SEO & PPC
SEO and PPC for Law Firms
There are two ways to appear when someone searches for an attorney: earn the position, or buy it. Most firms need both, and the balance between them changes as a site matures.
SEO compounds. It takes months before it moves, and then it keeps producing without a per-click cost. PPC does the opposite — it works the day you switch it on and stops the day you switch it off, at a price that in legal categories routinely passes fifty dollars a click. Running paid search while organic builds is usually the right answer, and social supports both, then shifting the mix as rankings take hold.
What neither channel forgives is being run on autopilot. Paid accounts drift, negative keyword lists go stale, and rankings that took a year to build erode quietly when nobody is watching the technical health of the site.
We are a Google Partner and a certified CallRail partner — more on how we work, and we manage both channels for law firms across immigration, tax, family, employment and personal injury work. The same approach applies to the SaaS and healthcare clients we handle, though the economics are gentler — legal is the most expensive advertising category most agencies will ever touch, and that raises the cost of getting it wrong.
Our Four Services
Web Design
Sites built around what your prospects actually search for — mobile-first, fast enough to pass Core Web Vitals, and structured to turn visitors into consultations.
SMM (social)
Consistent posting where your clients actually are, reviews arriving steadily, and everything kept inside your state bar’s advertising rules.
Web & Mobile App Development
Client portals, intake tools and integrations — built when custom software is genuinely the right answer, and declined when it is not.
What Law Firm SEO Involves
- Keyword and Intent Research
- Content That Earns Rankings
- Technical Foundations
- Local and Map Pack Visibility
Volume is the least useful number in a keyword report. What matters is intent — whether the person typing that phrase is looking for an attorney today or writing a school assignment.
We separate the terms that produce consultations from the ones that only produce traffic, then weigh each against how hard it would be to rank. A phrase with a tenth of the volume and a fraction of the competition is usually the better investment, particularly early on while a domain is still building authority.
We also look at what the firms ranking above you have not answered. Google rewards pages that add something to the results rather than restating what is already there, so the gaps in the current top ten tell us what to write.
The output is a map: which pages exist, which need building, which should be merged or removed, and what each one is trying to win.
Thin practice-area pages do not rank any more, and padded ones do not either. What works is a page that genuinely answers what someone needs to know before they call — the process, the timeline, what it costs them to wait, what the realistic outcomes are.
That content has to come from you. We can research the law and structure the page, but the detail that separates a page worth ranking from a page worth ignoring is practitioner knowledge: the mistake clients keep making, the local court quirk, the step everyone underestimates.
We interview for that, write around it, and put your name on it with real credentials attached. For anything in a regulated field, Google weighs who wrote it and whether they are demonstrably qualified.
Then we keep it current. A page written three years ago against law that has since changed is a liability, not an asset.
Most law firm sites have technical problems nobody has looked at. Pages competing against each other for the same term. Old blog posts outranking the practice-area page they were meant to support. Redirect chains left over from a rebuild two agencies ago.
We audit the structure before touching content: crawlability, index bloat, internal linking, canonical tags, schema markup, Core Web Vitals, and whether anything important is accidentally blocked.
Fixing this is usually the fastest gain available. Rankings that were suppressed by a technical fault tend to recover quickly once it is cleared, well before new content has had time to mature.
It is unglamorous work and it does not photograph well in a report, but it is the difference between content that performs and content that sits there.
For most firms the map pack matters more than the organic results below it. Someone searching for an attorney in their city sees three local listings first, and those three take a disproportionate share of the calls.
That means the Google Business Profile is a ranking asset, not an afterthought: categories set correctly, service areas defined, hours accurate, photos current, and reviews arriving steadily rather than in suspicious bursts.
Firms with several offices need each location handled separately, with its own page and its own profile, or the locations start cannibalising each other. We manage multi-location setups regularly and the failure mode is always the same — one office ranks, the others are invisible.
We also keep citations consistent. Directory listings with an old address or a disconnected number quietly undermine everything else.
Where PPC Earns Its Place
- Campaign Structure and Budget
- Negative Keywords and Wasted Spend
- Landing Pages and Call Tracking
- Reporting You Can Act On
Legal keywords are among the most expensive in advertising. Some cost more than fifty dollars a click, which means a badly structured campaign burns a month of budget in a week with nothing to show for it.
We build tightly themed ad groups so the search term, the ad and the landing page actually match. That relevance is what lowers your cost per click — Google charges less for ads it expects people to click, so structure is a budget decision, not an admin one.
Budget goes where the intent is highest. Someone searching for an attorney by practice area and city is worth several times someone reading about the law generally, and the campaign should reflect that rather than spreading spend evenly.
We start conservatively, find what converts, then scale into it. Nobody learns anything useful from a campaign that spent its whole budget in three days.
Most of the money wasted in legal PPC goes to searches you never wanted. Job seekers looking for work at a firm. Students researching an assignment. People hunting for free advice with no intention of hiring anyone.
Negative keyword lists are the single highest-return maintenance task in a paid account, and they are the first thing neglected when an account is left to run itself. We review search terms regularly and cut what is not producing.
The same applies to placements, devices, times of day and geography. If your intake team does not answer the phone at 2am, bidding at 2am is optional at best.
Over time the account narrows onto what works. That is the whole job — an account that has not changed in six months is not stable, it is unattended.
Sending paid traffic to a generic homepage is the most common and most expensive mistake in legal advertising. Someone who clicked an ad about a specific problem should land on a page about that problem, not on a page listing everything the firm does.
We build dedicated landing pages for the campaigns that justify them, with one clear action and nothing competing for attention.
Then we measure properly. Call tracking numbers tell us which campaign produced which call, and where CallRail is in place we can follow that through to whether the call became a consultation. We are a certified CallRail partner and set this up as standard.
Clicks and impressions are not results. The number that matters is cost per signed matter, and you cannot manage a budget sensibly without it.
Most agency reports are a wall of numbers that answer no question anyone asked. Ours are built to answer three: what did we spend, what did it produce, and what are we changing next month.
You get rankings for the terms that matter commercially rather than a vanity list, traffic broken out by which pages are actually growing, and lead volume tied back to source. Where the tracking supports it, cost per lead by campaign.
We also tell you what did not work. Something always does not, and an agency that reports only the wins is managing your perception rather than your account.
If a channel stops earning its budget we will say so, even when that means recommending you spend less with us. That tends to be the conversation that keeps clients for years.
Recent Projects
Ready to Rank for the Work You Want?
Tell us which practice area you want more of, and which one you are tired of getting calls about. That distinction shapes everything — the keywords worth chasing, the pages worth building, and where the ad budget should go.
We will look at where you rank today, what the firms above you are doing, and what it realistically takes to move, and how that fits our packages. If paid search is the faster route while organic builds, we will say that too.
Call 866-810-3570 or send a note below. The first conversation costs nothing.
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