Overview
- You can run a useful law firm SEO audit yourself in about six hours across five passes: technical, content, local, links, and conversion.
- Most of what you’ll find is fixable without an agency, and the audit’s real value is telling you which problems are worth money and which are noise.
- The tools that do the work are Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, and either Ahrefs or Semrush, and the free tiers get you most of the way.
- If your findings are a list of tasks, hire a contractor and work the list. If your findings are “we don’t rank for anything in our city,” that’s a strategy problem, and that’s when an agency earns its fee.
An audit is not a 60-page PDF. It’s a list of things that are broken, ranked by how much money each one costs you. Most of the law firm SEO audit reports agencies send out are generated by a tool, padded with screenshots, and built to make the problem look big enough to justify a retainer. You can do the diagnostic part yourself in a week, and then you’ll know whether you need to hire anyone.
Block off a few hours across five passes. Do them in order, because the technical pass changes what you find in the content pass.
Before you start: get the baseline
Export the last 6 months of query data from Google Search Console and sort by impressions. That’s what Google already thinks you’re about, plus where you’re close to page one without knowing it. Anything at position 8 to 15 with real impression volume is your cheapest win, and most firms have five or six.
Then write down your three most profitable case types and the city you want them from. Every check below gets judged against that, not against traffic in general.
Pass 1: Technical
Crawl the site with Screaming Frog. The free version handles 500 URLs, which covers most firm sites.
Indexation. In Search Console, open Pages and read the “Not indexed” reasons. Bad result: hundreds of URLs under “Crawled, currently not indexed,” which usually means thin or duplicated practice area pages. Also bad: important pages missing from the indexed list, often a stray noindex left behind by a redesign.
Redirect chains and 404s. Screaming Frog’s Response Codes tab. Bad result: internal links pointing at 301s that point at other 301s, or old blog URLs returning 404 with backlinks still aimed at them. A dead 404 with links is free authority you’re throwing away.
Core Web Vitals. Search Console’s report, field data. Bad result: mobile Largest Contentful Paint over 2.5 seconds on your main templates. On law firm sites the cause is almost always a hero video, a slider, or chat scripts loading ahead of content.
Titles and H1s. Screaming Frog flags duplicates instantly. Bad result: twelve practice area pages all titled “Practice Areas | Smith Law Firm,” or an H1 that just says the firm name on every page.
Schema. Run a few pages through Google’s Rich Results Test. You want Attorney or LegalService markup with a consistent NAP, plus Person markup on attorney bios. Bad result: no schema at all, or schema with an address that doesn’t match your Google Business Profile.
HTTPS and mixed content. Any page loading an http:// image or script. Rare now, still worth ten seconds of checking.
Pass 2: Content
This pass finds more money than the technical pass at most firms.
Thin practice area pages. Export every practice area URL with its word count from Screaming Frog. Bad result: a page called “Car Accidents” with 280 words that hasn’t been touched since 2019. The competitors who outrank you have 1,500 words there covering what to do at the scene, how comparative fault works in your state, and the statute of limitations. Thin pages also drag down how Google reads the rest of the site.
Cannibalization. In Search Console, filter by a query you care about and look at the Pages tab. Bad result: three different URLs all picking up impressions for “car accident lawyer [city],” each ranking at 20 instead of one ranking at 6. This is endemic at firms that have blogged for years without a plan. The fix is consolidation: pick the strongest page, merge the useful parts of the others into it, and 301 the rest.
E-E-A-T on attorney bios. Legal content is YMYL, so Google’s quality thresholds are higher for you than for a plumber. Bad result: a bio that reads “John has been practicing since 2008 and enjoys golf.” What you want is bar admissions with dates, jurisdictions, published cases, speaking engagements, verdicts, and outbound links to the state bar profile and any real press. Attribute every blog post to a named attorney with a linked bio, not to “admin.” We wrote the long version of this in E-E-A-T and YMYL for lawyers.
Stale content. Sort your blog by publish date. Bad result: posts citing a filing fee, damages cap, or statute that changed two legislative sessions ago. Update and republish beats deleting.
Pass 3: Local
For most firms this pass decides whether the phone rings.
Google Business Profile. Check the primary category first. Bad result: a PI firm set to “Law Firm” instead of “Personal Injury Attorney,” which is one of the most common ranking problems we see. Then check hours, service areas, photo recency, and whether anyone has answered your reviews. Our Google Business Profile optimization guide covers the rest.
NAP consistency. Search your firm name plus your phone number, then check Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Yelp, the state bar directory, and your local chamber. Bad result: three phone numbers and two suite numbers across your listings, usually the residue of an old office or a tracking number someone syndicated.
Multi-office handling. Each location needs its own page with a unique address, a local phone number, embedded map, staff who actually sit there, and content about that market. Bad result: three location pages with identical text and the city name swapped. Each real office also needs its own Google Business Profile with a staffed address, not a virtual mailbox.
Review velocity. Bad result: 40 reviews, 35 of them from 2021. Steady beats spiky, and a firm adding four a month outranks a firm that bought 30 in a week.
Pass 4: Links
Run your domain through Ahrefs or Semrush. Then run your three closest competitors, the ones actually in the map pack for your money terms.
Referring domains gap. Bad result: you have 40 referring domains and they have 300. That tells you the ranking problem isn’t on your site at all. Look at their link profiles for the repeatable sources: local news, bar associations, sponsorships, scholarship pages, legal directories, podcasts.
Toxic links. Sort your backlinks by domain rating and scan the bottom. Bad result: a few hundred links from casino sites, foreign-language blog networks, or spun-content directories, typically bought by a previous vendor. Disavow only when the pattern is obvious and manipulative. Google ignores most junk links on its own, and firms have hurt themselves disavowing decent links out of panic.
Internal links. Screaming Frog’s Inlinks column. Bad result: your highest-value practice area page has two internal links pointing at it while your privacy policy has 60. Fix the internal links before you go buy external ones. If you do need external links, link building for lawyers is where to start.
Pass 5: Conversion
Rankings that don’t produce calls aren’t worth auditing for.
Open your top five landing pages on your own phone. Is the number tappable without scrolling? How many fields in the form? How fast does it load on cell service, not office wifi? Then check whether you have call tracking at all. If you can’t tell which pages produce calls, install CallRail before your next audit, because half the decisions in the next one depend on data you aren’t collecting yet.
Then call your own office at 5:40pm on a Friday and see what happens. That test has ended more marketing arguments than any report.
Do you need an agency, or just a to-do list?
Look at what your audit produced.
If it’s a list of tasks, a dozen broken redirects, a category fix, six thin pages, you need a contractor and a few weekends. Hand the list to a decent freelancer and work it down. Budget accordingly, and our honest breakdown of law firm SEO cost explains what those pieces actually run.
If your audit says you’re invisible for every term that matters in your city, and your competitors have 8x your referring domains, no checklist fixes that. That’s 12 to 18 months of content and links, and it needs someone whose job it is. What you want to avoid is the middle path, paying a retainer for someone to do the checklist work you could have handled, which is most of what gets sold as an attorney SEO audit. We wrote about how to tell the difference in choosing a law firm marketing agency.
Send us your audit findings
If you run the passes above and want a second opinion on what to fix first, send the list through our contact page. We’ll tell you which items are worth money and which ones you can ignore, including the ones we’d ignore on our own site. You can see the rest of what we do at The Lawyers’ Marketer.