Can SEO Help Law Firms Get More Leads?

Yes, when done right, SEO generates more leads for law firms by positioning them where potential clients are actively searching: organic search results, map packs, and, now, AI Overviews. The demand for legal services is high, especially in fields like personal injury, and many of those legal consumers are searching for lawyers online. 

Every month, more than 90,000 people search for “personal injury lawyer.” And that’s not even counting users who search for a “personal injury lawyer near me” (over 40,000) or one of the thousands of other queries that drive new business to law firms.

With a custom SEO strategy, we’ve seen clients enjoy sustained increases in new signed cases within their first year. One injury firm in California saw a 38% increase in signed cases (84 additional organic cases). Another in Connecticut doubled their cases (161 additional organic cases), and another in Florida more than doubled theirs. 

But capturing this demand isn’t easy. Law is one of the most competitive SEO markets. Success requires an agency that specializes in law firm SEO, not just general SEO. Your agency should have proven experience managing law firms’ digital marketing budgets and developing strategies tailored to your firm’s market, practice area, and goals.

The best part? SEO efforts compound over time. As your website grows with authoritative content, earns trust, and gains backlinks, your results will strengthen long term. Done right, your website will become your firm’s most valuable asset. With maintenance and continued attention, it’ll generate leads for years to come.

SEO offers a huge opportunity for law firms

Every month, tens of thousands of people search for legal services online. Not only do general terms like ‘personal injury lawyer’ and ‘car accident lawyer’ generate substantial search volume, but city-specific searches offer plenty more opportunities still. 

And that’s just personal injury lawyer terms. It doesn’t account for queries specific to car accidents, truck accidents, and queries relevant to other practice types. The top four criminal defense lawyer terms generate about 75,000 searches per month between them. And “immigration lawyer” alone generates 74,000 monthly searches. 

And it’s not just English-language searches. There’s also opportunity in non-English terms, often with far less competition. While high-volume keywords like “personal injury lawyer Houston” get 8,400 searches per month with a keyword difficulty of 75, its Spanish equivalent sees just 70 searches but has a difficulty of only 12, making it much easier to rank for. The same pattern holds across other cities and practice areas. Few law firms actively target Spanish-language searches, leaving a gap in the market and an opportunity to capture cases that others are overlooking. Translating your English pages into Spanish resonates with Spanish-speaking clients, helping you connect with a broader audience. Even with lower search volumes, these queries represent potential for new clients, especially for smaller firms in competitive markets looking for a foothold.

These numbers reflect a massive pool of potential clients actively looking online for legal help. 

When someone searches for a lawyer, Google presents them with multiple opportunities to discover your firm. If you’re not building your presence on the Google search results pages, you’ll never see these leads. 

• Paid Ads – Local Service Ads (LSAs) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads appear at the top of search results and offer immediate visibility, but only a fraction of searchers (19%) click on them, according to a study by Backlinko. Even in high-intent searches like “car accident lawyer,” fewer than 25% of users click on an ad. 
• Google Map Pack – 42% of people doing local searches (such as for a lawyer in their city) click on a result in the local Map Pack, according to Backlinko. Create, optimize, and maintain a Google Business Profiles for each of your offices because they’re crucial for capturing local search queries. 
• Organic Search Results – Despite the growing presence of other search features and their continued descent down search results pages,  65% of searchers click at least one organic link, according to the Backlinko study. 
• SERP Features – Even with the risk of zero-click searches – that is, users find what they’re looking for on the Google search results page without clicking through to your website – there’s value in ranking for SERP features like Featured Snippets and People Also Ask. They increase exposure and credibility, and some users, especially transactional-intent searchers, will click through to your website.

The big elephant in the room now is AI and how it’s changing search behavior. AI-generated results are beginning to play a larger role in how people find information online. In fact, Google has doubled the presence of AI Overviews for long-tail searches (that is, queries with 8 or more words) between September and December 2024 according to a BrightEdge report. A quarter of long-tail queries now generate an AI Overview. Shorter queries, already seeing a substantial number of AI Overviews, also saw growth over the same time period. 

But this doesn’t negate the importance of a strong digital presence. If anything, it makes SEO even more critical. The fundamentals of search (visibility, trust, and authority) remain largely the same whether your goal is to rank in organic, local Map Packs, or AI Overviews (or, better yet, all of the above). Law firms that adapt will continue to capture leads. 

