What is the best SEO for lawyers?

SEO questions · Criminal defense attorney SEO

Short answer

The best SEO for a law firm is the one built around how its clients actually search and decide. For criminal defense that means a page for each charge you handle, credentials doing the trust work that reviews cannot, county pages that say something real, and an intake that answers at night. Generic legal SEO packages miss most of that.

Ask ten legal marketing agencies this question and most will describe the same package: Business Profile optimisation, a monthly blog post or two, some links, more reviews. That package is built for the average local business. Criminal defense is not average, and the places where it differs are exactly where the results come from.

Start from how your clients search

Someone who has just been charged is not searching “criminal defense attorney” in a calm moment. They are searching the exact thing that has happened to them, often late at night, usually on a phone: the specific charge, the court, what happens at the first hearing. A page that names that charge and explains what comes next is a completely different experience from a services page that lists it in a bullet.

Those specific searches also have far less competition than the head term, and the person typing them is much closer to picking up the phone. That makes charge-specific practice pages the single highest-return piece of SEO work for most defense firms.

Reviews work differently in criminal defense

Every local SEO guide says to get more reviews, and for most businesses that is right. Buyers rely on them heavily: BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 97% read local reviews.

But in criminal defense, review volume tracks charge severity inversely. Clients who beat a DWI will often leave a review. Clients whose serious felony charges were dismissed almost never will, because the best outcome for them is no public record that they were ever your client. When I looked at a real local pack for “criminal defense attorney”, the three firms in it had 180, 113 and 111 reviews, and all three were DWI or general practices. Firms doing the most serious work in the same market had single-digit counts.

So if your practice sits at the serious end, the best SEO does not depend on winning the review race. I wrote about this in the firm doing the serious work had nine reviews.

Credentials do the trust work instead

Martindale-Hubbell ratings, Avvo, your state bar listing, Google Screened, published cases, speaking and teaching. Put them on the home page, not buried on an About page. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks who created the content, how and why, and says that of the elements of E-E-A-T, trust matters most. For a firm whose clients cannot be named, credentials and clearly attributed attorney pages are how that trust is shown.

County pages, done honestly

A page for each county where you genuinely appear is legitimate: different court, different prosecutors, different practical advice about what happens next. The same page with the county name swapped is a doorway, and Google treats doorway pages as spam. My test: if the page would still be useful with the place name deleted, build it.

The unglamorous half

Service pages with real content, not a paragraph each.
Titles and headings written in the words clients use, not the firm’s internal terms.
Internal links connecting practice pages, county pages and the pages that convert. On most firm sites the practice pages are reachable from the menu and nowhere else.
The right primary category on the Business Profile, checked against what the firms in your pack use.

What the best SEO will not do

It will not guarantee the top three, and nobody honest will promise that. It will not fix an intake problem: if calls go to voicemail after six, more visibility just means more lost cases. And it will not deliver results within a month. This work takes about six weeks to start showing and several months to prove, which is why firms that need cases this quarter should run ads alongside it.

How to tell whether yours is working

Look at which pages bring in enquiries, not just which rank. Track calls and form fills by practice area. Check whether new charge pages start earning impressions within a few weeks of going live. And be sceptical of any report that credits a single tactic, like Business Profile posts, for a result that arrived alongside fifteen new pages. Google has never confirmed those posts affect ranking at all.

Where to start if you can only do one thing

List the five charges that bring in most of your fees. Check whether each one has its own page that explains the charge, the likely process in your courts and what the client should do next. If any of them is missing or is a single paragraph, that is your first piece of work. It is usually the fastest way for a defense firm to start appearing for the searches that turn into retained cases, and it needs nothing more than an attorney’s knowledge and a few hours of writing.

If your firm should be ranking and isn’t, my SEO for criminal defense attorneys is built around charge pages, credentials and honest county pages, and if I look and there’s nothing worth fixing, I’ll tell you that.