Legal SEO consulting
Legal SEO consultant for law firms that want signed cases, not ranking reports
I’m Michael O’Grady. I’ve audited well over 500 law firm websites. I find what’s holding yours back in search, then hand your team or agency a plan it can actually follow.
- 20+ yearsin SEO
- 15+ yearsin legal marketing
- 500+ firmsover my career
- 120+ accountsdirected in a single year
What does a legal SEO consultant do?
A legal SEO consultant finds out why a law firm’s website isn’t bringing in cases, then directs the fix. Most firms I’ve audited weren’t short on effort. They were short on diagnosis. The agency was busy, but nobody had checked whether Google could tell who the firm was, what it handled and where.
In short
- I diagnose before anything gets rewritten or deleted.
- I fix the foundation first: crawling, speed and one consistent firm identity.
- Then the content: practice-area pages built around the questions clients actually ask.
- Your team or agency does the work. I set the direction and check it.
If your rankings have stalled and nobody can tell you why, start a conversation.
Who it’s for
Solo and small firms
One market, a handful of practice areas, and usually nobody in-house who owns marketing. The work is focus: fewer, deeper pages, a clean Business Profile, and listings that agree with each other.
Multi-office firms
I’ve worked with firms with as many as 11 offices. Each office needs its own location page and its own Business Profile pointing to it. Done wrong, your offices compete with each other. Done right, each one props up the others.
Practice areas and markets
Personal injury is my strongest practice area, and my favorite. I also work with family, divorce, criminal defense and estate planning firms, plus niche areas like CRPS. Most of my work has been in New Jersey, New York, California, Tennessee, Florida and Texas, with firms as far away as Hawaii.
Consultant or agency? An agency does the work. I tell you which work matters, in what order, and whether it got done. You can keep your current agency.
Sound familiar?
These are the problems I hear most from managing partners. Each one has a fix, and none of the fixes is “publish more blog posts.”
Your report says impressions are up. Your phones don’t agree.
How I help
I tie rankings to calls and signed cases, and I’ll tell you when the two disagree. I’ve seen rising traffic hide a real drop in qualified calls, and a spike in robocalls make a falling call count look flat.
Your firm’s details don’t match across the web.
How I help
I’ve audited firms listed under three versions of their own name, with different phone numbers on different directories and old office addresses still sitting on citations. I find every mismatch and settle it, so Google can say who you are and where.
Your practice pages read like they were written for a keyword.
How I help
I rebuild them around what a client needs to know: who’s liable, what negligence means in their situation, what happens next. Then I fix the basics around them, like page titles that still say “Home.”
Your site is slow on a phone.
How I help
I find what’s dragging it down. Often it’s a page builder carrying a pile of plugins. Then I get the site passing Google’s speed checks.
You have hundreds of pages, and most get no traffic.
How I help
I find the pages nobody visits, then decide which to improve, merge or remove. Google should spend its time on the pages that bring in cases.
How I audit a law firm website
I’ve audited well over 500 law firm websites. The order matters, so I check the same three things first, every time.
Can Google find the pages that matter?
I check that your practice-area, location and attorney pages can be crawled and indexed. Crawling is Google reading a page; indexing is Google keeping it so it can appear in search. If those pages are invisible, nothing else matters yet.
Is the firm’s identity clear and consistent?
Your firm’s name, phone numbers, office locations and attorney credentials should match everywhere: your site, your Business Profiles and the directories. Google won’t confidently recommend a firm it can’t confidently identify.
Do the pages answer real client questions?
I check whether each page answers what a prospective client is actually asking, with useful information they can verify. Not the same keyword repeated six times.
What I find most often
- Internal links pointing to a different law firm’s website
- Links to pages that don’t exist on the site
- Broken internal and external links
- Page titles that just say “Home” or “Welcome”
- Missing schema, the code that tells search engines who you are, what you do and where
- Different phone numbers on different listings
- Old office locations still listed on local citations (your listings on directories and legal sites)
- Hundreds of pages with zero traffic
None of these is exotic. They’re the things I find again and again, and each one costs a firm visibility it already paid for.
How I approach legal SEO
After the audit, I work in this order, because each step makes the next one count.
Technical SEO
Crawling, speed, site structure and schema. A site that fails Google’s speed checks on a phone has lost before anyone reads a word.
Practice-area architecture
Each practice area gets a main page, supporting pages for the questions clients ask, and internal links that tie them together. Search engines read that structure as depth. Thin, disconnected pages read as filler.
Content strategy
This is where most legal SEO falls apart, so it gets its own section below.
How I build content strategy →Local SEO
Business Profiles, citations, location pages and geographic backlinks. That’s how a firm gets into the Map Pack, the three map results Google shows for local searches.
