A Step-by-Step Diagnostic Framework for Auditing Your Law Firm's SEO

This guide is written for two audiences: attorneys who want to understand what's happening with their firm's online visibility, and marketing staff or office managers who've been handed SEO responsibility without a clear framework for evaluating it.

It is not a checklist of tasks to complete once. It's a repeatable diagnostic methodology — something you can run when you're onboarding a new SEO vendor, evaluating whether your current one is performing, or trying to understand why rankings dropped after a site redesign.

You don't need to be technical to use this guide. Each section flags what you're looking for and what a finding means in plain terms. Where free tools can surface the data, we've noted them. Where the diagnosis requires paid tools or specialist interpretation, we say so plainly.

A few things this guide won't do: it won't tell you what keywords to target (that's a strategy question that depends on your practice areas and geography), and it won't give you a content calendar. Those come after the audit. The audit's job is to identify what's broken or missing — not to build your entire SEO program from scratch.

One note on scope: law firm websites that also need to comply with state bar advertising rules carry an additional review layer beyond standard SEO. This guide focuses on SEO diagnostics. For advertising compliance considerations, see our separate guide on attorney advertising compliance and SEO.

Technical SEO problems are the foundation of every other issue. A site that can't be properly crawled and indexed by Google won't rank well regardless of how strong its content or authority is. Run this layer first.

What to Check

• Crawlability: Use Google Search Console (free) to confirm Google can access your site. Check for crawl errors, blocked pages in robots.txt, and whether your key practice area pages are indexed. A surprising number of law firm sites have pages accidentally blocked from indexing after redesigns.
• HTTPS: Your site should serve entirely over HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings. Google treats this as a basic trust signal. Check your browser padlock and run a free SSL checker if unsure.
• Page speed: Use Google PageSpeed Insights (free) on your homepage and your highest-traffic practice area page. Core Web Vitals scores — particularly Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — directly affect ranking. Law firm sites built on bloated page-builder templates frequently fail here.
• Mobile rendering: Most local legal searches happen on mobile. Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to confirm your site renders correctly on small screens, and manually scroll through key pages on your phone.
• Duplicate content and canonical tags: If your site has multiple URLs serving the same content (www vs. non-www, HTTP vs. HTTPS, trailing slashes), you may be diluting authority across duplicate pages. A crawl tool like Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) will surface these quickly.

A clean technical bill of health doesn't guarantee rankings — but a broken technical foundation guarantees suppressed rankings. Fix anything flagged here before moving to content or authority work.

The most common SEO problem we encounter across law firm sites is a content mismatch: pages exist, but they don't match what prospective clients are actually searching for. This shows up in several patterns.

Practice Area Page Coverage

Each distinct practice area and each geographic market you serve should have its own dedicated page. A single "Personal Injury" page that covers car accidents, slip and fall, workers' compensation, and wrongful death is doing too much — each sub-practice carries its own search demand and its own competitive landscape. Map your current pages against your actual service offerings and identify gaps.

Keyword Intent Alignment

Pull your top landing pages from Google Search Console and look at the queries driving impressions. Ask: does the page content actually answer what those queries are asking? Many law firm pages are written to impress peers or describe process — not to answer the questions a potential client types into Google at 10pm after an accident. If your page ranks for a query but has a high bounce rate, intent misalignment is the likely cause.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Every practice area page should have a unique title tag that includes the practice area and the geography. Templated title tags (e.g., "Services | Smith Law Firm" across ten pages) are a fast diagnostic signal that content hasn't been properly optimized. Check these directly in your browser or with a crawl tool.

Thin Content

Pages with fewer than 300-400 words rarely rank for competitive legal queries. If your practice area pages are primarily navigation elements with brief descriptions, they're likely not generating organic traffic. In our experience working with law firm websites, thin practice area pages are the single most common content-layer finding.

For most law firms, the highest-value organic traffic comes from local searches: "divorce attorney [city]" or "DUI lawyer near me." These searches trigger the Google Map Pack — and the Map Pack is a separate ranking system from organic results. Your website audit alone won't diagnose Map Pack problems.

