SEO services for lawyers, with your firm's sign-off on every page

SEO for law firms, from a software company

This service is for a firm whose website does not show up in search for the work it most wants.

Devrisen is a software company. We build websites, and we offer SEO for law firms as a separate service, whether or not we built the site. We are not a legal marketing agency, and we are not lawyers.

That decides who does what. We do the search work: the audit, the technical changes or the specification for them, the drafts, and the work on links and listings. The law comes from your lawyers. Your firm owns the pages and content we write for it, and they stay on your site if you stop working with us.

Two ways people look for a lawyer

Someone referred to a lawyer often searches the name before calling, and for that reader the bio has to be right. People who have not been given a name tend to search in one of two ways.

Someone who needs a lawyer this week. The search is short: the problem, and often a place or "near me". Near the top, below any paid listings, Google often shows a map and a short list of nearby firms, built on their Google Business Profiles. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and how well known the business is, which it calls prominence. It says prominence is also based on things like how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has. Below the map come the websites.

Someone with weeks to decide. A company choosing counsel, or a family planning ahead, asks longer questions and often names no place. This reader is likely to open the page that explains the problem, then the bio of the lawyer who would handle it, and to compare firms before making contact.

Law firm SEO services: what we do, and what stays with your firm

The first row is the audit: the one paid step before the monthly work, done once. The rows below it are the monthly work, and the scope, a written list we agree with you, says which of them it includes and how far each goes. The monthly report is in every scope.

Part of the work	What we do	What stays with your firm
Technical audit	A written review of how Google reaches and reads the website: which pages it has indexed, how the site loads on a phone, whether each practice area has its own page, and where pages repeat each other. The findings come in order of urgency.	Access, and which kinds of work the firm wants more of.
Technical changes	Making the changes the audit calls for, or specifying them for your developer and checking the result.	Choosing who makes them: our team or your developer.
On-page work	Deciding which page should answer which search, and rewriting its title, headings and links in the words people search with.	A lawyer's approval of the changed page, with its title, headings and search description.
Content	Drafts of pages, written from what your lawyers tell us: practice-area pages, lawyer bios, office pages, and articles that answer common questions.	The law in each page, and a lawyer's approval before it is published.
Link building	Earning links to the website from sites that write about its field. Whether a site links is that site's decision.	Which organizations and publications the firm wants to be associated with, and a lawyer's approval of any message we send to another site about the firm.
Google Business Profile and listings	Keeping the firm's profiles and directory listings accurate, with each office's name, address, phone number and hours the same in each one the scope names.	A lawyer's approval of what a profile or a listing says about the firm. Asking clients for reviews, and replying to them.
A monthly report	What was done that month and what comes next, with figures from the site's own search and analytics data: how its pages are doing in Google and Bing search, the visits search brought and, where the site records them, the inquiries. A monthly call to go through it.	Which inquiries became clients. Only the firm knows that.

Our post on legal practice SEO goes through the work part by part, with what Google's documentation says about each.

Law firm website SEO, page by page

Most of a law firm's website is four kinds of page, and each does a different job in search.

• Practice-area pages — One for each kind of work the firm wants, answering what people ask before they call. One page that lists every practice answers none of those questions well.
• Lawyer bios — Who the lawyer is, what they handle and where they are admitted.
• Articles and answers — Written to answer questions people really ask, and saying which lawyer reviewed them. Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether a page is written or reviewed by someone who demonstrably knows the topic well.
• Office pages — One for each office where the firm's lawyers actually work. Google's spam policies give "pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" as an example of doorway abuse, so a copy for every nearby city with only the name changed is a risk, not a shortcut.

We do SEO work on WordPress sites and custom-built sites. Our team can make the technical changes, where the platform and the access you give us allow. Or your developer or web vendor can make them from a specification we write, and we check the result, as the scope provides.

If a vendor runs your site, ask whether it will make changes that someone else specifies. If it will not, or the platform does not allow them, tell us on the first call, because an audit is of little use if nobody can act on it.

Your Google Business Profile and directory listings

Where the scope includes them, we keep your firm's profiles and directory listings accurate, and if an office has no profile we help you create one in your firm's own Google account.

Four things about this work come from Google.

• Ownership — Your firm stays the owner of each profile and adds us as a manager. Google's policies for third parties say the business must keep ownership or co-ownership at all times, and list working as a manager, not an owner, as best practice.
• Verification — Your firm verifies its own profile. Google decides how a business is verified, and says not to share the verification code with anyone, including those who manage the profile.
• Eligibility — Google's guidelines say a virtual office (an address a business rents but does not operate from) is not eligible for a profile, and they set conditions for an office in a co-working space. If an office is part-time or shared, tell us on the first call.
• Ranking — Google says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and we promise no place on the map.

Google does not charge for a profile. What you pay us for is the work of keeping it accurate. Google publishes a notice for businesses working with a third party, worth reading before you give anyone access.

Talk through your firm's website

From the first call to a published page

We sign a confidentiality agreement with your firm before we are given any access. With that access we do not read what any inquiry says, and for the report we use only the number of inquiries that the site's analytics attribute to search.

What SEO for a law firm costs

We publish no price for the audit or for the monthly work, because the work differs too much from one firm to the next. The monthly fee covers the written list of work in the scope. It drops when listed work is finished or removed, and a new fee is agreed before anything is added. The fee depends on:

• Practice areas — how many need a page of their own.
• Lawyers and offices — how many bios and office pages there are to write.
• The website today — how many technical changes the audit calls for, and who makes them.
• Profiles and listings — whether they are included, and how many.
• Competition — how much content and link work your searches call for where you practice.

To start, tell us about your firm's website.

Book a 30-min call

SEO, paid ads, or a new website: which one the firm needs

A firm that cannot wait should look at paid ads before SEO. A paid ad can appear as soon as it runs, and it stops when the budget stops. We do not run ads as part of this service.

A new website is seldom the first answer. It is worth considering when the firm cannot get changes made to the site it has, for example because a vendor runs it and will not make changes. In that case a new website is a separate project with its own quote, and the code we write for it is assigned to your firm.

Some of the rules a law firm's marketing answers to, and what we leave to your lawyers

We are a software company, not a law firm, and nothing on this page is legal advice. These are some of the rules that bear on this work.

• Rules of professional conduct — Two states' published rules, as examples: North Carolina's Rule 7.1 and Rule 7.2, and Virginia's Rule 7.1. Rule 7.1 in each begins with the same sentence: "A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services." Between them, these rules and their comments go on to deal with reports of past results, comparisons with other lawyers and claims to be a specialist. Which states' rules apply to your lawyers, and what they allow, is for your lawyers to say.
• The Federal Trade Commission — The FTC has a rule on reviews and testimonials. As the FTC describes it, the rule prohibits fake reviews and testimonials, incentives conditioned on a review being positive or negative, and certain reviews and testimonials by a business's insiders that do not clearly and conspicuously disclose the connection, among other things.

We do not promise that a page meets any state's rules. That judgment is your lawyers', which is why one of them approves each page. We write no statement about results, no comparison with other firms and no word such as "specialist" unless your lawyers supply the wording. We write no testimonials at all: a testimonial is the client's own words, and whether to publish one is your lawyers' decision.

Nor do we promise a position in search, a number of inquiries or a date by which results will show. Google's own advice on hiring an SEO is that no one can guarantee a first-place ranking. Our commitment is the written list of work in the scope, and a report on it every month.