SEO for lawyers: which practice area to work on first and a 90-day plan

SEO for lawyers is won one practice area and one city at a time. People who need a lawyer search for their problem and their city: “inheritance lawyer in Castellón” or “dismissed while on sick leave”. Below you will find how to work out what clients in each practice area search for, a matrix to decide where to start and a 90-day plan, week by week.

This guide does not repeat what is already covered in others:

• The structure of the website and the practice area page template: what a law firm’s website should include.
• The Google Business Profile, point by point: a 20-point audit of a law firm’s profile.
• Reviews: how to get Google reviews.
• The limits set by professional ethics: lawyer advertising under the Code of Professional Conduct.
• AI in detail: what GEO is and how it differs from SEO.

On a legal topic, Google asks for more proof that you know what you are talking about

Google gives more weight to experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) on certain topics. These are the topics that can affect people’s health, financial stability or safety, and Google calls them YMYL. An inheritance or a dismissal is one of them, and of those 4 traits, trust is the most important.

E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor in itself, the same page clarifies. For a law firm, it translates into pages signed by whoever handles those matters, linked sources and real review dates. And be wary of anyone who promises you rankings: nobody can guarantee you the top spot.

4 Google sources and your phone tell you what your clients search for

Before you write anything, note down the real searches for each practice area in a spreadsheet. Use the sources in this order.

1. Search Console: what people already search for to find you

If your website has Search Console, start there. In the Performance report, the Queries tab shows the searches you appeared for and the Pages tab shows which page appeared. Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months.

Separate out your brand. Filter the queries with “Doesn’t match regex” and the firm’s name: you will see the searches without your brand (Search Console Help). Note: with a query filter, the totals leave out anonymised queries. Google has an automatic branded queries filter, but only for top-level properties, not folder or subdomain ones, and only with enough volume. A small firm will probably not see it.

Bear one limit in mind. Search Console leaves anonymised queries out of the table, and those are the uncommon ones. “Inheritance lawyer Vila-real” may be one of them. That is why, for a local practice area, the Pages tab often tells you more than the Queries tab.

2. Autocomplete: how people phrase it

Autocomplete predictions reflect real searches made on Google. They also take into account your location and your previous searches, so try it in an incognito window.

Type the beginning of each situation and note how Google completes it: “inheritance with”, “dismissed while”, “arraigo for”. Also try the practice area followed by the city. What Google does not complete is informative too: if hardly anyone searches for it that way, do not use it as a title.

3. Related questions: what people want to know next

Below many results there is a box of related questions, and at the bottom of the page, related searches. Google does not let you control what appears there, but it suggests looking at those queries when deciding what to write. In its documentation it calls them “People also ask”.

Each question is a candidate for a situation page or for an answer within the practice area page. The rule in the content plan, further down, decides which.

4. Keyword Planner: roughly how often people search

Keyword Planner is inside Google Ads. To use it, you have to finish setting up the account, including your billing details.

Choose your province as the location and look at the average monthly searches. It is a 12-month average and only counts exact match. Google also warns that its forecasts are less accurate for small areas. Use it to compare practice areas with each other, not as an exact figure.

5. Your phone and your email

The questions from the first call do not show up in any tool. Ask whoever answers the phone to note them down for 2 weeks, in the client’s own words.

When you finish, each row of the spreadsheet has 4 pieces of information: the search, its source, its type and the page that should answer it. The types are practice area and city, situation, question or deadline.

The practice area × city matrix decides where to start

A firm of 1 to 10 lawyers cannot work on all its practice areas in all its cities at once. This matrix ranks them with a preliminary filter and 5 criteria. It is our approach: a tool for deciding, not a Google formula.

The preliminary filter. A practice area only goes into the matrix if it meets 2 conditions:

• You can back it up with qualifications, accredited courses or extended practice. The limit is explained in lawyer advertising.
• You can take on more matters in it over the coming months. Ranking for work you cannot handle only brings you calls you have to turn down.

