location pages (tied to a physical office) with city-level landing pages (targeting a metro area the firm serves from a remote office or by traveling). These are different assets with different trust signals:

• Location pages: backed by a physical address, GBP, and verifiable presence — carry strong local ranking signals
• City pages: useful for expanding reach but should not use a fake address or virtual office address to support a GBP listing — this violates Google's guidelines and can result in listing suspension

In our experience, firms that build city pages honestly — without fabricating physical presence — can still generate organic visibility for those markets, but they should not expect Map Pack inclusion without a verified physical location.

Multi-location SEO introduces failure points that don't exist for single-office firms. Understanding where things break helps you prioritize the fixes that matter most.

Thin or Duplicate Location Pages

Many firms launch location pages by copying the homepage and swapping the city name. Google identifies this as near-duplicate content and either ignores the pages or ranks them poorly. Each location page needs genuinely unique content about that office, its attorneys, its service area, and its local context.

Unverified or Abandoned GBP Listings

Branch office GBP listings are frequently unclaimed or verified and then neglected. An unoptimized GBP — no photos, no posts, no service descriptions — performs significantly worse than a maintained one. Assign explicit ownership for each listing within your marketing team or agency.

Shared Phone Numbers Across Offices

Using a single tracking number across all locations undermines NAP consistency. Each office location should have its own local phone number — one that matches the GBP, the location page, and the directory citations for that office.

Wrong Canonical Tags on Location Pages

As covered in the architecture section, canonicalizing location pages to a parent URL destroys their ability to rank independently. This is a technical error that's easy to introduce during a site rebuild and easy to miss in an audit if you're not looking for it specifically.

No Review Generation Process Per Location

Firms often have a review request workflow for the firm as a whole but no mechanism for directing reviews to specific office GBP listings. Without this, flagship offices accumulate reviews while branch offices stagnate — widening the local visibility gap between locations over time.