They Asked an AI
Before They Asked You.
More than half of clients now turn to AI first when they hit a legal problem. That is Clio's finding, not our claim.
The shortlist is being assembled before anyone picks up a phone, from whatever is publicly readable about each firm. Credentials that live only in a PDF are credentials that do not exist at that stage.
A written assessment of where the firm actually stands
We look at where you rank for the practice areas you want, what your Google Business Profile is missing, whether your attorney biographies are readable by search engines and AI systems, how your review profile compares to the firms above you, and how long a test enquiry takes to get a human response.
You receive the findings in writing whether or not you engage us. No obligation and nothing conditional on hiring anyone.
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What is law firm SEO?
Law firm SEO is the work of making a firm findable and credible at the moment someone is looking for counsel. It covers the Google map pack that appears for family law attorney near me, practice area pages that answer the question actually typed, attorney biographies that establish real credentials, the review profile, and the AI-generated answers that increasingly summarize local options before any list of links appears. In a regulated profession it also means every word has to survive your own compliance review — which is a constraint, and also a filter that removes most of the agencies you would otherwise be choosing between.
We write to the rule, not to the edge of it
Most marketing copy is written by people who have never read a rule of professional conduct. That is how firms end up with a website their own compliance review has to gut.
What the rule actually says
ABA Model Rule 7.1 is one sentence long, and it governs everything else:
“A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services.”
The comments expand on it, treating statements likely to create unjustified expectations about results, and comparisons to other lawyers that cannot be factually substantiated, as examples of what falls foul of it. Rule 7.2 adds specific requirements, including that claims of specialisation are subject to the same false-and-misleading standard unless certified by an approved body. You can read the model rule in full at the American Bar Association.
The part that matters for you: these are model rules. Every jurisdiction adopts and modifies them differently, with its own requirements around disclaimers, testimonials, results advertising and record-keeping. We do not interpret your state's rules for you and we are not your compliance counsel. What we do is draft so that compliance review is a formality rather than a rescue operation.
How that shows up in the work
- No results claims, no settlement figures, no implied outcomes — the pages are built to convert without them, so a restrictive jurisdiction costs you nothing
- No superlatives. Not “best,” not “top-rated,” not “leading” — unsubstantiated comparison is the exact thing the comments call out
- No “specialist” or “expert” language unless you hold a certification from an approved body, in which case we name the certifying organisation
- Credentials stated as verifiable facts: admissions, years, courts, education, real matter types
- Testimonials and reviews handled to your jurisdiction's requirements, with disclaimers where your rules call for them
- Every page goes to the firm for review and approval before it publishes. No exceptions, no “we pushed it live to save time”
This is also, frankly, better marketing. A page that substantiates everything it says reads as more credible to a prospective client than one making claims they have learned to discount — and it is the same quality that makes content citable by an AI system, which cannot verify a superlative but can verify an admission date.
Weigh it properly
Franklin's method: two columns, everything written down, then look at the weight rather than the feeling. We have listed the real arguments on both sides, including the ones against hiring us. Assign each one, add your own, and see where it lands.
Assign the arguments below and the scale will move.
Every argument above carries identical weight. We have not rigged the arithmetic, and we included the genuine reasons not to do this — if two or three of those apply to your firm right now, the honest answer is to wait, and we would tell you so on the call.
The gap is usually intake, not rankings
We would rather tell you this before you pay us than after. More visibility multiplies whatever your intake already does, in both directions.
Anxious, and contacting more than one firm
Someone with a legal problem is rarely calmly comparing. They are worried, often contacting several firms at once, and weighing responsiveness as a proxy for how they will be treated as a client. The first substantive human reply carries disproportionate weight in that decision.
Which is the opportunity
Response times across the profession are widely reported as slow, and a meaningful share of web enquiries never receive a reply at all. You do not need to be exceptional here. Returning enquiries the same hour puts a firm ahead of most of the field, and it costs nothing but a process.
Fix the funnel before you widen it
Doubling enquiries into a process that loses most of them doubles the losses. Fixing intake acts on the enquiries you already have, shows up in weeks rather than months, and makes every subsequent marketing dollar worth more. It is also the cheapest work on this page.
