Websites and SEO for law firms
Practice areas are separate businesses. A firm site that treats them as one loses every one of them.
A law firm website is not one website. Family law, personal injury, employment and real estate are four different businesses with four different buyers arriving in four different emotional states, and the only thing they share is a letterhead. The firms that do well in search build each practice area as its own section with its own process content, its own fee explanation and its own intake path. The firms that struggle publish one 'practice areas' page listing everything they do, which reads as a firm that specialises in nothing.
How demand arrives
Practice-area-specific and event-triggered. Nobody browses for a lawyer - something happened. That makes intent extremely high and makes the match between the query and the page decisive.
Grouped by what the searcher has already decided, because that - not volume - determines what the page has to do.
Event-triggered
- divorce lawyer calgary
- car accident lawyer alberta
- wrongful dismissal lawyer
- criminal defence lawyer calgary
The highest commercial-value queries in local search, and the most aggressively contested.
Process research
- how long does divorce take in alberta
- how is child support calculated alberta
- what is my injury claim worth
- probate process alberta
Where a firm actually earns trust. Alberta-specific process content is the most defensible asset a firm site has.
Cost
- divorce lawyer cost alberta
- contingency fee personal injury
- real estate lawyer fees calgary
Cost anxiety is the biggest barrier to the first call, and almost every firm site refuses to address it.
On top of the core twelve.
Every build starts from the same twelve-page spine. These are the pages this vertical needs that a generic build would never include.
- 01
One section per practice area
Family, injury, employment, real estate, wills. Different buyers, different urgency, different searches.
- 02
Alberta process explainers
How it actually works here - timelines, courts, guidelines. The most defensible content a firm can publish.
- 03
Fee structure
Contingency, hourly, flat. Addressing cost directly is rare and removes the largest barrier to contact.
- 04
Lawyer profiles
In professional services the individual is the product, and these pages often outrank the practice pages.
- 05
Free consultation booking
The low-commitment first step this vertical converts on.
- 01Event-triggered query, frequently late at night
- 02Practice-area page matching the specific situation
- 03Process explanation that reduces fear before it sells
- 04Free consultation booking
- 05Consultation, retainer, matter
What proof looks like here
- Law Society standing and year of call
- Practice-area concentration rather than a list of everything
- Case results where professional rules permit them
- Named lawyer profiles with real photographs and real backgrounds
Schema type
LegalService
The schema.org type this business actually is. A wrong type is worse than none - it tells a search engine you are something you are not, and it is one of the most common errors on template sites.
Google Business Profile categories
- 1°Law firm
- 2Personal injury attorney
- 3Family law attorney
- 4Real estate attorney
- 5Estate planning attorney
The primary category does more for map-pack relevance than anything on your website. Getting it wrong is the single most expensive profile mistake there is.
- Personal injury is among the most expensive keyword sets in all of search, dominated by firms with very large budgets.
- Law Society advertising rules constrain claims and comparisons in ways commercial verticals never face.
- Legal content is held to a high quality bar, so thin practice-area pages actively underperform.
The Alberta version
The single most defensible content a small Alberta firm can build is Alberta-specific process content: how spousal support is actually calculated here, what the limitation period is on an injury claim, what probate looks like in this province, how the Employment Standards Code treats notice. National legal content farms cannot serve those questions accurately, large firms rarely bother to write them plainly, and they are exactly what someone searches at eleven at night before they are ready to call anyone.
Markets where law firms have a real presence and the local search picture is worth understanding before you spend anything.
- Can a small firm compete with the big personal injury advertisers?
- Not head-on for the main terms, and it is not worth the budget to try. The winnable ground is Alberta-specific process content, named-lawyer authority, niche sub-areas the large firms do not chase, and referral relationships that never touch a search result.
- Should lawyer bios be their own pages?
- Yes. People hire a lawyer, not a firm, and named-lawyer pages frequently outrank practice-area pages for anyone who heard your name and searched it. They are also the pages that carry the most conversion weight.
- Is publishing fees a risk?
- Explaining the fee structure is not the same as quoting a price. Whether it is contingency, hourly with a stated range, or flat fee for defined work - saying so removes the largest barrier to the first call, and almost no competitor will do it.
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