The Law Firms Winning in Multiple Markets Do These Things Differently

Not every firm with two addresses needs a full multi-location SEO buildout. A solo practitioner with a satellite office one day per week has different needs than a regional firm with four staffed locations across different metro areas.

This framework is built for firms where:

• Each office has its own street address and is staffed regularly (not a virtual office or mail drop)
• The firm wants to appear in the Map Pack for searches in each city — not just the headquarters market
• Multiple practice areas are offered across locations, creating potential for dozens of overlapping page combinations
• Different attorneys may be the primary contact at different offices, each with their own reputation signals to build

If your firm fits that profile, a generic SEO approach will work against you. Google's local algorithm evaluates proximity, relevance, and prominence on a per-location basis. A single optimized homepage doesn't carry ranking authority into a market 90 miles away — each location needs its own local footprint.

A note on virtual offices: Some firms list addresses at co-working spaces or registered agent offices to appear in additional markets. Google has tightened enforcement on this. Listings at addresses where the firm has no physical presence and no client-facing activity are subject to suspension. This is general guidance — verify current Google Business Profile policies and your state bar's advertising rules before creating listings at any address. (This is educational content, not legal or professional compliance advice.)

The most common mistake multi-location firms make is creating practice area pages first, then trying to retrofit location targeting afterward. The result is a site where the personal injury page targets every city simultaneously and ranks nowhere specifically.

A more effective structure separates the hierarchy into two clear layers:

Layer 1: The Location Hub Page

Each office gets a dedicated location page at a URL like /locations/chicago/ or /chicago-office/. This page covers the office address, attorneys based there, practice areas available at that location, local bar associations, and genuinely local content — nearby courthouses, county-specific procedural notes, or community involvement. This page targets "[firm name] Chicago" and "law firm Chicago" type queries.

Layer 2: Location-Specific Practice Area Pages

For high-value practice areas, create child pages that combine location and service: /chicago/personal-injury/ or /personal-injury/chicago/. These pages target "personal injury lawyer Chicago" and similar queries. Each one must be substantively different — not a template with the city name swapped. Reference Illinois statutes by number, mention Cook County court procedures, name the attorneys at that office who handle these cases.

A firm with four offices and five primary practice areas could reasonably need 20+ location-practice pages. That's not bloat — that's the correct scope for legitimate multi-market ranking. The content investment is significant, but so is the competitive advantage when it's done correctly and competitors are still relying on a single practice area page targeting five cities at once.

Internal linking matters here too. The main practice area page (if you keep one) should link to each city-specific version. Each city page should link back to the location hub and to the firm-wide practice area overview. This signals the relationship between pages without creating confusion about which page should rank for which query.

Each physical office should have its own verified Google Business Profile. This isn't optional — it's how Google determines which office to show in the Map Pack for a given search location. A single GBP for the whole firm, or a primary listing with secondary locations added as service areas, will not get individual offices into the local 3-pack for their respective markets.

Setup and Verification

Each GBP needs its own verification, typically by postcard sent to the office address. The business name on each listing should be consistent — use the same firm name format across all locations. Avoid keyword-stuffing the business name field (e.g., "Smith & Jones Injury Lawyers Chicago") — this violates GBP guidelines and can trigger suspension or ranking penalties.

Categories and Consistency

Use the same primary category across all office listings (e.g., "Personal Injury Attorney" or "Law Firm") unless a specific office genuinely specializes differently. Secondary categories can be customized per office if the practice mix varies by location. NAP — name, address, phone — must match exactly what appears on the corresponding location page on your website and across all citations (directories, bar association listings, legal directories).

Posts, Photos, and Reviews — Per Location

GBP posts, photo uploads, and Q&A should be managed per listing. A post about a verdict in your Chicago office is relevant to that listing, not to your Milwaukee office. Photos should include the actual office exterior and interior — stock photos of courtrooms don't differentiate locations. Reviews should be directed to the specific office listing where the client was served. In our experience, firms that treat all five offices as one review pool end up with one strong listing and four thin ones. Assign someone at each office to manage that location's GBP activity, or ensure your SEO team is doing it per listing rather than at the account level only.

