When one law firm has two Google listings competing with each other

Nobody sets out to create duplicate listings. They arrive the way clutter arrives: one associate, one office move, one agency project, and nobody was watching the profile that year.

Growth makes mess. A firm with two attorneys hires a third, opens a second suite down the hall, changes the name on the door when a partner leaves, and hires a marketing company for six months in there somewhere. Every one of those events can create a Google listing. None of them removes one.

So you end up with two mailboxes at the end of one driveway. Both have your house number on them. The carrier splits the mail between them without telling anybody, half your post sits in the box you stopped opening, and from the road it looks like two households live here. That is what a duplicate profile does to a practice. The searches split, the reviews split, and Google, looking at two addresses that both claim to be you, trusts each of them slightly less.

Where the second listing actually came from

It is almost never a mystery once you go looking, and it is usually one of these.

An associate left. Individual attorneys can have their own Google listing, which is legitimate and often useful, and when that attorney walks out the door the listing stays behind pointing at your address and your main phone number. Now a lawyer who does not work there is the public face of a listing that competes with the firm's own.

The office moved. Somebody created a listing at the new address instead of editing the old one, so the old one is still out there ranking for the neighborhood you left.

An agency built one. A past marketing engagement created a profile under an account nobody at the firm can access, usually a personal address at a company that has since been sold.

The name changed. The firm was Nowak & Bell, then it was Nowak Family Law, and the old listing never got the memo.

Or somebody at the firm claimed the practice listing on a personal Gmail and that person is now retired, unreachable, or simply cannot remember the password. That last one is fixable. Google has a process for requesting ownership of a profile somebody else controls, it takes a few days rather than a phone call, and it is worth starting early because it runs on its own clock.

Which attorneys should have their own listing

This is where firms in the two-to-five range get the most confused advice, because most of what is written online was written either for solos or for firms with forty lawyers.

The working rule is that a practitioner listing exists for a lawyer clients can actually reach at that address. The listing carries their name, their own category for the work they do, and the firm's address and phone. Done properly, four attorneys and one firm listing reinforce each other: the firm ranks for the practice, and each attorney is findable by name, which matters enormously in family law because referrals arrive as a name rather than as a firm.

Done carelessly, the same five listings compete. The tells are worth knowing. Every attorney listing carrying the identical category as the firm listing, all five naming themselves for the same phrase, or a listing for somebody who only comes in on Thursdays and is not publicly reachable at that address. And when an attorney leaves, the listing has to move with them or come down. Leaving it is the single most common cause of the exact problem this page is about, and it is covered in more detail in why a firm ends up with two profiles.

What consistency means when there are five of you

Consistency work sounds tedious because it is, and it is also the part that pays. Every place your firm's name, address, suite, phone and hours appear has to agree, letter for letter. Not "close enough." Suite 210 and #210 and Ste. 210 are three different answers to a question Google is asking.

Now multiply. Four attorneys with individual listings, two offices, and the directories that hold a copy of each: the state or provincial bar directory, Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Martindale-Hubbell, Lawyers.com, Super Lawyers, plus whatever general aggregators scraped you in 2016. That is not a hard problem, it is a large one, and it is why this segment usually needs the Better size rather than the Good one. Nobody's afternoon is long enough to do it by hand once and then keep it true.

The other multiplier is practice areas. Firms in this range often carry family law alongside estate planning, or criminal, or real estate. The instinct is to create a listing for each practice area at the same address, and that instinct is wrong: Google treats it as a duplicate and it can take the whole set down with it. Practice areas belong in categories and in the profile's services, with one primary category naming the work you actually want more of.

Two things that look like duplicates and are not

A second office with its own staff, its own phone, and its own front door is a real location, and it should have its own listing. A room you rent by the hour to meet clients in the next county over should not, and getting that wrong is a fast route to a suspension across every listing on the account.

An attorney listing and a firm listing at the same address are also not duplicates of each other, as long as the attorney listing is a person's name and the firm listing is the firm's. Two firm listings at one address are duplicates. The distinction sounds like hair-splitting until you are staring at a merge screen deciding which profile keeps eleven years of reviews.

What I do about it

This is the Better size: $2,200, one payment, no retainer. Every listing that exists for your firm gets found, including the ones you do not know about. Duplicates get merged in the order that preserves reviews rather than the order that is easiest. Individual attorney listings get created where they help and cleaned up where a departure left one stranded. Access gets recovered and moved onto an account the firm actually controls. The directories get corrected so they stop disagreeing with each other. You get a review-request setup that is yours to keep, weekly check-ins while it runs, and a look back at ninety days.

Pricing shown in USD. See Canadian-dollar pricing →

The full breakdown of all three sizes is on the homepage, and if the review side is what is really bothering you, start with the guide to family law review requests. If the firm's actual website needs the rebuild instead, DivorceWebDesigner's small-firm page covers that.

Email hello@divorceseo.com with the firm name, your offices, and how many attorneys are on the letterhead. Inside one business day I will tell you in writing how many listings I found and which of them are fighting each other.