The 5 criteria. Score each combination of practice area and city from 1 to 3. 2 is the midpoint: for proximity, for example, an office in the neighbouring town.

Add up the 5 criteria. With 12 points or more, start this quarter. From 9 to 11, the next one. With 8 or fewer, it is enough to name that city on the practice area page.

A high score in a city without an office does not call for a page for that city: you will see why in the section on offices. It calls for mentions there, a good explanation of how you work remotely or, if the numbers add up, opening an office.

Hypothetical example

Let’s say a firm of 3 lawyers with an office in Castellón handles inheritance, employment and family law. All the scores are made up for the example.

Inheritance goes first in Castellón and Vila-real, which share the same page and the same profile. Valencia has demand, but without an office there, distance works against you on the map. What counts there is mentions and the guides only you can write.

The content plan has 3 pieces per practice area

Each practice area that comes out on top in the matrix gets 3 pieces, in this order.

1. The practice area page. It is the parent page and answers “[practice area] lawyer in [city]”. The block-by-block template is in what a law firm’s website should include. Put it in its own folder, such as /herencias/: that way you can measure it separately. If it already exists at another URL, do not move it without a 301 redirect, as we explain in redesigning without losing rankings.

2. The situation pages. One for each situation with a different answer: inheritance with debts, inheritance without a will, dividing up the house between siblings. Each one links to the parent page, and the parent page links to all of them.

The rule to avoid overdoing it: if the answer is the same, it is the same page. Google warns that creating content for every variation of a search, in order to manipulate rankings, breaches its scaled content abuse policy. “Inheritance with debts” and “inheriting debts” are a single page.

3. Guides to legal deadlines. Many legal searches start with a deadline that is already running. A guide that explains it, linking to the relevant article, is there when the client is in a hurry. Each row of this table could be one:

Byline, sources and date. Google asks whether it is clear who created the content and whether there is a byline. Sign each guide with the name of the lawyer who handles those matters and their Bar Association (Colegio de la Abogacía). Link each deadline to its law, as in the table.

The quality rater guidelines ask that, on YMYL topics, content be accurate and consistent with expert consensus. Those raters do not decide rankings: Google uses their data to check that its systems work.

When the law changes, the page is updated that month

A legal page is only as current as the law it explains. Google has systems to show fresher content for queries that call for it. Our approach: after a reform, many legal searches become that kind of query.

These are real changes from 2025 and 2026, all published in the Official State Gazette (BOE), and the pages each one forced firms to review:

Updating a legal page takes 5 steps

1. Get the alert. In the consolidated text of each law you cite, the BOE offers a “Recibir alerta” (receive alert) option: it emails you every time there is a new version. You need a Mi BOE account. For Valencian laws, also check the Official Journal of the Generalitat Valenciana (DOGV): Law 5/2026 came out there on 10 August and in the BOE on 17 September.
2. Find the affected pages. Search your website for the name of the law. In Search Console, filter by its folder and start with the pages that get the most impressions.
3. Rewrite what changes: deadlines, requirements and steps. If a deadline has closed, like the one for extraordinary arraigo, do not delete the page. Say at the top that it has closed and which routes are still open: this is our approach.
4. Add the date, only if the change is substantial. Show “Updated on” with the real date, and make sure it matches the date in the structured data. Google asks whether you change dates to make pages seem fresh without real changes. In the sitemap, lastmod should reflect the last significant update.
5. Annotate it in Search Console. Right-click on the Performance chart and add a note of up to 120 characters, such as “Arraigo updated for RD 316/2026” (Help).

An announcement is not a law

On 10 February 2026, the Generalitat announced that it would remove Inheritance Tax on the transfer of family businesses up to the fourth degree. The tax cut came with Law 5/2026, in force since 11 August. A firm that had rewritten its page in February would have spent 6 months explaining a tax cut that did not yet apply.

Update when the law comes out in the DOGV or the BOE, and say from what date it applies. In the meantime, at most, add one line saying that it has been announced and is pending publication.