Google has become increasingly sophisticated at detecting thin localization — content where the only geographic signal is the city name inserted into an otherwise generic page. For law firms, this is both an SEO problem and a credibility problem: prospective clients can also tell the difference between a firm that knows their local court system and one that doesn't.

What Genuine [measuring legal search returns](/resources/attorney/attorney-seo-roi) Looks Like

For a personal injury page targeting Cook County, Illinois, genuine local content might include:

• Reference to Illinois's modified comparative negligence statute (735 ILCS 5/2-1116) and how it affects recovery
• The two-year statute of limitations for personal injury in Illinois, with a note about discovery exceptions
• Cook County Circuit Court filing procedures and which courthouse handles which case type
• Local medical facilities or rehabilitation centers relevant to injury cases
• The assigned attorneys at the Chicago office, with their individual bar admissions listed

None of this is filler — it's information a prospective client in Cook County actually needs and that a competing firm based in another state cannot authentically replicate.

Avoiding the Template Trap

The shortcut most firms take is creating a master page template and swapping the city name, statute citations, and courthouse name. This produces pages that look different but read identically. Search engines detect this pattern through content similarity analysis. More practically, it produces pages that don't convert because they feel generic.

The sustainable approach is to invest more content depth in the markets that matter most — your top two or three cities — and build the lower-priority locations over time rather than launching 12 thin pages at once.

Disclaimer: Statute citations and procedural references used in this article are illustrative examples only. Verify all legal and procedural details with current state and local resources before publishing them on a client-facing page.

Citation management for a single-location firm is straightforward. For a firm with six offices, it becomes a data management problem that directly affects local rankings if handled carelessly.

Every location needs its own citation profile — consistent entries on Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, Martindale, the state bar directory, Google, Apple Maps, Bing Places, and general business directories like Yelp and the Better Business Bureau. That's a minimum citation set per office, multiplied across however many locations the firm operates.

Common NAP Errors at Scale

The most frequent issues we see in multi-location citation audits:

• Suite number inconsistency — one listing says "Suite 400", another says "Ste. 400", another omits it entirely. Google treats these as potentially different businesses.
• Old office addresses still active — if the firm moved a location, citations pointing to the old address create conflicting signals that suppress the current listing's authority.
• Phone number routing errors — using a central firm phone number instead of a direct line for a specific office makes it impossible for Google to associate calls with a location.
• Duplicate GBP listings — sometimes a prior employee or the firm itself created an older listing that was never claimed or merged. Duplicate listings split ranking signals and confuse prospective clients.

Before running any active SEO campaign for a new office, audit existing citations for that address. Tools like BrightLocal or Whitespark can surface duplicates and inconsistencies across the major aggregators. Fix the data foundation before building new links or optimizing content — otherwise you're building on an unstable base.

Industry benchmarks suggest that firms with clean, consistent citation profiles across all locations see faster Map Pack entry for new offices than those cleaning up data errors while simultaneously trying to rank. The sequencing matters.

Opening a new office gives the firm a genuine opportunity to expand its local search footprint — but the rollout sequence determines whether the new location gains traction quickly or takes much longer than expected.

Pre-Launch: Before the Office Opens

Build the location page and location-specific practice area pages at least 60–90 days before the office opens if possible. Google needs time to crawl, index, and begin assigning authority to new pages. A page published the same week an office opens won't rank that week.

Set up and verify the GBP listing as soon as you have a confirmed physical address. Begin building citations in that market immediately — state bar listing, Google, legal directories first, then general directories.

Post-Launch: The First 90 Days

Publish content that demonstrates genuine activity at the new location — attorney profiles specific to that office, any local bar association memberships, community involvement, or local press coverage. These signals reinforce to Google that the location is active and legitimate.

Begin a deliberate review acquisition process for the new office immediately. A new GBP with zero reviews is at a significant disadvantage in competitive markets. Encourage clients served at that location to leave reviews on the location-specific listing, not the firm's primary listing.

What Not to Do

Don't redirect all incoming traffic for the new market to your existing homepage while the new pages are being built. Don't create location pages as placeholders with no real content and plan to "fill them in later" — thin placeholder pages can be indexed and create a negative first impression with both Google and prospective clients. And don't assume rankings from your strongest market will carry over automatically. Each market requires its own local authority, built through its own citations, reviews, and location-specific content.