The Firms with Five Offices Don't Have to Pick One City to Win In Google

A single-office firm has one main challenge: rank in one city for the right practice areas. A multi-office firm has that same challenge multiplied — and adds several new ones that don't exist at smaller scale.

The first complication is content duplication. Most firms with multiple offices describe their services the same way on every location page. Google reads those pages as near-identical, assigns them low crawl priority, and may not rank any of them well. You end up competing against yourself without realizing it.

The second is authority dilution. Backlinks earned by your brand often point to the homepage. If location pages aren't properly integrated into your site architecture with internal links, they don't inherit any of that authority — they're essentially orphan pages that Google has little reason to surface.

The third is GBP management at scale. Each physical office needs its own verified Google Business Profile. Maintaining consistent NAP (name, address, phone number) data, posting regularly, and generating reviews across five or ten profiles requires a system — not just good intentions.

Understanding these three distinct problems is the first step. The sections below address each one specifically, starting with the foundation that everything else depends on: your site architecture.

Your URL structure is a signal to Google about how your offices relate to each other and to your firm as a whole. The most common mistake is inconsistency — some offices live at /dallas, others at /locations/dallas-office, and one accidentally ended up at /contact/texas. That kind of inconsistency costs you.

A clean, scalable structure looks like this:

• /locations/ — index page listing all offices with brief context for each
• /locations/dallas/ — the Dallas office page
• /locations/dallas/personal-injury/ — Dallas-specific personal injury content (optional, for high-volume practice areas)

The /locations/ index page is important. It gives Google a logical crawl entry point, and it gives users a single place to choose their nearest office. Without it, location pages tend to become isolated and underlinked.

Depth matters. Location pages buried four or five clicks from the homepage receive less crawl frequency and authority. If your offices are important to the business — which they are — they should live at most two clicks from the homepage, either through navigation or prominent internal links.

For large firms with 10+ offices, a state-level layer can help: /locations/texas/dallas/. This groups offices geographically, which is intuitive for users and helps Google understand your geographic footprint as a firm.

One structural decision worth making early: do you want practice-area subpages under each location, or do you handle geographic targeting through the main practice area pages? Both approaches work, but mixing them creates the duplicate content problem faster than almost anything else. Pick one model and apply it consistently.

The standard advice — 'make each page unique' — is true but not specific enough to act on. Here's what uniqueness actually means for a law firm location page.

Attorney bios tied to that office

If three attorneys work out of your Austin office, their names, photos, and brief bios belong on the Austin page. Don't list all firm attorneys on every location page. Google is looking for signals that this page is genuinely about this specific office, and named staff is one of the strongest signals you can give it.

Local landmarks, courthouses, and service context

A personal injury firm in Phoenix should mention the Maricopa County Superior Court. A business law firm in Chicago should reference the Northern District of Illinois for federal litigation matters. These aren't keyword stuffing — they're the kind of contextual detail that distinguishes a page written for Phoenix from one written for any generic city.

Reviews specific to that office

Where possible, surface Google reviews that mention the local office or its attorneys by name. This reinforces the location signal and builds trust with someone evaluating whether to hire you based on proximity.

Local citations and community context

Has your Austin office sponsored a local bar association event, or do attorneys there speak at the Travis County courthouse? That's genuinely local content. It doesn't have to be long — two or three sentences — but it has to be true and specific.

The test: swap the city name on two of your location pages. If they still make sense, the pages aren't differentiated enough. Each page should be impossible to transplant to another location without significant rewriting.

Each physical office that serves clients at that location qualifies for its own Google Business Profile. This is foundational — without a separate, verified GBP for each location, that office has no realistic path to appearing in the map pack for local searches.

What 'serving clients at that location' means matters. Google's guidelines distinguish between offices where clients physically meet with attorneys versus virtual offices or addresses used for mail only. Using a shared coworking address or a registered agent address as a GBP location violates Google's terms and risks suspension of the entire profile. This is not legal or compliance advice — verify current GBP guidelines directly with Google's documentation before making decisions for your firm.

Setting up GBP profiles at scale

Use Google Business Profile Manager with a single owner account managing all locations. This simplifies access control, makes bulk updates possible, and prevents the situation where a former office manager is the only verified owner of a critical profile.

Category consistency

Each profile should use the same primary category — typically 'Law Firm' — with secondary categories matching that office's primary practice areas. Inconsistent categories across locations create a confusing brand signal for Google.

Review generation per location

Reviews must be earned separately for each office. A firm with 200 reviews for its main office and four reviews for a satellite location looks like a satellite location to Google — because it is. Build a system for soliciting reviews after matters close that routes clients to the correct office profile. Ensure review solicitation practices comply with your state bar's advertising rules before implementing any automated process.

GBP posts and Q&A

Posting frequency matters more than most firms expect. Offices that post consistently (weekly or bi-weekly) tend to maintain stronger map pack presence than those that go dormant. Assign someone responsible for each office's GBP activity — if it's everyone's job, it becomes no one's job.

Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages on your site target the same search query. For multi-office law firms, this surfaces most often when every location page targets 'personal injury lawyer [state]' or when practice area pages and location pages both try to rank for the same city-level term.

The fix requires two things: clear keyword mapping and intentional internal linking.

Keyword mapping by page

Assign each location page a specific city or metro area as its primary geographic target. Your Dallas page owns 'personal injury lawyer Dallas.' Your Fort Worth page owns Fort Worth. Neither page should try to claim the other's territory. If you want to show up in both cities from one page, you're going to rank well in neither.

Practice area pages at the root level (e.g., /personal-injury/) should target statewide or general terms, not city-level terms. Leave city-level targeting to the location pages.

Internal linking with purpose

Your Dallas personal injury page should link to your main personal injury page (topical authority) and to your locations index (geographic context). The main personal injury page should link back to each relevant office location page with anchor text like 'our Dallas personal injury attorneys.' This creates a web of signals that tells Google each page serves a distinct purpose.

Avoid linking every location page to every other location page in a flat list — that dilutes anchor text value and signals to Google that these pages are interchangeable rather than distinct.

Monitor for cannibalization

Use Google Search Console to check which pages are ranking for which queries. If you see two location pages sharing impressions for the same keyword, that's a cannibalization signal worth addressing — usually by consolidating content or sharpening the geographic focus of each page.