Law firms
Law firm SEO, where the rules are stricter than the marketing
Legal search is expensive, crowded and regulated. The firms that do well are usually the ones that picked a narrow practice area and refused to be a general firm on the internet.
Before you read the rest
I have audited a law firm's search presence in detail, end to end, including its profiles, its location pages and its link profile. I have not run an ongoing programme for one. If you need somebody with a decade of legal marketing behind them, that is a reasonable thing to want and I am not it.
What the audit found, and what I keep reading about
Templated location pages. Hundreds of them on one firm's site, one per city, each identical except for the place name, almost none of them in the sitemap and almost none indexed. They get generated because somebody sold the firm on coverage. They do nothing, and at that scale they make the whole site look thin.
Profiles that contradict each other. A firm with two offices routinely has three or four listings, old addresses still live, and a suite number that differs across directories. For a regulated business where the address is a legal detail, that is worse than untidy.
Practice pages that try to rank for everything. A single page covering personal injury, family and real estate ranks for none of them, because it is not really about any of them.
What I would do instead
Pick the two practice areas that pay, and build those properly: one substantial page each, written by or with the lawyer, answering the question a person in that situation is typing at eleven at night.
Fix the profiles before anything else. Legal searches are strongly local and the pack decides a lot of the enquiries.
Be careful with claims. Anything that reads as a promise about an outcome is a regulatory problem in most provinces, and the SEO advice that ignores that is advice from somebody who will not be there when the law society asks.
What this search page looks like right now
I measured "law firm seo expert" in Canada on 2026-09-21, running it 3 times rather than once. Google wrote its own answer above the results on every run, which changes the job: the page has to be the kind of source an AI answer draws from, not just a page that ranks under it. The full measurement across eleven searches is here.
| # | Domain | Page title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | lawfirmseotoronto.ca | Law Firm SEO Agency Toronto | SEO, Ads & AI for Lawyers |
| 2 | dnovogroup.com | Lawyer SEO & Law Firm SEO | Expert SEO Services for ... |
| 3 | enterproductions.ca | Which Is the Best Toronto SEO Agency Specializing in Law ... |
| 4 | www.reddit.com | Any Toronto/GTA SEO agencies that specialize in law firms? |
| 5 | hennessey.com | Law Firm SEO | SEO for Lawyers & Attorneys |
| 6 | marketing.legal | Law Firm SEO (Search Engine Optimization) |
| 7 | www.cswebsolutions.ca | Reach More Clients? Optimize Your Law Firm Now! |
| 8 | www.numerounoweb.com | SEO for Lawyers and Optimizing Law Firm Web Sites |
Asked alongside it
- Does SEO work for law firms?
- Is SEO still worth it in 2026?
- How much does an agency charge for SEO?
- What is the 80/20 rule in SEO?
Other industries
- Dental practices - Most dental SEO is sold as content marketing.
- WordPress sites - WordPress is not bad for SEO.
- Ecommerce - Ecommerce SEO splits into two jobs that need different people.
- Shopify stores - Shopify makes a good store easy and a good URL structure impossible.
- Software and SaaS - I build and market software as well as consult on it.
Questions from law firms
- Do you understand law society advertising rules?
- I know they exist, that they differ by province, and that they constrain what can be claimed. I write to the conservative side and your firm approves every word before it publishes. I am not your compliance advisor.
- Is legal SEO worth it at these prices?
- Sometimes not. In the most competitive practice areas the cost per acquired client through search can exceed what paid search costs, and the answer is to compare both before committing.
- What does it cost?
- $499 for an audit, retainers from $750 a month, $2,500 for a full programme with paid search. Details here. The price does not change by industry.
Start with a 15 minute call
No deck and no discovery phase. Tell me the site and the problem, and I will tell you whether I can help and what it would cost. If I am the wrong person, I will say so on the call.