The links a law firm gets without paying come from its Bar Association and its city

For the map, Google takes into account the number of websites that point to your business. And its rater guidelines consider recommendations from expert sources, such as professional associations, to be strong evidence of a good reputation on YMYL topics.

These are the sources a law firm in Castellón or Valencia has to hand:

Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links mainly to manipulate rankings. They give these examples, which are often seen at law firms:

• Paying for links or for articles that include them.
• Excessive link exchanges with other firms.
• Guest posts or press releases with optimised anchor text, such as “inheritance lawyer Castellón”.
• Links from low-quality directories or bookmarking sites.
• Links in the footer or template of several websites.

A paid article is not spam if the link has the rel="sponsored" or nofollow attribute. But for a law firm there is a second rule: the Code of Professional Conduct (Código Deontológico) prohibits covert advertising (art. 6.9), so it must be stated in a visible place that it is advertising. We explain this in lawyer advertising.

Our approach: when someone links to you, ask them to use your name or the firm’s name as the link text, not your practice area and your city.

Several offices: one page for each real office

Google considers it doorway abuse to have multiple domains or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. Sites that breach its policies may rank lower in the results or stop appearing.

An office page is not a doorway if it has information that only applies to that office:

• Address, how to get there and opening hours.
• Who sees clients there, with their Bar Association and membership number.
• Which practice areas are handled at that office, each linked to its parent page.
• Its own Google Business Profile, linked to this page. The audit for each profile is in a law firm’s Google Business Profile.
• Its own structured data. Google asks you to define each location as a LocalBusiness; for a law firm, the type is LegalService, because schema.org lists Attorney as deprecated.

Practice area pages are not cloned for each office. There is a single inheritance page, and it says which offices handle that work.

In a city without an office, our approach: almost never a page. Only if you have something of your own to say about it, as we explain in what a law firm’s website should include. If you see clients by video call, say so on the practice area page and the contact page, and work on mentions in that city.

Each practice area is measured separately, in its own folder

If each practice area lives in its own folder, Search Console lets you filter with “URLs containing” (Help). This is what to look at every month:

For inheritance, the regex could be (herencia|testamento|leg[ií]tima), the Spanish words for inheritance, will and forced share. The generative AI report groups data by page and is being rolled out gradually. For ChatGPT and Perplexity, do the 15-minute test with practice area and city questions.

The enquiries spreadsheet is the figure that counts: Analytics does not see people who reject cookies. How to set it up is explained in how to find out how many clients your website brings you.

Add an annotation in Search Console for every page you publish and every update. There is room for 200 annotations per property and they are deleted after 500 days. Do not write client names: everyone with access can see them.

How long it takes: weeks to see signals, months to see clients

Google puts it plainly: some changes take hours and others, several months. In general, you have to wait a few weeks to assess whether a change has worked.

Other documented timeframes:

• Crawling: from a few days to a few weeks. Requesting it several times does not speed it up.
• Search Console data: usually available within 2 or 3 days.

Our approach for the 90 days: by week 6, the new pages should be indexed. By week 9, the folder should have its first impressions. By week 13 you can start reading the non-branded queries. Enquiries attributable to a practice area usually take longer, and each market moves at its own pace.

90-day plan, week by week

The plan works on one practice area in the cities that come out of the matrix. When it ends, you repeat it with the next one.

What to do on Monday

1. Open Search Console, filter the queries without your brand and see which practice areas appear. If you do not have Search Console, that is the first task.
2. Fill in the matrix with the practice areas you can back up with credentials and your cities, even if only in pencil.
3. Turn on the BOE alert for the 3 laws you cite most on your website.
4. Search your website for “Juzgado de”. If a page names a court from before the Tribunales de Instancia, other than justice of the peace courts, correct it.
5. Ask whoever answers the phone to note down the questions from the first call for 2 weeks.
6. Write your first annotation in Search Console: “Plan start”.

If you would rather have support, at NOR studio we work on local SEO for law firms with this matrix and this calendar. Situation pages are the basis of the website we built for a Second Chance Law lawyer in Castellón. The rest of our approach is on our page for law firms.