Your firm has a website, someone writes practice-area pages for it, and the rankings still sit on page three. Or your agency sends a monthly report with a "site health" score of 78 and a list of 400 warnings, and nobody can tell you which of those warnings matter. That is usually the point at which a lawyer starts searching for technical SEO.
Technical SEO is the part of search optimization that has nothing to do with the words on the page. It is whether Google can find your pages, read them, understand how they relate to each other, and serve them quickly. Most law firm sites have a handful of real technical problems and a long tail of noise, and the job is telling the two apart.
Can Google actually find and index every page that matters?
Start in Google Search Console, under Pages. It lists every URL Google knows about, sorts them into indexed and not indexed, and gives a reason for each exclusion. The reasons to care about are "Crawled, currently not indexed" and "Discovered, currently not indexed" when they apply to practice-area or attorney pages, and "Excluded by noindex tag" on any page that was supposed to rank.
Then check the XML sitemap. WordPress sites running Yoast or Rank Math generate one automatically, but it often includes tag archives, author pages and media attachment pages that clutter the list. A sitemap should contain the pages you want ranked and nothing else, and it should be submitted in Search Console so you can see how many of its URLs are actually indexed.
Robots.txt is the last stop. We still find firms whose developer left Disallow: / in place after a redesign, or blocked the CSS and JavaScript folders so Google renders the site as unstyled text.
Does the site structure tell Google what the firm does?
Google infers what a page is about partly from where it sits. A personal injury firm with /practice-areas/car-accidents/ and /practice-areas/truck-accidents/ linked from a single practice-areas hub gives Google a clear map.
The specific things to check: every important page is reachable within three clicks of the homepage, the main navigation links to the practice areas you care about most, and each practice-area page links to the sub-pages beneath it. Internal links with descriptive anchor text (the words "truck accident lawyer in Richmond" rather than "click here") do more for a law firm site than most external link building, and they cost nothing.
Duplicate URLs are the other structural problem. Firms with a Spanish version of the site, a printable version, or addresses that resolve with and without a trailing slash need canonical tags that point Google to one preferred version of each page. Once the structure is sound, schema markup for law firms adds a second layer of clarity by labeling the firm, its attorneys and its practice areas in a format Google reads directly.
What happened to the rankings after the last redesign?
The most common technical catastrophe we see is a redesign that changed URLs without redirects. The old /richmond-dui-attorney/ page had ten years of links pointing at it. The new site put the same content at /practice-areas/dui/ and the old address now returns a 404. Google treats that as a deleted page, and the ranking goes with it.
The fix is a redirect map: a spreadsheet of every old URL and the new URL it should point to, implemented as 301 redirects at the server or in the site configuration. If the redesign already happened, pull the old URLs from Search Console's 404 list, from the Wayback Machine, or from your analytics history, and redirect them now. Rankings often recover within weeks once the redirects are in place.
How fast does the site need to be?
Google measures speed through a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals, visible in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. We explain what those numbers mean on our page about Core Web Vitals for law firm websites. The technical SEO view is simpler: a law firm site does not need to be the fastest site on the internet, but it should show its main content within a couple of seconds on a phone with an ordinary connection.
The usual causes of a slow law firm site are oversized hero images, a page builder that loads twenty scripts on every page, a chat widget that blocks rendering, and cheap shared hosting. All of those are fixable without a rebuild, and we walk through the steps on our site speed optimization page.
Which of the 400 warnings can you ignore?
Crawling tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush Site Audit and Ahrefs will flag everything, from missing alt text on a decorative icon to a meta description four characters too long. Most of that has no measurable effect on rankings.
Here is how we prioritize. First, anything that blocks indexing (noindex tags, robots blocks, server errors). Second, anything that splits authority (missing redirects, duplicate URLs without canonicals, mixed http and https). Third, anything that hurts the mobile experience (layout shifts, tiny tap targets, text that requires zooming). Everything else goes into a backlog that gets handled when someone is already editing that page.
A proper law firm SEO audit puts the technical findings in that order, next to content and authority findings, so you know which fix to fund first. Technical work is the foundation for a broader SEO for lawyers program, not a substitute for it.
Questions we get
Do we need a developer for this, or can our marketing person handle it?
Search Console review, sitemap cleanup and internal linking are within reach of a capable marketing coordinator. Redirects, canonical tags, hosting changes and script removal usually need someone comfortable editing server configuration or theme files.
Will fixing technical issues alone improve rankings?
If the site has a real blocking issue, yes, and sometimes dramatically. If the site is technically fine and the problem is thin content or no reviews, technical work will not move the needle.
How often should technical SEO be rechecked?
After any redesign, plugin change, hosting move or new practice-area launch, and otherwise quarterly. Search Console emails you when it detects new indexing problems, so at minimum make sure someone at the firm receives those alerts.
If you would like us to read what Search Console is telling you and turn it into a short priority list, tell us what you are working with.