We do one thing: SEO for law firms. We don’t do PPC. We don’t do paid social. We don’t do web design or development. We don’t do generalist marketing. One vertical, one discipline, and underneath it a small stack of four distinct disciplines that, taken together, are what a law firm’s SEO actually consists of in 2026.
This page is a jumping-off point to those four. Each one has its own guide on the site — a deep main piece, ten in-depth articles, and a dozen Q&A pages covering the questions firm owners actually ask before they hire. Read whichever one is the live problem for your firm. If you don’t know which one is your live problem, that’s what the free audit is for.
Legal SEO — the umbrella
Legal SEO is the catch-all category that everything else nests inside. It’s the strategy layer — what your firm should be ranking for, in what markets, against which competitors, with what realistic timeline. It covers the part of the work that doesn’t fit cleanly under local pack or practice pages: the keyword research, the competitive landscape, the budget benchmarking, the "is SEO even the right channel for this firm right now" question that most agencies skip past because the answer might cost them the sale.
What we deliver in this area: the initial audit and strategy, the monthly direction, the case-volume measurement, the ongoing call about what to fix next and what to leave alone. This is the layer the owner is most directly involved in — it’s the judgment work, not the execution work, and it’s what doesn’t delegate to an account manager. Start here if you’re new to working with us and want to see how we think.
Why it matters: the strategy decisions made in month one are the ones that determine whether the next twelve months produce cases or burn through retainer dollars. A firm that starts an engagement targeting the wrong queries, in the wrong markets, with the wrong competitive read, will not recover that lost ground without a hard pivot — and most agencies don’t do hard pivots, because hard pivots look bad on a monthly report. We’d rather get the strategy right the first time than spend a year course-correcting.
Local SEO — Phoenix-leading, nationally applicable
For a local law firm — which is most law firms — the local pack is the highest-leverage real estate on Google. The three results that appear above the organic ten, with the map, the reviews, the click-to-call button. Ranking in that pack drives more inbound calls than anything else on the SERP for most practice areas, and getting in or out of it is a separate discipline from organic ranking. Different signals, different optimizations, different competitive dynamics.
What we deliver: Google Business Profile optimization, citation graph cleanup, NAP consistency audit, local-link strategy, local pack competitive analysis, and the city-specific work for firms operating in multiple markets. We lead with Phoenix and the surrounding cities — Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Glendale, Peoria — because we’re based here and we know the local SERPs intimately. But the work translates: the same playbook runs for a firm in Denver, Atlanta, or Tampa.
Practice Pages — the thesis
This is the work we believe most firms need most and almost no agency leads with. Your practice pages — your DUI page, your personal injury page, your estate planning page — are the small stack of URLs that drive the majority of your case-producing organic traffic. They’re the pages a stressed prospect lands on after they search "[practice] lawyer [city]." And in roughly eighty percent of the audits we run, those pages are doing some combination of: targeting the wrong query intent, written by a content mill that doesn’t understand the practice, missing the substance signals Google looks for in the legal vertical, or built in a way that suppresses conversion below the fold.
What we deliver: page-by-page audits, query intent re-mapping, full rewrites of the highest-leverage practice pages, lawyer bio optimization, case-result pages structured to comply with state bar rules, schema markup that matches the page rather than sitting on top of it. This work is unglamorous and slow — two or three pages a quarter, not fifty blog posts a month. It’s also, in our experience, what produces cases.
Read the Practice Pages guide →
Reviews & Reputation
Reviews are a ranking factor in the local pack and the single biggest conversion lever once a searcher lands on your GBP or your site. A firm with forty-seven reviews at a 4.8 average is going to take calls away from a firm with twelve reviews at a 4.4 average, regardless of which one has the better practice page. And the legal vertical has a unique constraint here: state bar advertising rules limit how firms can solicit reviews, respond to negative ones, and display client outcomes on the site. Get any of it wrong and you’re not just losing rankings — you’re risking a bar complaint.
What we deliver: a review-acquisition strategy that respects ABA Model Rule 7.1 and the state-bar equivalents, response templates for the typical good-review and bad-review patterns, removal work for fake or defamatory reviews where the platform’s policies allow, schema markup for review-rich results, and case-result disclaimer language that meets the bar’s requirements without burying the substance of the page. Most agencies treat reviews as an afterthought. We treat them as a discipline.
Read the Reviews & Reputation guide →
Practice areas we serve
The four core guides apply across practice areas — the underlying disciplines are the same whether you’re a PI firm or a criminal defense firm. But the specifics vary. PI firms compete on different queries than estate planners. Criminal defense firms operate under different ABA rules around case-result advertising. Family-law and employment-law searches have distinct intent profiles. We’ve written dedicated practice-area pages for the six verticals we work with most.
- Personal injury SEO
- Criminal defense SEO
- Family law SEO
- Estate planning SEO
- Business law SEO
- Employment law SEO
We work with one firm per practice area per city. That conflict policy is the reason this list stays short — we’d rather turn down a second PI firm in Phoenix than dilute the engagement of the one we’re already working with. Browse all practice areas for the full set.
Markets we serve
Phoenix and the surrounding cities are the lead market. Most of our clients are within driving distance of our office, which we think matters more than the industry usually admits — local SEO is local, and being able to walk the city your client is competing in changes how you see the SERP. We do work with firms outside Arizona, but the bar is higher: the firm has to be the kind of work we’d take on regardless of geography, and the engagement has to make sense without the local-market knowledge advantage.
Browse the Phoenix-area markets page for the eight cities we cover in-depth, including the specific competitive dynamics in each market.
What we don’t do
Worth saying directly. We don’t do paid search, paid social, web design, web development, or general marketing. We don’t run an in-house content mill for blog content — when blog content is the right move (rarer than the industry pretends), we write it ourselves or work with one of two writers we trust. We don’t sell "packages" with bronze-silver-gold tiers. We don’t offer a separate "link building service." And we don’t do SEO for industries outside the legal vertical. If your need is outside that scope, we’re happy to point you to people we trust — but it’s not what we do.
The narrower the scope, the better the work. We didn’t want to be a generalist agency. We wanted to be the consultancy a law firm calls when its current generalist agency isn’t working.
If you want the long version of the philosophy behind all of this, the approach page covers it. If you want to talk to me about your firm specifically, the audit is free.
— The owner, PHX Search Co.