A divorce attorney's Google Maps ranking checklist

Forty minutes, one browser tab, and a list. Most of what keeps a family law practice off the map is on it.

Before a long drive you walk around the car. Tires, washer fluid, the light that has been on for a week, whether the spare is actually in the trunk. It is not mechanical skill, it is a list somebody wrote down once so that nobody has to remember it at six in the morning. This is that list, for a law firm's Google listing.

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Work through it in order. Write down what you find rather than fixing as you go, because the fixing has an order of its own and rapid scattered edits to a profile can push it back into verification.

Know what you are actually being scored on

Google is public about this. Map results are decided by how relevant your profile is to what was typed, how close you are to the searcher, and how well known the business is more broadly. Distance is not something you can argue with. The other two are largely made of the items below.

Which means the honest framing for a solo in a suburb is that some searches are winnable and some are not, and the list below is about winning the ones that are.

The profile itself

• Verified. Open the profile. If it does not say verified, nothing else on this list matters yet. An unverified profile can look completely normal to you and be invisible to everybody else.
• Primary category. Read it out loud. Does it name the work you want more of? "Attorney" puts you in a pool with every practice area in the county. "Family law attorney" and "Divorce lawyer" are narrower doors. Check the choices against the live list Google offers today.
• Secondary categories. Add the ones that describe real services, and stop there. Adding twelve does not help and can blur what the profile is understood to be.
• Business name. It should be the firm's actual name and nothing else. Keyword text bolted into the name field is a guideline violation with real consequences.
• Address and suite. Present, correct, and formatted the same way it is formatted on the letterhead. If you do not meet clients at the address, the address should be hidden and a service area set instead.
• Service area. Set to the counties you actually take files in. Not the whole state, and not one zip code.
• Hours. Accurate, including the hour when the phone actually starts rolling to an answering service. Holiday hours set for the next three months.
• Phone. The number that rings a human. A tracking number is fine as long as the same number is used everywhere else, and it very often is not.
• Description. Written for a nervous person rather than for a search engine. Say what you do, who you do it for, and where.
• Services. Fill this in properly. Every service you offer, named in the words a client would use rather than the words a lawyer would.
• Attorney listings. One per lawyer who is genuinely reachable at that address, and none for anyone who has left. Solos should have one combined listing rather than two.
• Ownership. The account controlling the profile belongs to someone who still works there and is not a personal address from 2014.

The information that has to agree

• Search your own firm name in Maps. Then the previous name, then every address the firm has ever had, then each attorney's name plus the city. Note every listing that comes back.
• Duplicates. If there is more than one, do not delete anything today. The duplicate profiles guide explains the order that keeps your reviews.
• The bar directory. Your state or provincial listing is usually the most authoritative record of your firm anywhere, and it is very often the most out of date. Check it first.
• Legal directories. Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Martindale-Hubbell, Lawyers.com and Super Lawyers. Name, address, suite, phone. Letter for letter.
• Old phone numbers. Search any number the firm has retired, in quotes. Whatever comes back is still telling Google something about you.
• Suite formatting. Pick one, Suite 210 or #210 or Ste 210, and use that one everywhere. It sounds trivial. It is the single most common inconsistency I find.

Reviews and photos

• Every review has a reply. Including the old ones and especially the bad ones. Keep replies short and free of any matter detail, and have your bar counsel approve the template once.
• A review link exists and somebody uses it. Pull it from the profile, shorten it, and give it to whoever closes files.
• The asking moment is defined. Not a sequence that fires ninety days later. The details are in the review requests guide.
• Photos are yours. Exterior, so people can find the door. Interior of the room where meetings actually happen. Attorney portraits. Anything Google pulled in automatically that shows an empty parking lot should be pushed down by better ones.
• Q&A is seeded. The questions your intake line answers ten times a week, asked and answered on the profile. You are allowed to ask and answer them yourself.

What to stop doing

• Changing the primary category every couple of weeks because six days passed and nothing moved. Give a change a month.
• Judging your ranking from your own searches. Google personalizes results by location and history, so your own view is the least reliable evidence you have. Private and incognito search explains what to look at instead.
• Marking an old listing permanently closed to get rid of it. A law firm showing as closed in Maps costs you more than a duplicate does.
• Buying a virtual office in the next county to rank there. Google is unusually good at finding those, and the penalty can reach every listing on the account.

Telling whether it worked

Give it ninety days, then read the profile's own performance data rather than your impressions. The numbers that matter are calls, direction requests, and how many people arrived through a search for something other than your firm's name. That last one is the real signal, because it separates people who already knew about you from people who found you.

Then read the private search guide before you draw conclusions, because family law undercounts in a specific and predictable direction and the raw numbers will make you pessimistic for the wrong reason.

If this list turned up more than you want to handle on a Tuesday night, that is what the Good size at $1,200 is for, one payment, no retainer. The full breakdown is on the homepage, the solo version of this problem is on the solo practitioner page, or email hello@divorceseo.com with your firm name and county.