The demand for legal services isn’t slowing down, and Google continues to evolve how it presents search results. Firms that invest in SEO will build long-term visibility online so they can continue to secure more leads.

Work with an SEO agency that has kept up with Google’s algorithm updates and evolving search behavior for years and will continue to do so as this new search landscape unfolds.

How we doubled our clients’ cases in 12 months

Some SEO agencies focus on vanity metrics, while others prioritize real ROI for your law firm. Some take a one-size-fits-all approach to SEO strategy, applying the same strategy to every client even when it doesn’t fit your firm’s unique challenges and needs. Others build tailored strategies designed to address your specific challenges and drive long-term growth in the metrics that truly matter.

Metrics like traffic and rankings are useful indicators of progress, but they’re just that: indicators. The true measure of success is the number of cases you sign. Rankings and traffic mean little if they don’t lead to more cases. Work with an agency that lives this distinction. When an agency prioritizes your ROI, they’ll create a strategy that drives real results.

Here’s an example. 

A law firm in Connecticut came to us struggling to gain traction in their local market. Their traffic was declining, and they couldn’t rank for transactional keywords, the kind that drive qualified traffic, generate leads, and ultimately lead to more signed cases.

We started with a clear roadmap that included:

• Content revitalization and cleanup: Updating key practice area pages so they’re more helpful and more relevant for readers looking for a lawyer.
• Technical and structural optimization: Improving site speed, fixing broken links, and enhancing mobile performance.
• Structural improvements: Organizing the URL structure and building a smarter internal linking strategy.

One of our first wins was a 27-point improvement in site health thanks to technical fixes and performance improvements. That metric alone means nothing to the business’s bottom line, but it was a great indicator that the site was primed to perform better because it was faster, more secure, and more technically sound. Google’s E-E-A-T prioritizes sites that users can trust and provide good user experience.

Next, we revamped hundreds of pages, giving priority to the client’s core practice areas most likely to convert visitors into clients. We removed outdated, low-quality content and replaced it with well-structured, relevant pages. We also overhauled the internal linking strategy to strengthen the site’s most important transactional pages. The result? Twice as many keywords ranking in the top 3 spots, positioning them to capture more traffic primed to convert into leads. 

The true victory wasn’t a healthier website or better rankings. The strategies we implemented turned those metrics into real results: more cases. Over the course of 12 months, we increased monthly organic cases from 18 to 36, good for an additional 161 organic cases per year.

Our more than 15 years in legal SEO informed our strategy. We’ve seen less experienced SEO agencies focus on traffic and rankings but boost traffic and rankings for the wrong searches. There’s value in FAQ posts and blog posts that rank highly and get top-of-funnel traffic, but if that’s all that’s driving those traffic and ranking metrics, you’re not going to see the payoff.

Unlocking the right traffic, in other words, can be your linchpin to growth.

Another client in Florida more than doubled their signed cases in just 12 months. Like the Connecticut firm, they struggled with low rankings for transactional keywords and had weak, low-value content. 

Their traffic was mostly from branded searches. Getting lots of branded traffic is a sign of good brand recognition in the community, which isn’t a bad thing. In fact, increasing your brand through community engagement is a good offline strategy that can pay dividends online and make your SEO agency’s job easier. But if a high percentage of your traffic comes from brand searches, it could be a sign that few visitors are discovering your law firm through search. That could point to an ineffective SEO strategy. After all, the point of SEO is to gain new eyeballs you wouldn’t get otherwise.

We applied a similar strategy: improving content quality and targeting high-intent transactional keywords to increase non-branded search traffic. As a result, 83% of traffic now comes from non-branded organic searches, 63% more keywords appear in SERP elements (featured snippets, knowledge panels), and 55% more keywords rank in the top 3 positions. Most important, their organic cases increased 116% over 12 months. 

Two firms, two tailored SEO strategies, both enjoying double their baseline monthly cases (or more). And now, they have strong foundations for continued growth and long-term success.

Work with an experienced legal SEO agency to boost cases

Our goal is to turn your website into your most valuable asset, one that drives new leads and cases every month. We’ll create a roadmap for your firm, informed by our years of helping other firms like yours grow their business. Start with a free site audit and see how we can change your website, your revenue, and your business.

Alex Valencia

Alex Valencia is an influential entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, podcaster, and CEO of We Do Web Content, one of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing businesses in America. His agency implements game-changing content marketing strategies and produces top-ranking web content for law firms, medical professionals, and small businesses nationwide.