Personal injury SEO is a $50K/month war.
Family and business law are still winnable.

It depends entirely on your practice area. Personal injury is a $50K-150K/month war in major metros — large PI firms spend at scale, dominate the link graph, and the cost of competing has moved beyond what most mid-size firms can absorb. But personal injury is one of six legal verticals. Family law, business law, estate planning, immigration, and criminal defense remain genuinely winnable in most markets at $4K-12K/month spend. The strategic mistake we see most often is a non-PI firm hiring an agency whose only template is the PI playbook and watching the budget get eaten without producing rankings. Practice-area fit is the first question; spend is the second.

Three things separate legal SEO from general local SEO. First, attorney-level ranking signals: individual lawyers are ranking entities (their own Person schema, bar admissions, AV ratings, Super Lawyers recognition) and many search queries are name-of-attorney searches that need dedicated profile pages. Second, multi-platform review velocity: Avvo, Lawyers.com, Justia, Martindale, Google, and Yelp all factor into legal authority — not just Google. Third, bar compliance: state bars enforce advertising rules under ABA Model Rule 7.2 derivatives, and content that ranks fine in dental SEO can get a lawyer disciplined. Compliance-aware content is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.

Each practice area gets its own dedicated landing page. This is the single highest-leverage architectural decision in legal SEO and most law firm websites get it wrong. A combined /practice-areas page covering personal injury, family law, business law, and estate planning cannot rank for any of those queries — Google can't tell which intent the page targets. We split into one URL per practice area (and for multi-jurisdiction firms, one URL per practice area per location), each with its own schema, its own attorney associations, its own case-study tier, its own reviews. Firms that make this single change typically see 2-4x lift in practice-area-specific rankings inside 90 days.

Attorney profiles are a major ranking surface that most firm websites underuse. Every attorney at the firm should have a dedicated /attorneys/[name] page with full Person schema (name, jobTitle, alumniOf for law school, hasCredential for JD and bar admissions, award entries for AV Preeminent, Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers recognition, knowsLanguage for bilingual practice, areaServed for jurisdictions). Attorney name searches are a meaningful slice of legal traffic, and many name searches convert at 30%+ because the searcher already has intent. The profile page also feeds the practice-area pages by linking inward and providing real Person-level E-E-A-T signal that Google now weights heavily for legal content.

Case-study and verdict content is powerful for SEO and conversion when handled carefully. The schema layer is LegalService with potentialAction for consultation booking. The compliance layer is mandatory — every state bar requires specific disclaimers around past results ('past results do not guarantee future outcomes' or jurisdiction-specific equivalents) and many states restrict the form of dollar-amount disclosure. We build practice-area case study libraries with state-bar-aware disclaimer logic, structured outcome data, and topical relevance back to practice-area pages. The content compounds — three years of case studies becomes one of the strongest authority signals a firm can develop.

All of them matter, weighted differently. Google reviews drive Google Maps and local-pack ranking and are the highest-volume conversion signal. Avvo reviews carry weight for legal-specific search intent and Avvo's own directory rankings (which often appear above firm websites for attorney-name queries). Justia, Lawyers.com, and Martindale build legal-specific authority and feed the link graph. Yelp matters in some metros (LA, NYC). The right approach is multi-platform velocity tracking — we use Mention Layer to monitor review flow and sentiment across all six platforms simultaneously, set practice-area-specific review request workflows tied to case completion, and ensure the firm doesn't ignore any platform that's driving meaningful local visibility.

ABA Model Rule 7.2 governs lawyer advertising and communications about legal services — it's the baseline most state bars build their own rules on top of. The relevant pieces for SEO content: prohibitions on false or misleading statements, restrictions on claims of specialization without proper certification, mandatory firm-name and physical-address disclosure, restrictions on testimonials and endorsements, and required disclaimers for past results. Each state bar has additional rules — Florida, California, Texas, and New York all have stricter advertising regimes than the ABA baseline. SEO content that's perfectly fine for a contractor or a SaaS company can violate bar rules when published by a law firm. We build content with state-bar-aware compliance review baked into the workflow rather than bolted on at the end.

Three things. First, we don't sell every firm the same playbook — practice-area fit and competitive density determine the strategy, not the agency template. A PI playbook applied to a business law firm produces wasted budget; we don't do that. Second, our content workflow has bar-compliance review integrated rather than bolted on, including state-specific disclaimer logic and ABA Model Rule 7.2 awareness. Third, our founder Joel House wrote AI for Revenue and The Growth Architecture — published methodology, not pitch material — and we run AI search optimization (Mention Layer across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) as a baseline because legal-question searches are increasingly intercepted by AI engines before the searcher ever reaches a SERP.