Your Firm Is Paying for SEO. These 12 Mistakes Explain Why It Isn't Working.

This article is for law firm partners, administrators, and marketing directors who are already spending money on SEO — whether through an agency, a freelancer, or an in-house effort — and aren't seeing the case volume or rankings they expected.

It's also useful if you're evaluating a new SEO engagement and want a checklist of what to watch for before you sign a contract.

What this guide is not: a beginner's introduction to how SEO works. If you're starting from zero, the law firm SEO hub covers the full framework first. Come back here once you understand the basics.

A note on scope: SEO for law firms sits inside a regulated industry. Attorney advertising rules — including ABA Model Rules 7.1–7.3 and state-specific requirements in jurisdictions like New York, California, Florida, and Texas — affect what you can say on your website, how you describe results, and how you solicit reviews. Some of the mistakes below touch on that overlap. This is educational content, not legal or ethics advice. Verify advertising compliance requirements with your state bar or a qualified legal ethics attorney.

After working through SEO audits across law firm websites, a pattern emerges: the mistakes are rarely random. They cluster into three categories.

Category 1: Wrong Target

The firm is optimizing for the wrong keywords, the wrong geography, or both. A personal injury firm in Sacramento ranking for 'personal injury lawyer' — with no city modifier — is competing against national directories with domain authority scores built over decades. That's a losing allocation of budget and effort.

Category 2: Weak Foundation

Technical SEO issues, thin content, and an unverified or incomplete Google Business Profile are the foundation problems. Rankings built on a weak foundation erode as competitors improve. In our experience, many firms skip foundational work entirely because it's less visible than link building or blog content.

Category 3: Compliance Friction

Law firm websites carry a unique burden: they must satisfy both Google's quality signals and state bar advertising rules. Firms that strip out disclaimers to 'look more confident' may be violating ethics rules. Firms that bury content in legalese to satisfy compliance end up with pages that neither convert nor rank.

Most firms have active problems in at least two of these three categories simultaneously. Fixing one without addressing the others produces limited improvement — which is why some firms cycle through agencies without results. The agency fixes the technical layer, but nobody addresses the content or the keyword strategy.

The 12 mistakes below are organized by category. Identify which category is your primary constraint first, then work through the specific errors.

Mistake 1: Targeting head keywords without geographic or practice-area specificity

'Personal injury lawyer,' 'divorce attorney,' 'criminal defense lawyer' — these terms are dominated by Justia, Avvo, FindLaw, and Martindale. A single-office firm has almost no realistic path to ranking for them organically. The firms winning new clients from Google are targeting 'car accident lawyer in [city]' or 'contested divorce attorney [neighborhood].' More specific terms have lower search volume per query but far higher conversion rates and realistic ranking potential.

Fix: Pull your current keyword rankings from Google Search Console. Flag any terms without a city modifier or specific practice-area qualifier. Rebuild your page targeting around those specifics.

Mistake 2: One practice-area page for multiple distinct services

A single 'Family Law' page covering divorce, child custody, adoption, and prenuptial agreements is trying to rank for four different user intents simultaneously. Google generally rewards specificity. Each major practice area — and each distinct service within it — earns its own dedicated page with its own keyword focus, FAQ section, and internal links.

Fix: Audit your site architecture. If a single page covers more than one logically distinct service, split it. Link the sub-pages back to a parent practice-area hub page.

Mistake 3: Ignoring search intent

Someone searching 'do I have a personal injury case' is in research mode. Someone searching 'personal injury lawyer near me' is ready to call. Pages built for one intent rarely perform well for the other. Many law firm pages target the high-intent commercial keyword but are written like informational blog posts — or vice versa.

Fix: For each target keyword, search it yourself and examine the top-ranking results. Match your content format, depth, and tone to what Google is already rewarding for that specific query.

Mistake 4: Targeting neighboring cities with thin duplicate pages

Creating 50 city pages — each with the same content and only the city name swapped — is a well-documented SEO anti-pattern. Google identifies these as low-quality and may devalue your entire domain as a result. Industry benchmarks suggest these pages rarely rank and frequently dilute the authority of pages that could.

Fix: If you serve multiple cities, create genuinely differentiated pages for each. Include local landmarks, courthouse information, county-specific legal context, and unique attorney commentary. If you can't do that for a location, don't build a page for it.

Mistake 5: An unclaimed or incomplete Google Business Profile

The Map Pack — the three local results that appear above organic listings for searches like 'divorce attorney Chicago' — drives a significant share of local legal queries. Your Google Business Profile is the primary input for Map Pack eligibility. Many firms either haven't claimed their profile, haven't selected accurate categories, or haven't filled out the services and description fields. Some firms don't know their profile has duplicate listings suppressing their visibility.

Fix: Claim and verify your GBP if you haven't. Set your primary category to the most specific legal practice category available (e.g., 'Personal Injury Attorney' rather than 'Law Firm'). Add all relevant secondary categories, populate services, upload interior and team photos, and establish a consistent review request process.

Mistake 6: Citation inconsistency across directories

Your firm's name, address, and phone number (NAP) should be identical across every directory — Google, Yelp, Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, your state bar listing, and local chambers. Even minor variations ('Suite 400' vs '#400' vs no suite number) create conflicting signals that suppress local rankings. In our experience, firms that have moved offices or rebranded often have significant citation inconsistency without realizing it.

