An agency sent you a 40-page PDF with a score of 62 out of 100, a red bar chart, and a proposal attached. Half the items are about missing alt text on stock photos. None of them explain why your divorce page ranks on page three while a smaller firm across town ranks on page one. You are trying to figure out whether this audit told you anything.
A real law firm SEO audit answers a small number of concrete questions about your site, in order of how much each one matters, and ends with a prioritized list of what to fix. It should be readable by a managing partner and actionable by whoever maintains the site. This page describes what ours covers, so you can judge any audit you are handed, including one from us. It sits within our broader SEO for lawyers work.
Why most free audits are sales documents
Automated audit tools crawl a site and list every deviation from a generic checklist. They weight items equally, so a missing meta description on a privacy policy page scores the same as a practice page that is blocked from indexing. They cannot tell whether a page is any good, whether the firm's Google Business Profile is suspended, or whether the site lost half its traffic after a redesign in March.
A useful audit starts from the business question: which pages should be bringing in which clients, and why are they not. That means looking at Google Search Console and analytics data before looking at the site itself. A firm whose criminal defense page gets hundreds of impressions a month and a handful of clicks has a title tag problem, not an alt text problem.
Can Google reach and read every page that matters?
The first section of the audit is technical, and its purpose is to find anything preventing Google from indexing the pages that should rank. Common findings on law firm sites: practice pages accidentally set to noindex after a WordPress theme change; a staging site that was indexed and is competing with the live one; redirects from the old site that point to the home page instead of the matching new page; attorney bios generated by a plugin with URLs Google cannot crawl.
We check the robots.txt file, the XML sitemap (does it exist, is it submitted, does it list the pages you care about), canonical tags, the index coverage report in Search Console, and the redirect map from any previous site.
Our page on technical SEO for law firm websites goes into each check.
Is the site fast on the phone a client actually uses?
Most prospective clients reach a law firm site from a phone, and a slow page loses them before it loads. The audit measures Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift) using field data from Search Console where available, and lab data from PageSpeed Insights where not.
Typical law firm culprits: a hero image uploaded at full camera resolution; a chat widget, a call tracking script, and three analytics tags all loading before the content; a page builder that outputs thousands of lines of CSS; and a font stack that blocks rendering. Our page on Core Web Vitals for law firm websites explains what each metric means and what usually fixes it.
Does each page have a job, and is it doing it?
The content section maps every page on the site to a target search phrase and asks whether the page can rank for it. This is where most of the findings live. We look at whether practice pages have unique title tags or all share the firm name. Whether the page for "estate planning attorney [city]" actually contains that phrase, a real explanation of the service, and an attorney's name. Whether there are twelve thin pages that should be three substantial ones.
Search Console data drives this section. Pages with impressions but few clicks need better titles and descriptions. Queries where you appear on page two need a stronger page. Queries with no impressions at all need a new page or a different strategy.
Does Google know who the firm is?
The final section covers the firm as an entity: the Google Business Profile, the consistency of name, address, and phone across directories, the attorney bios, and the structured data on the site. Google decides whether to show your firm in the map pack, in a knowledge panel, and in AI-generated answers based on how clearly and consistently the firm is described across the web.
We check whether the site has LegalService and Attorney schema, whether it is correct, and whether it matches the Business Profile. Our page on schema markup for law firms explains what each type does. We check the profile's category, hours, service list, and review response rate, and we look for a second or duplicate profile that could be splitting reviews or triggering a suspension.
What the audit hands you at the end is a single list, ordered by expected impact, with each item marked as a quick fix, a content project, or a development task, and an estimate of what each requires. If your audit ends with a score instead of a list, you have been given a brochure.
Questions we get
How long does a proper audit take?
For a typical law firm site of 20 to 100 pages, expect one to two weeks from access to delivery, most of it spent reading Search Console data and the pages themselves. A large multi-office site takes longer.
What access do you need?
Read access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, manager access to the Google Business Profile, and a login to the website CMS if you want the technical findings verified rather than inferred. We do not need hosting or domain registrar credentials for an audit.
We had an audit last year. Do we need another one?
If the recommendations were implemented and traffic improved, probably not yet. If the audit was never acted on, the findings are likely still valid, and the question is prioritization rather than a new audit. If the site was redesigned since, yes; redesigns are the most common cause of lost rankings we see.
If you want to know whether the audit you were handed is worth acting on, tell us what you are working with.