What to check, in the order that matters
Most audits are a tool export sorted alphabetically, which tells you a hundred things and does not tell you which one is costing you money. This is the order we actually work in, and the reason each step comes before the next. You can run all of it yourself.
What this covers
- 03 Start with what is actually indexed
- 04 Check whether your pages compete with each other
- 05 Measure speed on a phone, not a laptop
- 06 Audit the profile and the citations
- 07 Read the link profile honestly
- 08 Then, and only then, look at content
The sequence matters more than the checklist. Each step can invalidate the findings of the ones after it, so running them out of order produces a list of problems that are mostly symptoms of one you have not found yet.
Start with what is actually indexed
Not how many pages your site has. How many are in the index. Search your domain with a site query and compare the count to what you believe you have published. On most firm sites the two numbers are meaningfully different and nobody has ever noticed.
Pages missing from the index produce nothing regardless of how good they are. Pages in the index that should not be there, thin tag archives, duplicate print versions, old landing pages from a campaign in 2019, dilute the authority of the ones you care about.
Then check the obvious blockers. A robots rule someone added during a rebuild and never removed. A noindex tag left on a section. A redirect chain three hops long. These are embarrassing to find and trivial to fix, which is the best combination available in an audit.
Finish this step by confirming that your most important commercial pages, the practice-area pages that are supposed to earn the work, are all present. It is surprisingly common for one of them not to be.
Check whether your pages compete with each other
This is the finding that appears on most law firm sites and it is worth its own step. Open your practice-area pages side by side and read the first paragraph of each. If they are the same sentence with a different practice name, a search engine is seeing the same thing.
The mechanism is straightforward. When several pages target one query, the engine selects a single candidate and the others contribute nothing. Firms interpret the resulting flat performance as the content not working, and respond by publishing more pages of the same kind, which makes it worse.
- A
How to test it
Search your brand name plus a practice term and see which of your pages the engine returns. If it is not the page you would have chosen, you have found the problem. Repeat for each practice area.
- B
How to fix it
Consolidate what is genuinely duplicative, differentiate what should be distinct, and link them so the relationship is explicit. Fewer, better pages beats more, thinner ones in every case we have looked at.
Measure speed on a phone, not a laptop
Test the site on a phone, on a mobile connection, not on a laptop on office wifi. Legal search skews heavily to mobile and the urgent practices skew further still, so a desktop measurement is measuring the wrong thing.
What matters is how long until the page is usable, not until it has finished loading. A page that shows text quickly and settles down is fine. A page where the layout jumps twice while an image and a font arrive will lose people who are frightened and in a hurry.
The usual culprits on a firm site are uncompressed images from a photographer, a slider nobody looks at, and three tracking scripts loading before the content. All three are removable without a redesign.
Audit the profile and the citations
Most legal search is jurisdictional, so this step is not optional even for firms that think of themselves as regional. Open your primary profile and check the category first, because the primary category does more work than anything else on it and is usually whatever was picked on the day the profile was created.
Then check consistency. Search your firm name and note every version of your address and phone number that appears anywhere. Every variant is a small contradiction, and firms that have moved office once or twice usually carry several.
Then check the legal directories. They will outrank you for the head terms whether you engage with them or not, so your entries there should at least be complete rather than left at the free default.
Read the link profile honestly
You are looking for two things: whether there is enough, and whether any of it is a liability. The first is judged against the firms currently ranking above you rather than against an absolute number, because there is no absolute number and anyone quoting you one is inventing it.
The second is more urgent. Firms that bought cheap link packages years ago frequently carry a profile that is actively suppressing them now. The signatures are uniform anchor text, large numbers of links from unrelated foreign-language sites, and sudden historical spikes.
If you find that pattern, the first month of any program should remove more than it adds. A toxic link check with disavow exists for exactly this situation, and doing it before building anything new is the difference between compounding and pouring into a leak.
Then, and only then, look at content
Content is last on this list deliberately, which is the opposite of how most audits are ordered. A content gap analysis performed on a site with an indexation problem is measuring a constraint that is not binding.
When you do reach it, the question is not whether you have enough pages. It is whether anything on the site answers the questions people ask before they search for a lawyer. Most firm sites have service pages and nothing else, which means the cheapest and earliest audience in the market never encounters them.
List the twenty questions your intake team answers most often on a first call. If your site does not answer them in public, that is your content plan, and it will outperform anything a keyword tool suggests because it comes from actual demand.
Then stop. An audit that ends in six prioritized actions gets done. An audit that ends in ninety-four findings gets filed, and filing it is the same as not having run it.
Questions
How long should a law firm SEO audit take?
A thorough one takes a few days of work, not a few hours and not a month. Anything delivered in under an hour is a tool export with a logo on it. Anything taking a month is usually being padded, because the checks that matter are finite and most of them are mechanical.
Do we need to pay for an audit?
Not to get the findings in this guide, which you can run yourself with free tools and an afternoon. Paid audits earn their fee on interpretation and prioritization rather than on discovery. An on-page technical audit is included in our programs from Golden upward.
What is the single most common finding on a law firm site?
Practice-area pages that are near-duplicates of each other. It appears on the large majority of firm sites we look at, it suppresses every page involved, and it is usually the cheapest thing on the list to fix.
Our previous agency said everything was fine. Should we re-audit?
If the site publishes steadily and positions do not move, yes. That specific pattern almost always indicates a structural constraint rather than a content problem, and it is the pattern most likely to be missed by an agency whose product is content.
Does an audit tell us how long results will take?
It tells you what is currently preventing results, which is more useful. Anyone converting an audit into a ranking date is guessing. What an audit can honestly say is which fixes are likely to move things within weeks and which are quarters-long projects.
The other guides
- 01 A law firm SEO strategy that holds up Sequencing the work so early wins fund the terms that take longer.
- 02 Choosing an SEO agency The questions that separate a reporting habit from a marketing story.
- 03 What law firm SEO costs What the market charges, what changes the number, and what to refuse.
A free analysis of what your firm can win
Five questions about your practice areas, your firm size and where you are losing to the directories. You get back the terms we would target first, with difficulty and volume attached, and an honest read on how long each one takes. No obligation and no call required.