A law firm SEO audit is mostly an ordinary SEO audit. The crawl is the same crawl, the indexing checks are the same checks, and anybody telling you the technical work is fundamentally different for lawyers is selling a vertical premium on commodity labor.
What is genuinely different is the content, and it is different in a specific way. A law firm site is built from four repeating page types that most businesses do not have, it competes in a category where the same words mean different services, and parts of it are governed by professional conduct rules rather than by taste. That last point changes what an audit is allowed to conclude.
So this covers those page types and where the audit has to stop. We sell audits, so treat it as interested testimony. It is deliberately not an article about choosing a supplier, because that is a different question and the answer to it does not change because the client practices law.
What a law firm SEO audit covers that a general one does not
Start by separating this from the two audits it sits next to, because most of the work is shared and only a minority is legal-specific.
Our note on why an SEO audit is worth running covers what an audit is and when it is not worth buying, and none of that changes for a firm. Our local SEO audit checklist covers the profile, category, review and citation work, which a firm with an office needs exactly as any local business does. Read those for the general version rather than having it repeated here.
What is left is four page types and one boundary. The page types are practice area pages, office or location pages, attorney biographies, and case results or client outcomes. The boundary is that some of what those pages say is regulated, and an SEO audit is not the thing that clears it.
That is the whole of the legal-specific list, and it is shorter than most vertical guides imply. Being honest about the size of it is more useful than padding it, because it tells you how much of a quoted legal SEO premium is actually buying anything.
One structural thing does carry through all four, which is worth naming before the sections that follow. A firm site is built from repeating templates rather than from individually written pages, so a fault in one practice area page is usually a fault in all of them, and a good bio is usually good by accident rather than by design. That changes how you audit it. Sample the template rather than grinding through every page, confirm the fault repeats, and write the finding once against the template. Our guide to conducting a website audit covers that sampling approach in general terms.
The compliance boundary, and why we are not the people to clear it
This has to come second, before any recommendation, because it governs what the rest of the audit is permitted to say.
What a lawyer may say about their services is governed by professional conduct rules. The American Bar Association publishes Model Rules, and its table of contents, read on 16 September 2026, groups them under “Information About Legal Services”, with Rule 7.1 titled “Communications Concerning a Lawyer’s Services”, Rule 7.2 “Communications Concerning a Lawyer’s Services: Specific Rules” and Rule 7.3 “Solicitation of Clients”.
Two things on that same page matter more than the titles. The word is Model. Each jurisdiction adopts its own version, so what applies to your firm is your own regulator’s text rather than the model. And the numbering visibly moves, because the same table lists Rule 7.4 and Rule 7.5 as “(Deleted)”. Rules that have been deleted once can change again.
So here is the honest limit, stated plainly rather than buried. We did not read the text of any individual rule while writing this, because those pages refused our requests, and we are not quoting a requirement we have not read. More importantly, we would not be the right source if we had. An SEO audit cannot clear your advertising compliance and should not claim to.
What an audit can usefully do is flag the page elements that commonly sit inside that regulated area and route them to whoever at the firm is responsible, so that somebody qualified looks at them. Flagging is not clearing. Any supplier who reviews your site and tells you the claims on it are compliant has told you something they are not positioned to know.
Practice area pages, the structure that decides everything else
If one finding on a firm’s site is worth more than all the technical work combined, it is usually this one.
Most firm sites carry one page per broad area of law and expect it to answer every search within that area. It cannot. A broad area contains distinct problems that different people search for in completely different words, and a single page attempting all of them is specific to none of them. The audit question is whether each thing the firm actually wants to be hired for has a page of its own.
Then check what those pages are written about. A practice area page that describes the area of law is a page about a subject. A page that describes the situation somebody is in when they need that service is a page about a client. The second earns the work, and firm sites default heavily to the first because that is how lawyers are trained to write.
