Choosing a top SEO company for lawyers: what to check before you sign

The top SEO company for lawyers is not the one with the boldest promise, but the one that understands two things at once: how people with a legal problem search, and what the professional rules let a law firm say. Get the first wrong and you pay for traffic that never becomes a file. Get the second wrong and your own website becomes a disciplinary risk. This guide walks you through what to check before you sign, which questions to ask, which red flags to walk away from, and what actually drives the effort of SEO for a firm.

If you want to know what SEO for a firm involves in the first place, start with our guide to SEO for lawyers. This article is about choosing the partner who does it with you.

What does a good SEO company for lawyers actually do?

A good partner builds three things and measures one:

• Practice-area pages. One deep page per area of law you really practise, written in the client’s language: what happens now, what the steps are, how a first meeting works. A single “our expertise” page with ten bullet points ranks nowhere.
• Local visibility. Most clients look for a lawyer in their own city or judicial district. That means a complete Google Business Profile, consistent firm details across bar and legal directories, and location pages only where you really have an office or serve a region.
• Visible expertise. Legal content is a “Your Money or Your Life” topic, so real authors with their bar, preferred areas and experience matter more than in almost any other sector.
• Measurement on intake. Contact requests and calls per practice area, not a list of keyword positions.

Ask a candidate to explain how they would approach each of those four for your firm. A partner who jumps straight to “more blog posts” or “more backlinks” has not understood the job.

Which questions should you ask an SEO company?

Google publishes its own list of questions to ask a potential SEO, including whether they follow Google’s Search Essentials, what results they expect and in what timeframe, what experience they have in your industry and in your country or city, and whether they will share every change they make to your site. Those are a good start. For a law firm, add these:

1. Which professional rules apply to my firm, and how do you handle them? In Belgium, Flemish bars follow the OVB code and French-speaking and German-speaking bars follow the avocats.be code. A serious partner knows there is a difference and asks which bar you belong to.
2. Who writes the legal content, and who checks it? The right answer involves a lawyer from your firm as author or reviewer. Content that no lawyer has read should not go live.
3. How will you build local visibility without fake reviews or bought listings?
4. What will you report each month? You want intake requests per practice area and the work done, not only traffic graphs.
5. How do you measure visibility in AI assistants? Clients increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity “which lawyer in [city]”. A partner should be able to show whether your firm is named and who is named instead.
6. What happens to the content and the accounts if we stop? Your site, your profile and your analytics must stay yours.

Red flags when choosing an SEO company for lawyers

One more: unsolicited emails promising “page one for lawyers in your city”. Google itself warns that unsolicited SEO offers deserve the same scepticism as other spam.

What do deontology-proof deliverables look like?

Everything an SEO company publishes in your name is publicity, and you remain responsible for it. That does not make SEO impossible; it makes it more specific. Our article on law firm websites and the advertising rules covers the rules in detail. For an SEO brief, it translates into these deliverables:

• Practice-area pages that inform. They explain the problem and the procedure factually, list the areas you practise and avoid claims you cannot substantiate.
• Author boxes with checkable facts. Name, bar, year of registration, preferred areas. No titles you do not hold.
• Process transparency instead of results. How a first meeting works and how fees are calculated, stated clearly, rather than success rates. Whether results may be mentioned at all depends on your bar’s code, and the French-speaking code rules them out.
• A disclaimer near the content. General information, not tailored advice.
• Review requests that respect the client. No incentives, no pressure, no scripted reviews.

What drives the effort of SEO for a law firm?

We do not quote prices in articles, and a fixed price without an analysis would not mean much anyway. What determines the effort is predictable:

• The number of practice areas and offices. Each area you want to be found for needs its own page and its own authority. Three areas in one city is a different job from eight areas across four offices.
• Competition in your city and area of law. Employment law in Brussels is a different contest from construction law in a smaller district.
• The state of the site. A technically sound site with good structure needs content work; a slow or outdated site may need a rebuild first.
• Languages. In Belgium, a firm serving Dutch- and French-speaking clients needs both versions, written natively and linked correctly.
• How much lawyer time is available. The best legal content comes from your own lawyers. A partner can interview, draft and edit, but someone in the firm has to review.

Ask a candidate to explain their proposal against these drivers. If the scope is not linked to your practice areas, your cities and your languages, it is a template.

How does GEO fit into choosing an SEO company?

People with a legal question increasingly ask an AI assistant first, and for “which lawyer in Ghent” style questions they get a short list of names. Being on that list depends on largely the same foundations as SEO: clear practice-area pages, consistent firm details and mentions in reliable sources. But it needs its own measurement, because Search Console does not show AI answers.

When you compare SEO companies, ask how they would measure your share of AI answers per city and practice area, and what they would change if competitors are named and you are not. We explain the method and the professional-rules angle in GEO for law firms. To see where your firm stands today, run our free AI visibility checker.

How we work with law firms

We are a small team that works on SEO and AI visibility together, steers on intake requests rather than rankings, and gives honest advice, including when an approach is not worth it for your firm. Our SEO service covers practice-area pages, local visibility and measurement; our GEO agency work covers visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. You keep ownership of everything we build.

Frequently asked questions