A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Personal Injury Law Firms

This framework is written for two audiences: PI firm owners who want to understand what's actually driving — or limiting — their organic performance, and in-house marketing directors who need a structured way to evaluate either their current agency's work or a prospective one's proposal.

The audit applies most directly when your firm is in one of these situations:

• You're spending on SEO but can't clearly explain what's working or why.
• Rankings dropped after a website redesign or domain change.
• A new competitor has appeared in positions you previously held.
• You're entering a new market or adding a practice area (e.g., truck accidents, medical malpractice) and want to understand the gap before investing.
• You're evaluating whether to keep your current agency, bring work in-house, or engage a specialist.

What this audit is not: a one-time fix. Personal injury is one of the most competitive local search verticals in legal. Markets like Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles see constant movement. An audit is a snapshot — the value comes from repeating key sections quarterly and acting on what you find.

If you're a solo practitioner in a mid-size market with a relatively new website, focus on the technical and local sections first. If you're a multi-attorney firm that's been online for several years, the content and authority sections will likely surface the most meaningful opportunities.

Technical SEO isn't glamorous, but it's the foundation everything else sits on. A content strategy built on a slow or misconfigured website will underperform regardless of how well-written the pages are.

Crawlability and Indexation

Use Google Search Console to check for crawl errors, pages blocked by robots.txt, and any manual actions. Run a site crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to find broken internal links, redirect chains, and orphaned pages — pages that exist on your site but aren't linked from anywhere.

Core Web Vitals and Page Speed

Google's Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) directly affect how your pages are evaluated for ranking. In our experience working with law firm websites, the most common failure is Largest Contentful Paint on mobile — often caused by uncompressed hero images or render-blocking scripts. Check your scores via PageSpeed Insights or the CWV report in Search Console. Focus on mobile scores; most PI-related searches happen on phones.

HTTPS and Site Security

Every page on your site should be served over HTTPS. Mixed-content warnings — where a secure page loads insecure resources — can trigger browser warnings that damage trust and potentially affect rankings. Verify with a tool like Why No Padlock.

Duplicate Content and Canonical Tags

Law firm websites frequently generate duplicate content through parameter-based URLs, printer-friendly page variants, or near-identical location pages. Audit your canonical tags to confirm each page points to its preferred URL. For multi-location firms, this is especially important — Google should not have to guess which city page is authoritative.

Document every finding with a severity rating: Critical (blocks indexation or causes manual action), High (measurably hurts ranking or user experience), Medium (worth fixing within 60 days), or Low (marginal improvement).

For personal injury firms, local search — specifically the Map Pack — is often the highest-converting traffic source. A single Map Pack position for a term like "car accident lawyer [city]" can represent meaningful case volume. This layer of the audit examines three things: your Google Business Profile, your citation footprint, and your review profile.

Google Business Profile Health Check

Log into your GBP and verify:

• Primary category is set to "Personal Injury Attorney" (not just "Law Firm" or "Lawyer").
• All relevant secondary categories are added.
• Business name exactly matches your official firm name — no keyword stuffing, which violates Google's guidelines.
• Service areas and office address are accurate and consistent with your website.
• Photos are current, professionally shot, and include interior, exterior, and team images.
• Posts are being published regularly — at minimum, twice per month.
• The Q&A section has been seeded with common intake questions and answered by the firm.

Citation Consistency (NAP Audit)

Your firm's Name, Address, and Phone number should be identical across every directory listing. In personal injury specifically, priority citation sources include Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, Super Lawyers, Martindale-Hubbell, and your state bar directory. Run a citation audit using BrightLocal or Whitespark. Inconsistencies — even minor variations like "Suite 400" vs "Ste. 400" — can dilute local ranking signals across a competitive market.

Review Velocity and Sentiment

Assess how many Google reviews you have compared to your top two Map Pack competitors. Note the recency of reviews — a firm with 80 reviews but none in the past six months may be losing ground to a competitor with 40 reviews and consistent monthly activity. Check your average rating and read your most recent negative reviews for patterns. Note: Any strategy for soliciting or responding to reviews must comply with your state bar's advertising rules and ABA Model Rules 7.1–7.3. Verify requirements with your jurisdiction before implementing a review program.

Personal injury content audits are different from other legal verticals because the keyword landscape is segmented by case type, causation, and geography — not just practice area. "Car accident lawyer Chicago" and "Uber accident attorney Chicago" are separate opportunities that require separate pages.