The third check is the one people miss, which is whether the pages compete with each other. Splitting a broad area into six pages helps only if the six are genuinely different. Six pages that restate the same material with a different heading divide the subject between six addresses and none of them wins, which is the same failure a content audit finds on any site. Our guide to running a content audit covers how to decide which survive a merge.
Check the vocabulary too, because this is where firm sites lose most often and it is invisible from inside. Lawyers describe matters in the terms the profession uses, and the people searching describe them in the terms of the situation they are in. Those two vocabularies frequently share almost no words. Read the searches the site already appears for and compare them against the language on the page. Where they diverge, the page was written for a colleague rather than for a client, and rewriting the headings alone often moves it.
Offices, and what changes when a firm has more than one
A firm with one office is an ordinary local business and the general checklist covers it. A firm with several is a harder problem and it is where most multi-office sites are weakest.
The first check is whether each office has a real page rather than an entry on a contact list. An office that exists only as a line in a footer has nothing to rank. The second is whether those pages are distinguishable from each other. Pages produced by swapping one place name through a template are the most common finding on multi-office sites, and they are worse than having a single well-written contact page, because they are visibly automated to anyone who opens two of them.
The third is the intersection with practice areas, which is where the page count explodes. A firm with four offices and six practice areas has a theoretical grid of twenty-four combinations, and generating all of them produces exactly the thin duplication above. Build the combinations where the firm genuinely does that work from that office and has something particular to say about it, and let the rest be served by the practice area page.
For the profile, category, review and citation side of each office, use the general local checklist linked earlier. Those checks do not change for a firm, and repeating them here would be padding.
Attorney biographies, the most under-audited pages on a firm site
Bios are usually treated as a staff directory and they are frequently among the most visited pages a firm has, which makes them the biggest gap between traffic and attention.
People search for individual lawyers by name, having been referred, having seen a name on a document, or while checking somebody out before a meeting. Those are high-intent arrivals and they land on a page that frequently lists an education history and nothing else. Check what the bio pages actually receive and what they do with it.
Three audit checks are worth the time. Whether each bio says what that person does rather than only what they have qualified in, since the first is what a prospective client is trying to work out. Whether the bio connects to the relevant practice area pages, because that is the internal linking a firm site most often lacks. And whether there is any route to contact from the bio, since a visitor who has decided they want that specific person should not have to go looking.
Then check what happens when somebody leaves, which is a maintenance question with a search consequence. A bio deleted outright throws away whatever standing the page earned and breaks every link pointing at it. Where the firm has somebody covering that work now, the page should lead there rather than nowhere.
Bios are also where accuracy decays fastest and where inaccuracy matters most. Admissions, roles and areas of practice change, and a bio listing something a person no longer does is a claim about services that has gone stale rather than a typo. Check when each bio was last reviewed and by whom, and treat a site where nobody can answer that as a finding in itself. Our breakdown of what goes in an SEO report covers recording that sort of finding so it reaches the person who can fix it.
Reviews and testimonials, where the audit stops
Every local business benefits from reviews, and for firms the ordinary advice runs into the regulated area described earlier.
The general local checklist says to ask clients for reviews and to count yours against whoever outranks you. For a firm, whether and how testimonials and client statements may be solicited, published, or presented is governed by the firm’s own regulator, and it is not uniform. We are not going to tell you what your rules permit, and you should be wary of any marketing supplier who does.
So the audit finding here is procedural rather than promotional. Does the firm have a written position on what it may publish, does whoever manages the website know what it is, and does the review process follow it. A firm where the marketing side is asking for testimonials without anybody having checked the position has a governance finding, and that is worth more than a note about review counts.
What is safely checkable is everything mechanical around it. Whether the profile is claimed and accurate, whether existing reviews are answered, and whether responses avoid saying anything about a matter. That last one is the audit finding that has genuinely worried us on live sites, because a well-meant public reply can say more than it should.
