Expand Your Law Firm’s Reach with Strategic Local SEO Optimization:
- Define and Target Your Full Service Area
Go beyond your office’s physical location by identifying and optimizing for the full range of cities, counties, and neighborhoods your firm serves—using Google Business Profile, legal directories, and demographic data to reach more potential clients.
- Build Localized Pages and Content That Convert
Create unique service area pages and blog content featuring local keywords, testimonials, maps, and nearby landmarks to boost relevance, improve local rankings, and drive more leads from outside your immediate office location.
- Strengthen Local Authority with Directories and Backlinks
Ensure accurate, consistent listings across legal directories, and earn quality backlinks that point to your service area pages—not just your homepage—to signal trust and authority to search engines.
For most law firms, the location where they have their brick-and-mortar office represents just a small portion of their target audience. Legal services often extend far past the office’s physical location and throughout the county, and sometimes several counties, around it.
If your firm is only reaching the people in the city where your offices are, you’re missing thousands of dollars of valid revenue from people living outside of the city. Law firm local SEO requires understanding this reach and optimizing service area information to ensure your message reaches your entire service area. Here’s how you can do this.
Decide Your Service Area
The first step in optimizing your service area for local SEO for attorneys is to determine exactly who it is you want to serve. If you’re in a relatively small city, then your service area may be that city and its primary suburbs. However, you might live in a large metro area. In that case, you may want to be targeting specific neighborhoods or boroughs within that city. You can also target counties.
Not only do you need to think about the geography of your service area, but you also need to think about the demographics. If you’re a family law attorney specializing in child custody cases, and you target an area that’s primarily older adults without children in the home, you aren’t going to get many hot leads from those local SEO efforts. If your area has distinctive demographics in particular geographic areas, then make sure you’re properly targeting each of those areas.
Create a running list of potential service area terms. Remember your primary city and its surrounding communities, but also make a list of neighborhoods. As you work with clients, find out where they are from and add those areas to your list. The more service area terminology you have, as long as it’s accurate, the better your results will be.
Research Demand
In addition to thinking about your community and brainstorming service areas, you need to do some research. Find out what areas in your community need and are willing to pay for the legal services you provide. Optimizing service areas for law firms requires you to think carefully about who your target clients are and where they live and work.
Use Google to Define Your Service Area
If you’re looking to boost your law firm’s local SEO, the first step is setting up a Google Business profile for your firm. Once it’s set up, you will need to make sure your service area is clearly defined. Your Google Business Profile has a direct impact on harming or improving Google Maps visibility for law firms, so it’s vital that you pay attention here.
Google allows you to put in up to 20 service areas. You can choose from:
- City
- Postal code
- Neighborhood
For local SEO purposes, set up one profile for your main metro area, even if you have satellite firms in the suburbs of the primary city. Keep the service area around 2 hours from your primary location. If your firm is large enough to have multiple locations outside of that 2-hour radius, consider setting up location-specific Google Business profiles for each metro area you serve.
As you choose your 20 locations, be strategic. Think about how your potential clients will search. Does your community tend to talk about specific neighborhoods, or the main cities? Do you have distinctive zip codes to target? You can use a combination but hit each of your primary service areas in this description.
Add Effective Directory Listings
Professional directories for law firms are another place where you can target specific service areas effectively. Determine which ones you want to target, then claim your profile on them. Once you have a profile, add your service areas, using whichever metric they allow. Most will allow zip code, city, neighborhood, or county, just like Google.
Don’t just claim your directory listings and add service areas to them. Treat these as important parts of your online marketing because they are. Add photos, licensure information, website links, and more, so people will view your firm as a legitimate option for their legal needs.
Finally, make sure your name, address, and phone number on these directories match Google and your website. Consistency is critical to local SEO for law firms, even while you’re trying to rank for different service areas.
Generate Location-Specific Content
As you build your content marketing plan for your law firm, use your newly defined service areas to create location-specific content. Highlight those service areas in content that feature things to do or specific county laws that may be of interest to your clients. Have blog posts that use location-specific keywords appropriately, but keep each post focused on one particular part of your service area. Optimized local content is a huge boost to your local SEO for law firms, so incorporate your service area into your content strategy.
Create Service Area Pages on Your Website
Once you’ve set up your Google Business profile, it’s time to take your service area optimization to your firm’s website. Set up service area pages that target the areas you serve. These pages are different from location pages, which target the city or cities where you have an office. Rather, they target the area you serve, even if it’s separate from your geographic location.
On this page, place the following:
- Location-specific keywords in the content
- Testimonials from local customers, with the city or county listed
- Local landmarks and neighborhoods
- An embedded map showing the entire service area
Avoid the Temptation to Copy Content
When building these service area pages, it’s vital to have fresh content on each one. If you simply copy your content and swap out the city name for the county or zip code, Google will hurt your ranking due to duplicate content. Make each page fresh to avoid this problem.
As long as each page has unique content, you can set up pages for all of your service areas. These pages can cover the same basic information, just with different content structures, to effectively reach searchers within those geographic areas.
Benefits of Service Area Pages
One of the reasons service area pages are so vital on your law firm’s website, even if you don’t have a physical location in those service areas, is for local SEO. The best ranking to achieve is one of the three law firms listed in the local map pack, but Google prefers businesses that have physical locations. Strong service area pages can help you overcome this challenge, increasing the chances that your business will get listed.
In addition, service area pages give you a place to send leads when you target those service areas in other online marketing, such as pay-per-click marketing. It shows that you have an established presence as a law firm in that area and are ready to help clients with their legal needs. You can also link to these pages in blog posts and other content you create around a particular service area.
Backlink for Each Location
Backlinking, or getting links to your website from other websites, is one of the best ways to show authority for your law firm’s site, and that authority is a contributing factor when Google ranks your site. Reach out to legal blogs, past clients, local chamber of commerce pages, and more, and request links. Then, link to the appropriate service area page, not just your home page, to show authority and presence for those service areas.
Focus on Service Area Optimization for Law Firms with Help from Surefire Local
As you build your optimization strategy for various service areas, you need a tool that makes it easy to see directory listings, blog posts, social media pages, and Google Business profiles from one location. That’s exactly what Surefire Local does.
Our online marketing platform for law firms and other small businesses has all of the features you need to nail your local SEO in one convenient back office. You can add to and edit directory listings and your Google Business Profile, plan local content strategies, research keywords, and even perform demographic research directly from our platform. This saves you time and effort as you work on finding and optimizing those critical service areas.
Don’t ignore potentially valuable service areas because of a poor or cumbersome local SEO strategy. Surefire Local makes it easy and convenient to do this effectively. Attend a Surefire Local demo today to see how our platform can help you achieve your firm’s online marketing goals.