Law Firm SEO Audit: What to Check on an Attorney Website

A law firm SEO audit starts with the same checks as any site audit: can Google crawl the pages, index the right ones, and load them quickly. But attorney websites have their own weak spots, and they are rarely the ones a generic tool report flags.

I have worked in SEO and digital marketing for more than 16 years, and I work with clients remotely from Bucharest. I am not a lawyer, and this article is not legal advice. Anything about claims, disclaimers, reviews or client information should be checked with your own counsel or your state bar’s ethics guidance. What I can do is show where those rules meet the parts of a website an SEO touches.

This is a checklist for the audit itself. For the wider plan behind it, see our guide to law firm SEO. If you are deciding whether to buy an audit, what a paid SEO audit should deliver explains what to expect in the report.

What a law firm SEO audit covers

I split the audit into eight areas. The first two are about structure, the next three about trust and local visibility, and the last three about the points where marketing meets professional rules.

The technical crawl still comes first. A practice page that is blocked, redirected twice or missing from the index won’t benefit from anything else on this list.

Practice area pages and duplicate city pages

Start with a list of every practice area the firm wants to be found for, then match each to one page. In audits I often find two or three pages chasing the same searches: an old service page, a newer landing page and a blog post, none of them clearly the main one. The fix is usually to pick the strongest, merge the others into it and redirect.

City pages need a harder look. Google’s spam policies define doorway abuse as “when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries”, and give as an example “Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.” A page for each nearby town, with the same text and the town name swapped, fits that description closely.

For each city page I ask three questions:

• Does the firm have an office there, or does it really serve clients there?
• Does the page say something specific: the local court, how matters are handled there, how clients reach the office?
• Would the page still be useful if the town name were removed from the title?

If the answers are no, the page is better merged into the practice page. Area pages can be done well; our guide to law firm local SEO covers when they make sense.

Attorney bio pages

In my experience, bio pages are among the pages prospective clients read most carefully, and among the least maintained. I check each one for the facts a prospective client looks for: practice areas, bar admissions, education, languages, the office the lawyer works from and how to contact them. I also check that guides and articles written or reviewed by a lawyer link back to that lawyer’s bio, so authorship is clear.

Common findings: lawyers who left years ago still listed (and still ranking), bios that list practice areas the firm no longer handles, and bios with no internal links at all. Every one of these is a communication about the firm’s services, so each change should go through the person at the firm who approves content.

Business Profiles and NAP consistency

Map results matter for most firms. Google’s Business Profile guidelines say the name “should reflect your business’s real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery”. So I compare, office by office, the name, address and phone number (NAP) on the website, in the footer, in the schema and in the profile.

The issues I see most in legal listings:

• Virtual offices. Google says a rented mailing address where the business doesn’t operate, “also known as a virtual office”, “isn’t eligible for a Business Profile.”
• Duplicate profiles. “Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts.”
• Practitioner profiles for every specialism. “A practitioner shouldn’t have multiple Business Profiles to cover all of their specializations.”
• A central helpline. Google asks you to “Use a local phone number instead of a central call center helpline number whenever possible.”

Then I check rankings for each office in its own area, with city-level rank tracking, because one firm-wide position hides how each office really performs.

Reviews: how the firm asks and replies

The audit here is about process, not star counts. Who sends review requests, to which clients, at what stage, with what wording? Are staff reviewing the firm? Do replies to negative reviews reveal anything about a client’s matter? Google’s rules on incentives and selective requests, and the confidentiality questions to raise with counsel, are covered in the law firm local SEO guide linked above, so I won’t repeat them here. In the audit, I simply record whether the firm’s current practice follows them.

Schema: use LegalService, not Attorney

Many law firm sites still use the Attorney type in their structured data. Schema.org now marks it clearly: Attorney “This type is deprecated – LegalService is more inclusive and less ambiguous.” LegalService is described as “a business that provides legally-oriented services, advice and representation, e.g. law firms.”

What I check in the markup:

• Type: LegalService for each office, rather than Attorney.
• One block per real office, with the same name, address and phone as the profile and the page.
• No markup for places the firm doesn’t operate from. Schema that describes an office the firm doesn’t have is a false statement in another format.
• Lawyers as people: individual lawyers can be described on their bio pages as people who work for the firm, linked to the office they belong to.

A short example of the office block, to adapt with your real details:

{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LegalService",
"name": "Example Law Firm",
"address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "...", "addressLocality": "...", "addressRegion": "...", "postalCode": "..." },
"telephone": "...",
"url": "https://www.example.com/offices/example-city/"
}

In a law firm audit, the schema, the profile and the footer should tell the same story, because each one is a statement the firm is making.

Claims, disclaimers and intake forms

Every title, snippet and page on the site is a communication about the firm. ABA Model Rule 7.1 says “A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services.” Your state’s version may differ, so counsel should confirm what applies. In an audit I list wording for counsel to review: “best” or “top” in titles, results pages without context, “specialist” claims, and city pages that imply an office.

Disclaimers and intake forms belong in the same review. The ABA Journal’s summary of Formal Opinion 10-457 says lawyers are “well-advised to consider that a website-generated inquiry may have come from a prospective client.” It reports the opinion’s view that warnings “will be effective only if reasonably understandable, properly placed and not misleading”, which “requires a clear warning in a readable format whose meaning can be understood by a reasonable person”, and that the warning should appear where the reader is likely to see it before going further.

For the audit, that means checking each contact form: is there a warning, is it readable, is it next to the form rather than hidden in the footer, and has counsel approved the wording?

Turning the audit into a plan

A law firm SEO audit is only useful if the firm can act on it. I finish with a short list, ordered by impact and effort, with an owner for each item and a note of which items need counsel’s approval.

If you are comparing outside help for this work, our scorecard for judging legal SEO firms and what law firms should ask a legal SEO expert are good places to start.

FAQ

How is a law firm SEO audit different from a normal SEO audit?

The technical checks are the same. The difference is the extra layer: practice and city page structure, attorney bios, practitioner profiles, review processes, LegalService schema, and the professional rules that apply to claims, disclaimers and client information.

Should a law firm delete its city pages?

Not automatically. Keep the ones where the firm has an office or real work to describe, and merge the near-identical ones into the main practice page. Google treats pages made only to rank for similar searches in different cities as doorways.

Is Attorney schema still valid?

Schema.org marks the Attorney type as deprecated and recommends LegalService as “more inclusive and less ambiguous.” Use LegalService for each real office, with details that match the page and the Business Profile.

How often should a law firm audit its website?

A full audit before and after a redesign, a merger or a move of offices, and when enquiries change without an obvious reason. In between, a check of profiles, bios and new pages every few months keeps small errors from building up.