Case results, the content most likely to need a second opinion
Results pages are the highest-risk content on a firm site and also some of the most persuasive, which is why they need the clearest handling.
From a pure search view they are useful. They are specific, they contain the language real situations are described in, and they answer the question a prospective client is actually asking, which is whether this firm has handled something like mine. From a compliance view they are claims about outcomes, which is squarely inside the regulated area.
The audit position that works is to treat every results page as flagged by default. Not removed, not rewritten by the SEO supplier, and not approved by them either. Listed, with the observation that this page makes outcome claims, and routed to whoever at the firm owns that decision. If the firm has a review process for marketing material, results pages belong in it and the audit should check that they went through it.
The same treatment covers awards, rankings and recognitions, which firms display heavily. An audit can check whether the claim is attributed to whoever made it and whether it is current. Whether it may be displayed at all is somebody else’s call.
Intake, and the thing firm sites lose most often
A firm site has a conversion problem that most business sites do not, and an audit that ignores it is measuring the wrong half.
Somebody arriving at a law firm site is frequently in the worst week of their year and is deciding whether to speak to a stranger about it. The friction that matters is not page speed, it is whether they can tell what happens next. Check that every page a search can land on says how to start, what the first conversation is, and whether it costs anything.
Then check the mechanics, because they fail silently. Submit every form with an address you can check and confirm something arrives. Call the number on the site during stated hours. A firm losing inquiries to a form that stopped delivering will attribute the quiet period to the market, and no amount of search work fixes it.
Check the after-hours path too. A search for urgent legal help does not respect office hours, and a site whose only route is a form monitored on weekdays is choosing which inquiries it receives. Whether that is acceptable is the firm’s decision, but it should be a decision rather than an accident.
One more intake check is worth doing before the audit closes. Find out what actually happens to a submitted form once it arrives. On firm sites it frequently lands in a shared mailbox that several people assume somebody else is watching, and the search work is then judged on a conversion rate that reflects the mailbox rather than the site. An audit that reports traffic without ever establishing whether anybody answers it is measuring half a system.
The order to run a law firm SEO audit in
Sequence matters here for a reason specific to firms, which is that the expensive findings need somebody else’s approval before anything happens.
Run the compliance flagging first, before any other content work. Not because it is the biggest finding, but because it has the longest queue. Anything routed to a partner or a general counsel for review sits until they get to it, and starting that on day one means it moves in parallel with everything else rather than after it.
Then the structural findings, practice area coverage and office pages, because those decide what content is needed and there is no point improving a page you are about to merge. Then the bios, which are usually quick wins. Then intake, which is a test rather than a change. Then the ordinary technical and local work, which is the same work as on any site.
Name a receiver for every finding, because a firm has more separate owners than a typical client. Website findings, content findings needing a lawyer’s input, and compliance findings needing approval usually belong to three different people, and a single undifferentiated list goes to whoever is least able to act on it.
What we would check first, and what we cannot tell you
Given an unfamiliar firm site and a day, the first hour goes on counting rather than judging.
How many things the firm wants to be hired for against how many pages exist for them. How many offices against how many have a real page. How many bios receive any search arrivals. Whether any form on the site actually delivers. Those four decide the shape of everything else, and on most firm sites at least one of them is a surprise.
And here is the part we will not do, which is the reason to be careful with anybody who will. We do not assess whether your site complies with your professional conduct obligations. We flag the pages that live in that area and hand them to you. If a marketing supplier offers you a compliance review as part of an SEO engagement, the useful question is what qualifies them to give it and whether they would stand behind it, because we would not and we are telling you so before you ask.
Our free website audit reviews the website itself and is a reasonable first look, and our SEO audit is the paid version. Neither is a legal review, neither logs into anything, and our SEO services page is where the ongoing work is priced. Our guide to telling whether your SEO is working covers judging any of it afterward.
The first move costs nothing. Count the things your firm wants to be hired for, then count the pages that exist for them. If the second number is smaller, you have found the work.