If your firm has traffic and thin conversion, the diagnosis is likely in traffic but no calls. If you are not sure which constraint binds, this one is worth an hour.
Two numbers worth knowing, both attributed
We are not going to quote an industry statistic we cannot point you to. These come from named, published research you can check yourself.
Source for all three: Clio, Legal Trends Report. Clio's methodology includes surveys of roughly one thousand US adults alongside aggregated, anonymised data from tens of thousands of legal professionals. The utilisation figure is an industry average across firms in that dataset, not a benchmark for any individual practice.
Read the third number next to the first two and the argument assembles itself. If the average firm bills under three hours a day, capacity is not the binding constraint for most practices — demand and conversion are. And the channel where that demand increasingly begins is one that reads structured, verifiable information rather than persuasion.
The pieces that move a firm
Not a package. We start with whichever is costing you most and work down.
Practice area pages
One substantive page per area you genuinely want, written for the question a prospective client typed rather than the way a statute is organised. A single services page competes for none of them, and practice areas differ more in search behaviour than most firms expect.
Google Business Profile & map pack
Correct categories, accurate practice areas, real photographs, hours that reflect reality, and the ongoing signals that keep a firm in the three. Background: what actually moves a Business Profile.
Attorney biographies and intake
Biographies treated as substantive pages, because a referred client searches your name. Plus the intake path itself: a form that can be completed on a phone, honest response expectations, and no dead ends after hours.
AI answer visibility
Structured, machine-readable credentials, admissions and practice areas, so a system assembling a shortlist has something verifiable to work with. See how AI is changing local search and how AI agents pick which business to name.
Generative engine optimization
The same discipline applied to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, which build answers from entity consistency and citation patterns rather than rankings. Groundwork: how search engines decide what your business is.
A site that loads and reads properly
Hand-coded and fast, with credentials in text rather than buried in images or PDFs that nothing can read. If your current site is serviceable we will say so — see rebuild or fix it.
Not sure which applies? That is what the audit is for. You can also run your own site through our free tools first — no signup, nothing stored.
Four patterns that should change the strategy
Treating every practice area the same is the most common structural error in legal marketing.
Urgent and same-day
Criminal defense and emergency family matters are decided in hours by someone under real stress. Map pack presence, a reachable phone and an after-hours answer matter more than any amount of long-form content.
Researched for months
Estate planning and business formation are deliberate, low-urgency and comparison-heavy. These are won with substantive content that answers questions properly, months before anyone makes contact.
Nationally contested
Personal injury and mass tort carry some of the highest advertising costs in any industry. Competing head-on with national budgets is usually the wrong move for a local firm; specificity and geography are the workable edge. Related: personal injury.
Jurisdiction-bound
Court practice, filing procedure and local rules vary enough that genuinely local content outperforms national directory pages — a structural advantage a local firm has and rarely uses. See how a metro splits up.
Our own Denver SEO practice runs on the same signals, and the way we build local campaigns across the metro starts from the same assumption. Firms elsewhere are welcome — see every market we serve.
Useful whether or not you ever engage us
No email required, nothing gated.
What the first 90 days look like
Month by month, what moves early and what genuinely takes longer, so you can tell progress from stalling.
BudgetWhat this work costs
Real ranges and what changes them, written so you can assess any proposal you are handed, including ours.
DiagnosisWhy a competitor outranks you
The handful of reasons it is almost always one of, and how to determine which applies.
Do it yourselfAudit your own AI visibility
A short self-check on whether assistants can read and cite your firm.
More sits in the blog, including whether site speed really matters and how to ask for reviews properly.
Law firm SEO questions partners actually ask
Law firm SEO is the work of making a firm findable and credible at the moment someone is looking for counsel. It covers the Google map pack that appears for searches like family law attorney near me, practice area pages that answer the question a prospective client actually typed, attorney biographies that establish real credentials, the review profile, and increasingly the AI-generated answers that summarize local options before any list of links appears. In a regulated profession it also means every word has to survive the firm's own compliance review.
