How to Choose a Law Firm SEO Company

Choosing an SEO company for a law firm comes down to three checks you can run before you sign anything: whether they already work with a firm you compete with, how the deal is structured against your state bar's rules, and who writes the pages that go out under your name. Rankings promised on a sales call tell you nothing. These three tell you almost everything.

Most hiring advice for law firms is the same advice given to every other business with the word attorney pasted over it. These are the parts that are actually specific to you.

Ask first whether they already work with your competition

This is the question almost nobody asks, and it has no equivalent in most industries. A dentist in Queens and a dentist in Brooklyn can both hire the same agency without either being harmed. Two personal injury firms in the same county cannot. There is one first position for the search that matters, and if the same company is working for both firms, it is deciding which of you gets it.

Nobody discloses this unprompted, so ask it plainly: do you currently work with any firm practicing in my area within my market, and will you agree in writing not to take one on while you have me? Some companies hold a genuine exclusivity policy by practice area and geography, and will say so immediately. Others will explain that their teams are kept separate, which does not answer the question, because separate teams still leave one client ranking above the other.

The stakes rise with how contested your work is. It matters enormously for SEO for personal injury lawyers and SEO for car accident lawyers, where a single position can be worth more than the entire retainer. It matters less, though it still matters, in SEO for estate planning lawyers, where demand is thinner but so is the competition.

How the deal is structured, not just what it costs

Marketing arrangements that are ordinary in other industries can create a professional problem for a lawyer, and the vendor selling to you is usually not the person who carries that risk.

The line most rules draw is between paying for advertising, which is permitted, and giving something of value to someone for recommending you, which generally is not. What tends to decide which side an arrangement falls on is whether the vendor exercises discretion in matching a particular person to a particular firm. A retainer for building and ranking your own website sits comfortably on the safe side. A deal where you pay per case, or hand over a share of a fee, sits closer to the line and in most states crosses it, because sharing legal fees with a non-lawyer is separately prohibited.

The rules are not uniform. Arizona removed its version of the fee-sharing rule in 2021 and licenses businesses with non-lawyer ownership, and Utah permits fee sharing under conditions including written notice to the client. Most states have done neither. So the only answer that helps you is the one for the state you practice in, which is worth knowing before a proposal with an attractive per-case number arrives.

None of this makes a marketing company the villain. It makes the structure your responsibility rather than theirs. Ask how the arrangement is characterized, and if the person selling it cannot discuss the rule it sits under, they have not thought about the part that lands on your license.

Who writes your practice-area pages

A page explaining comparative fault, or what actually happens at an arraignment, or what a personal representative is obliged to do, is legal information published under your firm's name. A general writer producing it at volume gets something subtly wrong, and subtle is the dangerous kind, because it reads fine to everyone except the person relying on it.

So ask two things: who writes these, and does an attorney read them before they go live. The second question separates the serious answers. Anyone who's done legal work already has that review step and will describe how it runs. Anyone who hasn't treats the question as an obstacle.

Ask too whether the copy gets checked against your state's advertising rules. Several states restrict calling a lawyer a specialist or an expert absent certification, and some require particular disclaimers. Someone who's never opened those rules will write you the most persuasive version of a page and leave you holding the consequences.

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Four answers that should stop the conversation

A promised position on a term you both know is contested

No agency controls the ranking, which is why Google's own advice on hiring for search warns you off anyone promising a spot. In legal the promise usually gets honored on phrasing nobody types, and the report lands looking healthy. Make any guarantee name its exact terms before you treat it as one.

They also sell leads in your practice area

A company that runs your SEO and separately sells shared leads to firms around you is on both sides of your market. Ask directly whether they sell leads in your area of practice, and to whom.

Reporting that counts leads instead of matters

Lead counts are the easiest number in legal marketing to make look impressive, because a wrong-number call and a viable case both count as one. Ask for signed matters broken out by practice area. A company confident in the work will show you that. One that changes the subject is telling you what the number looks like.

Silence about what happens to the assets

Ask what leaves with you, and make them itemize it. A firm that can't walk away holding everything built in its name has been renting its own identity, and legal has a longer history of that than most industries. What SEO costs for a law firm sets out the specific questions and why this bites harder here.

Ask what they intend to do about the phone

This is where a good answer separates itself fastest. Search work delivers a call. Whether that call becomes a matter depends on who picks up, how quickly, and what happens if nobody does, and no amount of ranking fixes a firm that returns messages the next afternoon.

A company that never mentions intake is quietly promising to fill a bucket without checking it holds water. You are not obliged to hire them to fix your intake. You do want to hire someone who noticed.

How to compare two proposals

Line them up on practice areas rather than on price or page count. For each proposal, ask which of your practice areas gets a properly written page of its own, which get sub-pages beneath them, and which are being left out entirely. That single comparison usually explains the whole difference between two numbers, and it is the thing a price alone hides.

A firm chasing criminal defense and divorce work is commissioning two different bodies of writing aimed at two different people in two different states of mind. A proposal that treats them as one line item has not been built for your firm.

Then set the monthly figure against one signed matter in your lowest-value practice area, not your highest. If the work only makes sense when you assume a catastrophic injury case, the proposal is being justified by a lottery ticket.

A word about the shape of who you hire

Big shop, freelancer, small specialist outfit: all three are legitimate, and the trade-off is capacity against access. Size of logo tells you nothing. Put one question to whichever you're considering, which is which parts this particular person handles and which get passed to somebody you'll never speak to.

I should declare my own position rather than let you catch it later. Mine is the small kind. The strategy, the technical work, the pages themselves and the AI search side are mine personally, with two colleagues covering off-page, reporting and citations. Put that question to me exactly as you'd put it to the others on your list.

The one request that settles it

There's a single ask that sorts the field. Get each of them to name the specific faults in how your firm shows up today, while price is still unspoken. Nobody competent objects, because that examination is how a real number gets built in the first place. An objection tells you the package predates any knowledge of your firm.

So that's the order I use. Audit first, at no charge: current positions across the practice areas you actually want work in, what the site earns you today, the faults quietly costing you calls, and a read on the firms sitting above you. Turnaround is 24 to 48 hours. Price comes up afterwards, and nothing ties you in. And if the prior question is still open, whether search deserves the budget in the first place, SEO measured against the paid channels runs those numbers.

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