Law firm SEO in English and Spanish, judged on signed cases

Law firm SEO at Probative is the work that helps your firm rank in Google’s regular results, and be quoted in AI answers, for the cases you want, in English and in Spanish. We judge it on signed cases from organic search, counted in your own records, not on rankings or traffic alone.

You can buy SEO on its own or inside the Google + SEO and Full Service packages. It is priced by the size of your market, Local, Metro or Major, because a contested metro takes more pages and more work than a smaller city.

What the work covers

SEO for a law firm comes down to four jobs. We do all four, in this order.

1. Make the site easy to read, for people and machines

• Crawling and indexing. We check that Google can reach and index every page that matters, and that it isn’t wasting time on pages that don’t.
• Speed. We hold pages to Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds at the 75th percentile: the main content loads within 2.5 seconds, the page responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and nothing jumps around as it loads (web.dev).
• Structure. Clear headings, internal links between related practice pages, correct canonical tags, and hreflang tags that pair each English page with its Spanish version.
• Structured data, as hygiene. We add accurate schema for your firm, your offices and your FAQs. Google says no special markup is needed to appear in its AI features (Google), so we treat schema as tidiness, not a trick.

2. Write the pages people are actually looking for

We build a page plan from three things: what people search for in your area, what your intake team actually accepts, and what the case is worth to you. A truck-crash page and a soft-tissue page are not equal, and the plan says so.

Every page is written answer-first. The first lines answer the question the page exists for. Then come the details a careful reader wants: how the process works, what it costs, deadlines, what to bring, what happens next. A page that answers plainly serves the person reading it, and it is also the kind of page an AI answer can quote.

Each page is written by a legal writer, edited by us, and approved by your attorney before it goes live. We follow Google’s guidance on helpful, people-first content: it should be clear who wrote a page, how it was made, and why it exists (Google).

3. Build the Spanish half properly

Google Search “tries to find pages that match the language of the searcher,” and it judges a page’s language from its visible text (Google). Since September 2026, search ads are matched to the language of the search too (Google). A translated page reads like one. Our Spanish pages are written fresh by native writers for Spanish-speaking readers in the US, checked by a second native reviewer, and paired with their English versions so Google shows the right one. Machine translation and AI drafting are never used for Spanish we publish.

4. Earn authority, never buy it

Links and mentions still matter. We earn them the slow, durable way: local press and community work, useful data a reporter can cite, listings and memberships that are real, and pages other sites want to point to. We never buy links or join link schemes. Google’s spam policies ban them, along with “scaled content abuse”: many pages made mainly to rank, whether written by people, automation or both (Google). A penalty costs a firm far more than the shortcut saved.

How we measure SEO in signed cases

Rankings and traffic are signs that the work is on track. They are not the result. The result is a signed case that started with someone who found you through organic search.

• How a case is credited. Under The Probative Standard, a signed case is credited to the last paid click or tracked paid call in the 30 days before the person first contacted you. If there was none, it goes to the last unpaid tracked source, such as organic search, an AI assistant or a referring site. So an organic signed case is one that didn’t start with a paid ad.
• How the trail is followed. Organic visits carry no ad click ID, so we follow them another way: the landing page and referrer recorded in your CRM, call tracking on your site, tagged links on your Business Profile, and intake’s “How did you hear about us?” Every organic signed case is marked “tracked” or “self-reported,” so you know how firm each one is.
• Four organic lines. The Monday report splits organic results into non-brand search, brand search, your Business Profile and AI assistants. Google doesn’t tell anyone which search a visitor typed, so we also show signed cases by page group: case types, cities, Spanish pages and guides.
• Brand searches are never credited to SEO. Someone who searches your firm’s name probably heard of you somewhere else. Those cases get their own line and are never counted as SEO’s work.
• No pretend tests. Paid channels can be tested by turning ads down in some areas. Organic search can’t be switched off that way, so we never claim SEO “caused” a number of cases. We show the trend, in equal windows, and say what it can and can’t prove.
• Leading signs, labeled as such. Pages indexed, the searches each page appears for, map visibility and calls from organic visits are shown as diagnostics, never as headlines.

What realistic timing looks like

SEO is slow at first. In one large study, only 1.74% of new pages reached Google’s top 10 within a year (Ahrefs). Existing sites with some history move faster than new ones, and smaller cities move faster than the most contested metros. That’s why most firms run search ads and SEO together: ads bring signed cases this month, while SEO builds the cases you won’t have to pay for click by click.

What you can expect, roughly:

• Month 1: the audit, the page plan and the first fixes.
• Months 2 to 4: new pages live and indexed; the first organic calls traced to them.
• Months 4 to 12: rankings settle, and signed cases from organic search start to appear in the Monday report. For most firms it takes 6 to 12 months before those numbers are large enough to read, and a case can sign 3 to 12 months after the page that brought it went live.
• Every month: no cost per signed case is shown for any organic line with fewer than 5 signed cases, under The Probative Standard.

We won’t put a date on page one. Nobody honestly can (Google).

Ethics and bar-rule notes for SEO

• Your pages are often advertising. California defines an advertisement broadly, to include electronic communications that encourage people to hire a lawyer (§6157). Texas exempts website pages other than the homepage from filing, but they still follow its advertising rules (State Bar of Texas). Alabama has lawyers keep a copy of each communication, web pages included, for 6 years (Supreme Court of Alabama). Your attorney approves every page we write.
• No claims we can’t back. No superlatives, and no “expert” or “specialist” unless your state allows the exact wording and the claim is true. No past results or testimonials unless your state’s rules and your attorney allow them.
• Required statements in every language. Where a state requires a statement on an ad, we put it on the Spanish page too.
• Checked against your state. The state-by-state basics are in the lawyer advertising rules by state. Your counsel and your bar have the final word.

How it changes by practice

• Personal injury: pages by crash and injury type, with the case values your firm actually sees deciding the order.
• Criminal defense: pages by charge and court, written for a family member searching at night.
• Family law: custody, divorce and support pages written with privacy and safety in mind.
• Estate planning: plain-language pages on wills, trusts and probate, county by county.
• Employment law: wage, discrimination and retaliation pages that lead with deadlines.
• Lemon law: pages by make, model and defect, built on your state’s lemon law.
• Immigration: pages by visa and case type, in the languages your clients speak, with clear warnings about notario fraud.

SEO for the map results and your Google Business Profile is its own service: local SEO. Being named in AI answers is measured and worked on in AI search.