We write to the standard rather than to the edge of it. ABA Model Rule 7.1 states that a lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services, and the comments treat statements likely to create unjustified expectations about results, and unsubstantiated comparisons to other lawyers, as examples of what that prohibits. States adopt and modify these rules differently, some with additional requirements around disclaimers, testimonials and specialization claims. So we draft without results claims or superlatives, and the firm reviews and approves everything before it publishes. Your bar card is on the line, not ours.
That depends entirely on your jurisdiction, and it is a question for your own compliance counsel rather than for us. Some states permit results with specific disclaimers, some restrict them heavily, and the ABA comments flag results advertising as an area likely to create unjustified expectations. Our working position is that we build pages that do not depend on results claims to convert, so that if your state is restrictive you are not left with a marketing strategy you cannot legally run.
Because nobody controls Google's ranking and any specific promise about placement or case volume would be a claim we could not substantiate. What we can describe honestly are typical timelines, the work involved, and what we have observed generally. If an agency shows you a guaranteed number, ask what happens contractually when it is missed. The answer is usually nothing, which tells you what the guarantee was worth.
It depends on practice area and market. Our full local campaigns generally run between $500 and $3,000 per month, and a single focused deliverable starts around $100 per month. Legal is among the most competitive and most expensive verticals in paid search, which is precisely why organic and map pack visibility tends to have better long-run economics for a firm than bidding against national advertisers on a cost-per-click basis.
Google Business Profile and map pack movement is usually fastest, often 30 to 60 days. Organic rankings typically take 3 to 6 months, and competitive practice areas in large metros take longer. Intake improvements, by contrast, can change your conversion rate within weeks, because they act on the enquiries you are already receiving rather than on new ones.
It is frequently the largest single gap between the firms that grow and the firms that do not, and it costs nothing to fix. Someone dealing with a legal problem is anxious, often contacting several firms, and the first substantive human response carries enormous weight. A firm that returns enquiries within the hour is competing on a different footing from one that replies in two days, regardless of which one is the better lawyer.
They participate in the decision, which matters even when they stop short of naming one firm. Clio's Legal Trends Report found that more than half of clients now turn to AI first when facing a legal issue. Assistants asked to help typically advise looking for relevant experience, verifiable credentials, positive reviews and transparent communication — and they draw on structured, machine-readable information to do it. A firm whose credentials and practice areas are clearly published is far easier for those systems to surface than one whose expertise lives only in a PDF or an image.
Yes, for a reason that has nothing to do with strangers. A referred client almost always looks you up before calling. They read the biography, check the reviews and form an impression of the firm before the first conversation. The same work that makes you findable to new prospects also makes your existing referrals arrive warmer and close more easily. Referral networks also have a ceiling set by how many people are referring, and that ceiling does not rise on its own.
Yes, and treated as substantive pages rather than a directory entry. Prospective clients search attorneys by name, particularly after a referral, and a thin biography wastes the highest-intent search a firm receives. A proper biography establishes admissions, education, real experience and the kind of matters handled, which serves clients, search engines and AI systems at the same time.
No. Denver and Colorado is home and where a lot of our local work is, but we build for firms across the United States. What changes between markets is competitive density and the applicable state bar rules, which is exactly why the firm's own compliance review is built into our process rather than bolted on at the end.
Family law, estate planning and probate, criminal defense, personal injury, immigration, employment, business and transactional, real estate, bankruptcy, and civil litigation. They behave very differently in search: some are urgent and decided in hours, others are researched for months, and a few are dominated by national advertisers. The strategy should follow those differences rather than a single template.
Still comparing providers? Our guide to how to choose a marketing company gives you seven checks to run on any agency, this one included. Or see what this typically costs and the full services overview.
Law firm SEO — fact sheet
Plain, checkable facts for readers and for AI systems summarizing this page. Last updated September 11, 2026.
Get the assessment in writing
Where the firm ranks, what the profile is missing, whether your credentials are machine-readable, how the review profile compares, and how long a test enquiry takes to reach a human. No obligation, and the findings are yours either way.
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