The firm on the square, and why we work for it

In a county seat the courthouse is in the middle and the lawyers face it

For most of a century the walk around the square was how people found a lawyer: a sign in a window, a name someone's uncle had used. The walk now happens on a phone. The ABA's last county-level count found that 1,272 of the country's 3,141 counties have fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents (ABA 2020 Profile of the Legal Profession, via LawSites), and the firms that are there carry a lot of the county's legal needs. We think they should be the ones a person finds.

Based in Austin, Texas

The Law Firm SEO Agency is operated and based in Austin, Texas, and works with firms anywhere in the United States. Our background is agency search work, including search and advertising accounts for 39 small businesses at a UK digital marketing agency, which is where the habit of writing everything down for a client who is busy comes from. We do the research on this site ourselves, write the memos and draft the pages. There is no sales layer; the people who read your email are the people who do the work.

Law is new for us; we have no law firm clients yet. The case study is from another field. The firm is independent, works by email, and takes one firm per town per practice area.

Six things we believe about marketing a small firm

1. For a firm with one office, the map pack is where most of the choosing happens.

   It appeared in all 14 towns we checked, with each firm's rating and phone number next to its name, and AttorneySync saw it on 77% of mobile searches for a lawyer.

2. Claim the free directory profiles before paying for any.

   Justia and Super Lawyers held two of the nine web results in every town we checked. A complete free profile on each means a person who clicks one still finds you.

3. A page per case type beats a bigger page about everything.

   The firm pages that ranked in our October snapshot of 14 towns carried the case type and the town in their titles. A person searching for a custody lawyer is looking for a page about custody.

4. Answering the phone matters as much as ranking.

   Clio's 2024 secret shoppers reached a person at 40% of 500 firms. The memo includes a phone test because it is often the cheapest fix.

5. Reviews should be asked for every time, and never paid for.

   Every client, same message, no incentive, no screening. It is built to fit Google's policy and the FTC rule; your attorney confirms it for your state.

6. The advertising rules make a site easier to trust.

   A page that names a responsible lawyer, states the office location and makes no claim it cannot substantiate reads like a lawyer wrote it.