Local SEO for law firms →Also: AI search. The same signals that help Google understand your firm help ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name it. AI search for law firms →
“AI does the manual hunting I used to do by eye. I do the judgment.”
I use Claude to find the content gaps most SEO strategists miss. I build detailed skills, saved instructions that run the same analysis every time, to pull missed opportunities out of the data and pick topics against my own criteria. Deciding what matters is still my job.
Content strategy that gives writers direction
Most legal content fails before a writer types a word. The brief says “personal injury, 800 words, use the keyword five times,” and that’s exactly what comes back.
In 2017, at Martindale-Avvo, I redesigned the content strategy documents our SEO team used and trained 20 strategists to work from them. The goal was simple: give writers enough direction that every page answers real client questions and reads like it came from someone who knows the law.
What goes into one of my content strategy documents
- The headings, in order
- The topics each section has to cover
- Keyword phrases
- The page’s URL
- Internal links in and out
- Detailed notes to the writer on how to lay out the content and which stats to include
It produced what I was after: fewer rewrites, faster turnaround, better rankings for the practice areas we wrote for, and happier clients. A writer with that brief doesn’t have to guess.
Writing for semantic SEO and entities
Semantic SEO means writing so a search engine understands the topic, not just matches a phrase. An entity is a specific, identifiable thing: a statute, a court, an injury type, a city, your firm.
I’ve written for search intent and semantic SEO since 2015. Take a truck accident page that never mentions the trucking company, its insurer or the evidence a client should keep. It reads as thin to a person. It reads as thin to Google, too.
Writing to get cited by AI
I still use the same content strategy approach today, and it’s how I improve a firm’s visibility in AI search. AI Overviews and AI assistants pull passages that answer a question cleanly and make sense on their own. So I structure pages that way: the direct answer first, then the detail a lawyer would add. That’s the goal. Nobody can promise an AI engine will cite a page, and I won’t.
Where I disagree with a lot of legal SEO agencies
Some of these were unpopular when I started saying them. A few still are.
Longer practice pages, not more blog posts
For years I pushed for long-form practice pages while many agencies didn’t believe in them or didn’t want to write them. A 600-word page can’t cover what a client needs to know about a truck accident claim.
Publishing blogs just to delete them later
Agencies publish dozens of thin posts, then “prune” them a year later to save crawl budget, the time Google spends crawling your site. That’s paying twice for pages that never had a job.
Saying the keyword over and over
Repeating “car accident lawyer” ten times doesn’t make a page more relevant. Covering the topic the way a lawyer would explain it does.
Treating 65 characters as a rule
I care more about what a page title says than whether it hits an exact character count. A title that says “Home” fails at any length.
Deep folders in competitive markets
In competitive markets I prefer a flatter URL structure built on location: /miami-car-accident-lawyer/ rather than /practice-areas/car-accidents/. The address itself says what the page is and where.
Practical tip
Check your firm’s name before your keywords
Search your firm’s name on the major legal directories, then open your Business Profile. If you find more than one version (an old name, a keyword-stuffed name, a name that still includes a partner who left), fix that first. Then check the phone number and office address on each one.
In the South Florida engagement below, three name variations were working against the firm before anyone touched the content.
How an engagement works
It starts with a free call, usually 20 to 30 minutes. Then three steps. The audit and roadmap stand on their own, so you can stop there and hand the plan to your own team.
| Step | What you get | Timeframe | Cadence | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Audit | A written audit and a walkthrough, live or recorded. It covers crawling and indexing, technical health, practice-area structure, content gaps, local listings and citations, and what your current vendors are actually delivering. | 2–3 weeks | One-time | From $500 |
| 02Roadmap | A prioritized 90-day plan: what to fix first, who owns each item, and how we’ll know it worked. | Delivered with the audit | Refreshed quarterly | Included with the audit |
| 03Advisory | A monthly strategy call, a review of what your team or agency publishes, and a monthly report on calls and signed cases, not just rankings. | Ongoing | Monthly. Three-month minimum, then month to month | Quoted after the audit |
The tradeoff: you get direction, not a production team. If nobody on your side can carry out the plan, you’ll need writers or an agency too. When a firm wants a team to do the work, I recommend Verdict Digital Marketing. I own Verdict Digital Marketing. Verdict also takes clients outside of legal. You don’t have to hire Verdict to work with me.
Proof: two firms, two different problems
One firm couldn’t be found. The other could be found, and its phones still didn’t move. Both are real, and both are anonymized.
Personal injury, South Florida
From page two to the Map Pack in six months
The firm had no page-one rankings and no Map Pack listing for any core injury term. I led the audit. It found a site scoring 7 out of 100 for mobile speed, internal links pointing to a different law firm, and three versions of the firm’s name across the web.