Fix: Run a citation audit using a tool like BrightLocal or Whitespark, or manually check your top 20-30 directories. Correct inconsistencies at the source — don't just update your website and assume directories will follow.

Mistake 7: Thin practice-area pages

A 300-word practice-area page with a stock photo and a contact form is not competitive for legal keywords. Google's quality guidelines emphasize depth, expertise, and helpfulness. Competing pages for high-value legal terms typically include detailed explanations of the legal process, FAQs, local jurisdiction context, attorney credentials, and schema markup. A thin page signals low effort to both Google and potential clients.

Fix: Audit your practice-area pages by word count — but more importantly by depth. Does the page answer the questions a prospective client would actually have? Does it demonstrate your attorneys' expertise? Add FAQs, process explanations, and relevant local context. Implement attorney schema and FAQ schema where appropriate.

Mistake 8: Ignoring Core Web Vitals and page speed

Law firm websites frequently load slowly — particularly on mobile — because they carry large image files, outdated WordPress themes, or too many third-party scripts (chat widgets, form tools, analytics). Page speed is a confirmed Google ranking signal. More practically, a slow site loses potential clients before they ever read your content. Many firms report their highest-quality leads came from mobile searches — which makes mobile performance especially critical.

Fix: Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights and address the top flagged issues. Common quick wins: compress images, enable browser caching, and defer non-critical JavaScript.

Mistake 9: No internal linking strategy

Most law firm websites have practice-area pages, blog posts, and attorney bios that exist in isolation — no logical link structure connecting related content. Internal links distribute authority across your site and help Google understand the relationship between your pages. A blog post about 'what to do after a car accident' that doesn't link to your personal injury practice-area page is a missed opportunity in both directions.

Fix: Map your content to your primary practice areas. Every blog post should link to at least one relevant practice-area page. Practice-area pages should link to supporting content and related service pages. Attorney bios should link to relevant practice areas.

Mistake 10: Omitting required attorney advertising disclaimers

Many law firm websites — particularly those built by generic web agencies — are missing state-required advertising disclosures. Depending on your jurisdiction, you may be required to include 'attorney advertising' notices, disclaimers that past results don't guarantee future outcomes, and disclosures about which attorneys are responsible for site content. Missing these isn't just an ethics risk — it signals to sophisticated potential clients that your firm may not be detail-oriented. Verify your specific state bar's advertising rules before making any changes. This content is educational, not legal ethics advice.

Fix: Review your state bar's advertising rules. In New York, California, Florida, and Texas — among others — specific disclosure language is mandated. Have a legal ethics attorney review your site if you're uncertain about compliance.

Mistake 11: Testimonials and results that create compliance risk

Featuring client testimonials, specific settlement amounts, or case results without proper disclaimers may violate ABA Model Rule 7.1 and state equivalents that prohibit false or misleading communications about a lawyer's services. Many firms include these without realizing the compliance exposure — and some SEO agencies add them specifically for conversion without understanding the regulatory context.

Fix: Any results, testimonials, or case outcomes should include clear disclaimers that past results do not guarantee similar outcomes. Review your state bar's specific rules on testimonials — they vary significantly. Some states prohibit them entirely.

Mistake 12: Optimizing for rankings but not for conversion

A law firm can rank on page one and still generate almost no cases — because the page doesn't answer the visitor's actual question, doesn't build trust quickly, or buries the contact information. SEO drives traffic; conversion turns that traffic into consultations. Firms that treat SEO as purely a rankings exercise miss the second half of the equation entirely.

Fix: For each high-traffic page, review the conversion path. Is there a clear, low-friction call to action? Is the phone number visible above the fold on mobile? Does the page answer the specific question the visitor searched? Does it communicate why your firm — specifically — is the right choice for their situation? Trust signals (bar admissions, years of practice, specific case types handled) matter here more than generic claims.

Not all 12 mistakes carry equal weight. The priority order below reflects both the typical impact on rankings and the speed at which fixes produce visible results.

Fix immediately (fastest recovery signal)

• Unclaimed or incomplete Google Business Profile — GBP improvements can affect local rankings within weeks
• Citation inconsistency — Cleaning up NAP data is foundational and prevents ongoing suppression
• Missing compliance disclaimers — Ethics risk is time-sensitive regardless of SEO impact

Fix in the first 30-60 days

• Thin practice-area pages — Expanding these takes time but directly impacts your ability to rank for commercial terms
• Keyword targeting errors — Rebuilding your keyword strategy affects everything downstream
• Internal linking gaps — A quick audit and a structured linking sprint can be completed in a few days

Fix as part of a longer content strategy

• City page quality — Rebuilding these correctly takes significant content investment
• Search intent mismatches — Requires page-by-page audit and restructuring
• Conversion optimization — Best approached after traffic is stabilized from other fixes

One realistic expectation: even after all 12 mistakes are corrected, you should expect 3-6 months before the full effect of those corrections appears in rankings and traffic. Google's crawl and reindexing cycle takes time, and domain authority changes accumulate gradually. There is no shortcut to this timeline — and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.

If the scope of fixes feels overwhelming, an independent SEO audit is often a useful starting point — it identifies which of these mistakes are actually present on your site and lets you prioritize rather than guessing. You can also get expert help correcting your firm's SEO issues if the audit reveals problems that need technical or strategic resources you don't have in-house.