The firm opened a second office in the next city, and the website has a single address in the footer. Or it has grown to six offices across two states, three of them acquired with their own websites, and nobody is sure whether to fold them into one domain. Rankings are strong in the original city and nowhere else.
Multi-location SEO is mostly about making Google believe each office is a real, distinct place that serves the people around it, without producing six copies of the same site. Here is how we approach the decisions in the order they come up.
One website or one per office?
One website, almost always. Authority accumulates to a domain, and every link a satellite site earns is a link the main site did not.
The exception is a genuinely separate brand serving a different market, such as a consumer-facing injury practice and a business litigation practice that share partners but nothing else. If you do consolidate, the migration needs a full redirect map from every old URL to the new one, which is a technical SEO job that should be planned before the acquired site is switched off.
Within the one site, put locations at /locations/city-name/ rather than on subdomains like richmond.firm.com. Subdomains are treated as partly separate sites and split the authority you are trying to concentrate.
What a location page needs so it is not a doorway page
Google's guidelines penalize doorway pages: near-identical pages created for each city with the name swapped in. A firm with eight location pages that differ only in the city and the phone number is at risk, and those pages rarely rank anyway.
A location page that works reads like it was written by someone who has been in that office. It names the attorneys who work there and links to their bios. It gives the address, the phone, the hours, the parking situation and a photo of the building. It says which courts the office typically appears in and which counties it serves. It lists the practice areas handled at that office, which may not be all of them, and links to the practice-area pages. It embeds a Google map pointed at that specific Business Profile, and carries LocalBusiness or LegalService structured data with that office's own address and phone.
If there is not enough to say about an office to fill a page like that, ask whether it is an office or a mailing address, because Google will ask the same question.
Business Profiles for each office, and the ones you should not create
Every staffed office with signage gets its own Google Business Profile with its own address, phone, hours, photos and reviews. Each profile links to its own location page, not to the homepage, so Google can pair listing and page.
Do not create profiles for virtual offices, coworking mailboxes or an attorney's home. Google's guidelines require staff present during posted hours, and listings that fail that test get suspended, sometimes taking the legitimate ones down with them during review. Firms that want to rank in a city without an office have other options, discussed below.
Categories can differ by office. If the northern office handles injury and the southern office handles family law, set the primary category on each to match what that office actually does.
Keeping phone numbers and citations straight across offices
Each office should have one primary phone number, used consistently on its Business Profile, its location page, and its directory listings. Call tracking is compatible with this as long as the tracking number is the one published everywhere for that office and the main line is listed as an additional number on the profile.
Citations multiply with offices. Each location needs its own entry on Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp, Avvo, Justia and the state bar directory, with the exact name and address of that office. Acquired offices bring their old firm name with them across dozens of directories. The process is the same one we describe on our citations and directory listings page, repeated per office and tracked in one spreadsheet.
Reviews also belong to the office, not the firm. A client who worked with the Norfolk office should be sent the Norfolk profile's review link. Sending everyone to the headquarters listing leaves the branch listings looking empty.
Ranking in a city where you have no office
The map pack is out of reach without a physical location, because distance is a fixed input. What you can do is compete in the organic results. A well-built page for "[City] personal injury lawyer" that explains the local courts, the specific procedures in that county and which office handles those matters can rank organically.
Google Business Profiles also allow a service area to be set in addition to the address. For a firm that regularly appears in a neighboring county's courts, adding that county to the service area is accurate and harmless, though it does not by itself produce map rankings there.
The principles on each individual office are the same as for a single-office firm, and we lay those out on our local SEO for law firms page. The map-specific mechanics are on Google Maps optimization for lawyers, and all of it sits inside a firm-wide SEO for lawyers plan that decides which office gets attention first.
Questions we get
We have two offices twenty minutes apart. Do we really need two location pages?
Yes, if both are staffed and take clients. They will rank for different neighborhoods, and each Business Profile needs its own page to link to. Two pages is not a doorway problem; two pages with identical content is.
Should the homepage list every office address?
List them in the footer with links to each location page, but give the homepage's structured data and the site's primary contact details to the headquarters. Google associates a page with one place most cleanly.
An acquired firm has strong rankings on its old site. Will we lose them when we merge?
Some movement is normal for a few weeks. If every old page is redirected to the equivalent new one, the rankings usually transfer and often improve, because the combined domain has more authority than either had alone. The risk is in redirects that point everything to the homepage.
If you are planning a second office or untangling several, tell us what you are working with and we will map out the order of operations.