Inventory Your Existing Pages

Export all indexed URLs from Search Console and categorize them: homepage, practice area pages, location pages, attorney bios, blog posts, and landing pages. For each practice area page, note whether it targets a specific injury type (e.g., traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, wrongful death) or remains generic. Generic pages almost always underperform against pages built around specific case types in competitive markets.

Identify Keyword Gaps

Using a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, pull the organic keyword rankings for your top two or three local competitors. Filter for keywords where they rank in positions 1–10 and you rank outside the top 20 or don't rank at all. Group gaps by category:

• Case type gaps: injury types your competitors cover that you don't have dedicated pages for.
• Geographic gaps: suburbs, neighborhoods, or nearby cities where competitors have location pages and you don't.
• Informational gaps: questions prospective clients are searching (e.g., "how long does a personal injury case take in [state]") that competitors are answering and you aren't.

Content Quality Assessment

For your existing practice area pages, evaluate each against four criteria: specificity (does it address the actual case type or stay generic?), depth (does it explain the legal process, typical timeline, and what a client should expect?), E-E-A-T signals (attorney authorship, credentials, case results where bar rules permit), and conversion architecture (is there a clear, low-friction call to action?). Pages that fail on two or more criteria are candidates for rewriting before adding new pages.

In competitive personal injury markets, content quality alone rarely wins top positions. Authority — measured largely through the quality and relevance of sites linking to yours — is the differentiating factor between firms that rank consistently and those that plateau.

Baseline Your Current Authority

Pull your domain's metrics in Ahrefs or Moz: Domain Rating or Domain Authority, total referring domains, and the distribution of those links by quality tier. A firm in a major market competing for high-value terms generally needs more referring domains from relevant, authoritative sources than a firm in a smaller market — but raw numbers matter less than link quality and relevance.

Competitor Backlink Gap

Export the referring domains for your top two competitors and compare them against your own backlink profile. Look for sites that link to both competitors but not to you — these represent your most actionable link acquisition opportunities. Common sources specific to the PI vertical include:

• Legal directories (Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, Super Lawyers, Martindale)
• Local bar association websites
• Local news outlets that have covered your cases or quoted your attorneys
• Community organizations your firm sponsors or supports
• Legal aid and nonprofit referral organizations

Toxic Link Assessment

Review your backlink profile for patterns that suggest spam: links from foreign-language sites unrelated to legal, links from private blog networks, or a sudden spike in low-quality links that coincides with a ranking drop. If you find a significant cluster of toxic links and your rankings have declined, this warrants deeper investigation — potentially including a disavow file submission in Search Console. This is one situation where engaging an SEO specialist is worth the cost of getting it wrong.

Document your authority gap against each competitor as a number: how many quality referring domains would you need to acquire to reach parity? That number helps scope a realistic link-building investment.

An audit that produces a 60-item issue list without prioritization is rarely acted on. This scoring approach helps you — or your agency — decide what to address first.

Score Each Finding on Two Dimensions

Rate every issue you've identified on Impact (how much will fixing this move ranking, traffic, or leads?) and Effort (how much time, cost, or technical complexity does fixing this require?), each on a 1–3 scale.

• Impact 3: Directly affects Map Pack ranking or high-volume practice area page positions.
• Impact 2: Improves a secondary metric (crawlability, page speed, informational content) that supports ranking indirectly.
• Impact 1: Cosmetic or marginal improvement with minimal measurable effect.
• Effort 1: Can be completed in under two hours with existing resources.
• Effort 2: Requires dedicated work over days or weeks, or external help.
• Effort 3: Significant development work, content production, or ongoing campaign (e.g., link building).

Build Your 90-Day Work Plan

Start with every finding scored Impact 3 / Effort 1 — these are your quick wins. Fix GBP category errors, resolve canonical issues, update outdated NAP data. Then move to Impact 3 / Effort 2: rewriting under-performing practice area pages, filling the most valuable Work through each layer of your firm's online presence — technical foundation, local signals, [content gaps and advertising compliance](/resources/personal-injury-lawyer/personal-injury-seo-advertising-compliance), authority — and leave with a prioritized action list, not just a list of problems., cleaning up citation inconsistencies.

Impact 3 / Effort 3 items — link building, a full site rebuild, creating a city-page architecture — belong in your 90–180 day plan and typically require either dedicated in-house resources or an agency engagement.

Anything scored Impact 1 goes on a backlog. Don't spend capital — time or money — on low-impact fixes while high-impact ones remain open.

Review your priority matrix monthly. Rankings shift, competitors invest, and new gaps open. The matrix should be a living document, not a one-time deliverable.