Google Business Profile Completeness

Pull up your GBP listing and check against this diagnostic list:

• Business name: Does it match your official firm name exactly? Keyword-stuffed names ("Smith Injury Lawyers | Car Accident Attorney") violate Google's guidelines and can trigger suspensions.
• Primary and secondary categories: Your primary category should be the most specific match to your dominant practice area (e.g., "Personal Injury Attorney" not just "Lawyer"). Secondary categories should cover your other practice areas.
• Service area vs. location: Brick-and-mortar offices should have a verified address showing. Service-area-only listings rank differently and for different query types.
• Photos: Profiles with no photos — or only stock photos — underperform compared to profiles with genuine office and team photos. This is a consistent pattern across local search research.
• Review volume and recency: Google weighs both the number of reviews and how recently they were posted. A firm with 40 reviews, most from three years ago, is at a disadvantage against a firm with 20 reviews from the past six months.

NAP Consistency

Your Name, Address, and Phone number should be identical across your website, GBP, legal directories (Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, Martindale), and any other citations. Inconsistencies — even minor ones like "Suite 400" vs. "Ste. 400" — can confuse Google's local entity matching. Run a citation audit through a tool like BrightLocal or Moz Local to surface inconsistencies at scale.

Authority — in SEO terms — is largely a function of which other websites link to yours and how trustworthy those sites are. For law firms, this layer is frequently underdeveloped because it requires active effort rather than on-site optimization.

Baseline Authority Assessment

Use a free tool like Moz's Link Explorer or Ahrefs' free tier to check your domain's authority score and compare it against two or three direct competitors in your market. If competitors consistently score significantly higher, you have an authority gap that content and technical fixes alone won't close.

Backlink Quality Check

Look at your existing backlinks. The diagnostic questions are:

• Are your links coming from relevant sources — legal directories, local news, bar association pages, community organizations — or from low-quality link farms?
• Do you have any links from sites Google considers spammy? These can suppress rankings and in rare cases trigger manual penalties. A disavow file may be needed if your link profile shows significant spam.
• Is there any link velocity pattern — a sudden spike or drop in links — that correlates with a ranking change you've experienced?

Competitor Backlink Gap

The most actionable output of an authority audit is a gap analysis: sites that link to your competitors but not to you. These represent link opportunities where your firm could plausibly earn or request a link. Common sources for law firms include local chambers of commerce, legal aid organizations, bar association committee pages, and local news outlets that cover legal topics.

Authority building takes time — in our experience, it's typically the slowest-moving layer of law firm SEO, with meaningful results appearing over a 6-12 month horizon in competitive markets. But the audit tells you where you stand today relative to who you're competing against.

After running all four diagnostic layers, most law firms end up with a list of 10-30 findings. Not all of them matter equally. This framework helps you sequence fixes by business impact rather than by technical complexity or audit order.

Scoring Each Finding

Rate every finding across two dimensions:

• Business impact (1-3): How directly does fixing this affect lead volume or conversion? A missing practice area page for your highest-revenue service area scores 3. A missing alt tag on a stock photo scores 1.
• Implementation effort (1-3): How much time, technical skill, or cost does the fix require? Fixing a redirect loop is a 1-2 for a developer but a 3 for a solo attorney doing their own site edits.

Prioritize findings that score high impact + low effort first. These are your quick wins. Address high impact + high effort items second — they move the needle most but need resourcing. Defer or accept low impact + high effort items unless you have spare capacity.

When the Audit Points to Professional Help

There are three audit outcomes that consistently indicate it's time to bring in a specialist rather than attempt in-house fixes:

1. Multiple critical technical issues: If you're finding crawl blocks, canonicalization problems, and Core Web Vitals failures simultaneously, fixing them piecemeal without understanding their interactions often creates new problems.
2. A significant authority gap: If competitors have substantially stronger link profiles, closing that gap requires a sustained outreach and PR strategy that most law firms don't have internal resources to run.
3. Post-redesign ranking drops: Site redesigns that weren't managed with SEO continuity in mind can cause significant ranking losses that require systematic diagnosis and recovery work beyond what a standard audit covers.

In each of these situations, the audit output you've generated is still valuable — it gives a specialist a head start and helps you evaluate whether their proposed approach actually addresses what you've found.