We fixed the foundation first: rebuilt the site, cleaned up the links and settled on one name. Then we rewrote the practice pages, from 600–900 words of keyword copy to 1,500–2,200 words built around what a client needs to know.
Delivered through Verdict Digital Marketing, which I own. Results are specific to this client and engagement and are not a guarantee of future performance.
See the case studies →Personal injury, three offices
Traffic up, phones flat
Only the home office ranked well when I took over the account, and the campaign had plateaued. I launched new case-type pages in two waves, rebuilt the location pages, pointed each Business Profile to the right office page and built geographic backlinks.
Search visibility improved across the board. Overall calls didn’t, and that gap is the most useful part of the story.
Latest six months vs. the prior six months. These are adjacent windows, not the same season a year apart. Client details are anonymized, and results are not a guarantee of future performance.
Read the three-office case study →What I won’t do, and when SEO is the wrong call
What I won’t do
- Pay for fake reviews
- Build copy-paste city pages
- Stuff keywords into your pages
- Sell you blog posts or pages your strategy doesn’t need
When SEO is the wrong investment
If you need signed cases next month, a full SEO build-out isn’t the answer. That’s especially true in personal injury, and in markets like New York City or Los Angeles.
You still need a few strong local pages, because local searches carry high intent. But SEO’s real value is authority that compounds over time, and that takes time you may not have. If that’s where you are, I’ll tell you on the first call.
Is this a fit?
This is for you if
- Your SEO has plateaued, or you want more from it and your content
- You want a legal SEO specialist with 15+ years in legal marketing leading your account, not a team that learned law firms recently
- You’re paying an agency and can’t tell whether it’s doing enough
- You want practice pages that answer what clients actually ask
- You want to turn more calls into good cases
Probably not a fit if
- You want a guarantee you’ll be number one by Friday
- You’re looking for the lowest-priced option
- You like a monthly report that says “impressions are up” and nothing else
- You’re comfortable with mediocre SEO and a vendor who’s “working on it”
- You’d rather hear everything is going great than what’s actually working
Who you’d work with
You work with me, not a junior account manager
I’m Michael O’Grady. I’ve spent 20+ years in SEO and 15+ years in legal marketing: at LexisNexis, at Martindale-Hubbell and Martindale-Avvo, where I directed 120+ accounts in a single year, and at Verdict Digital Marketing, which I founded in 2014.
Along the way I’ve audited well over 500 law firm websites, and written for Martindale-Avvo on why law firm websites don’t rank in Google.
More about me →Legal SEO questions
How is a legal SEO consultant different from an SEO agency?
An agency produces the work: pages, links, listings. I decide which work matters and in what order, and I check whether it’s paying off in calls and signed cases. Plenty of firms use both.
Can you work with my current agency?
Yes. I direct vendors; I don’t replace them. If your agency does good work, my job is to point it at the right problems. If it doesn’t, you’ll find out.
Which practice areas and markets do you work with?
Personal injury is my strongest practice area, and my favorite. I also work with family and divorce, criminal defense and estate planning firms, plus niche areas like CRPS cases. I’ve worked with firms across the country, most often in New Jersey, New York, California, Tennessee, Florida and Texas, from solo practitioners to firms with 11 offices.
Is SEO worth it if I need cases right away?
Usually not as your main investment. If you need signed cases now, especially in personal injury in a market like New York City or Los Angeles, a full SEO build-out won’t pay off fast enough. You still need a few strong local pages, because local searches carry high intent. I’ll tell you on the first call if that’s where you are.
How long does legal SEO take to show results?
It depends on your market, your competition and how much is broken. Technical fixes can show up quickly. Content and local authority take longer. The South Florida engagement on this page ran six months. That’s one firm, not a promise.
Do you guarantee rankings?
No. Nobody controls Google’s rankings. I’ll tell you what I’d fix, why, and how we’ll measure it.
What does legal SEO consulting cost?
It starts with a free call, usually 20 to 30 minutes, and I reply to every inquiry within 24 hours. Audits start at $500, and the 90-day roadmap comes with the audit. Ongoing advisory is quoted after the audit, because the scope depends on what the audit finds.
Do I have to hire Verdict Digital Marketing?
No. I own Verdict Digital Marketing. Verdict also takes clients outside of legal. I recommend it when a firm wants a team to do the work, but you can work with me and keep your own vendors.
Before you hire anyone, including me
SEO brings people to your phone. It can’t answer it. If calls go to voicemail or intake lets good cases slip, better rankings just send more people into the same leak.
Find out what’s holding your site back
Tell me about your firm and what you’ve tried. I’ll reply within 24 hours and tell you what I’d look at first.