What is the typical cost of SEO for a law firm?

SEO questions · Criminal defense attorney SEO

Short answer

Most law firms pay somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars a month, and the most common band across the SEO industry is $500 to $1,000. What matters more is what the fee buys. For a criminal defense practice, the work that pays is practice pages per charge and real county pages, not a monthly link count.

Law firms get quoted wildly different numbers for SEO, sometimes for what sounds like the same service. That is because “SEO for lawyers” covers everything from a templated package that touches the Business Profile and publishes two blog posts a month, to a serious build of practice area pages for a firm competing in a major metro. The price only means something once you know which one you are looking at.

What the market charges

The broadest public data comes from Ahrefs, which surveyed 439 SEO providers in 2023, updated in 2024. 78.2% charged a monthly retainer. The most common band was $501 to $1,000 a month, and 68.8% charged $2,000 a month or less. Consultants averaged $171.18 an hour and agencies $98.90. Ahrefs sells SEO tools to the people it surveyed, which is worth knowing, but the numbers match what I see.

Legal marketing agencies often charge more than that average, sometimes several thousand a month, partly because legal clicks are expensive and agencies price against what the firm would otherwise spend on ads.

Compare it with what you would pay for clicks

The useful comparison for a law firm is not SEO against nothing. It is SEO against paid search. WordStream’s benchmarks across 13,474 US campaigns put the median legal cost per click at $9.87 and the median cost per lead at $131.63. Those are medians across all legal campaigns. Competitive criminal defense terms in a busy market cost far more per click than that.

That arithmetic is why SEO makes sense for most firms: a page that ranks keeps bringing in enquiries without a charge per visit. It is also why ads are still the right tool for a firm that needs cases this quarter, because SEO takes about six weeks to start showing and months to prove.

What should be in the fee for a criminal defense firm

Criminal defense is not like other local practices, and the fee should be spent accordingly.

A practice page per charge, not per category. Someone facing a specific charge searches for that charge. A page for federal firearms charges, for appeals, for vehicular homicide, each with real depth, does more than a single “criminal defense” page listing them in bullets. I wrote about this as a page per charge, not a page per practice area.
County and court pages that are not doorways. Different courts, different prosecutors, different practical advice. The same page with the county name swapped is the opposite.
Credentials on the home page. Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo, the state bar listing, Google Screened. In a practice where many clients will never leave a public review, that is what carries trust.
Internal links. Practice and county pages connected to each other and to the pages that convert, rather than reachable only from the menu.

What should not be in it

A promise of the top three. Google is explicit that there is no way to pay for a better local ranking, and that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking.

A monthly review target that ignores how your clients behave. Review volume in criminal defense tracks charge severity inversely. DWI clients review. Clients whose serious charges were dismissed almost never will. If your work is at the serious end, a strategy built on winning the review race will fail for structural reasons.

Fifty city pages. Build the ones you can defend, and skip the rest.

What I charge

For law firms I usually start with my $500 diagnostic audit, because most firm sites have a specific, findable reason they are not ranking, and the fix depends on what it is. Ongoing local work starts from $500 a month, month to month. Some of my legal work is white label, through agencies that serve law firms, in which case the agency sets the client’s price.

How to judge whether it is worth it

Work out what a typical retained case is worth to the firm, then ask how many extra cases a month the SEO would need to bring in to cover its cost. For most criminal defense practices that number is small. Then ask whether your intake can handle more calls, because more visibility with a phone that goes to voicemail at seven in the evening just means more missed cases.

Finally, ask any provider what they would build first and why. If the answer is a monthly package rather than a specific list of pages for your practice areas and counties, the fee is buying activity rather than results.

A useful check on any quote: ask what will exist on your site after three months that does not exist today. A list of named pages is a good answer. A number of hours is not.

If your firm should be ranking and isn’t, my SEO for criminal defense attorneys starts with the practice pages and county pages that actually win cases, and I’ll tell you if your site is fine and something else is the problem.