What Law Firms Should Do Before Starting SEO and GEO

A law firm decides it’s time to get serious about search. Someone starts talking about keywords. Someone else asks why the firm isn’t showing up in ChatGPT. Three proposals arrive, each promising to solve a slightly different version of the problem.

Meanwhile, nobody has checked where the website’s contact form goes.

Before investing in search engine optimization (SEO) or generative engine optimization (GEO), your firm needs to make a few decisions about its business, website, and ability to handle new inquiries. GEO generally describes efforts to improve visibility in AI-generated answers. The terminology is newer. Plenty of the preparation will look familiar.

You don’t need everything perfect before getting help. You do need enough clarity to give the work a direction and recognize whether it’s producing something worthwhile.

Decide Which Work You Actually Want

“We need more cases” gives a marketing team very little to work with.

Which cases? Where? How many could your firm reasonably take? A family law firm looking for more mediation work needs a different content plan from one trying to grow its contested custody practice. Both could attract plenty of visitors while bringing in the wrong inquiries.

Before discussing keywords, write down:

• Priority services. Identify the matters you want to grow, the work you’ll accept, and the inquiries you routinely decline
• Geographic reach. Separate where you have offices, where you can serve clients, and which markets you want to prioritize
• Client fit. Describe the problems, circumstances, and needs that make someone a good fit for your services
• Capacity. Decide how many additional consultations and matters your attorneys and staff can handle

Set a business goal around that information. “Increase qualified estate planning consultations in these two counties” gives everyone something concrete to plan around.

It also helps prevent an expensive detour into ranking for services your firm barely handles.

Get Specific About Why Someone Would Choose Your Firm

Most law firms can describe themselves as experienced, dedicated, and compassionate. Those words leave a prospective client with some fairly obvious follow-up questions.

Experienced in what? Who will I work with? How does the process work? Can you help with the particular problem that brought me here?

Gather the details that answer those questions: attorney backgrounds, relevant credentials, languages available, consultation procedures, accessibility arrangements, and the kinds of matters the firm handles. Verify each detail before turning it into a marketing claim.

Your intake staff can help here. Ask what people want to know before booking, what they frequently misunderstand, and what makes them hesitate. Those conversations provide a useful starting point for your pages and FAQs.

Give your marketing team concrete information about how your firm works. Otherwise, your next website page may introduce you as a dedicated team of experienced professionals. Again.

Walk Through the Website Like a Potential Client

Open your website on your phone. Choose a practice area page and try to contact the firm.

Can you tell which attorney or team handles the issue? Is the service location clear? Does the page explain the next step? Can you call without copying a number into another app?

Then test the contact form with a clearly labeled internal test. Confirm that the message reaches the right person and that any automated response accurately describes what happens next.

Pay particular attention to promises. “We respond immediately” becomes a problem when inquiries sit untouched until Monday. “Free consultation” needs to match the firm’s actual policy for that service.

A technical audit can investigate crawling, indexing, site performance, and other underlying issues. This exercise checks the experience you’re asking a potential client to have. Even a well-built website needs clear information and a workable path to a conversation.

Give Every Inquiry an Owner

More visibility means very little when nobody knows who should return the call.

Agree on how your firm will handle phone calls, forms, chat inquiries, and messages received outside business hours. Set a response standard your staff can actually meet, including coverage when the usual intake person is unavailable.

At a minimum, decide:

• Who responds. Assign responsibility for each inquiry channel and a backup
• What happens next. Establish the steps between the first inquiry and a booked consultation
• What gets recorded. Track whether the inquiry fits your services, whether someone followed up, and the eventual outcome
• What gets reviewed. Look for repeated issues, including missed calls, scheduling delays, and inquiries for work you don’t handle

Keep confidential client and matter details out of general marketing reports. Your marketing team can learn that a campaign attracted the wrong practice area without receiving someone’s entire story.

Intake feedback also helps improve the campaign. If callers consistently misunderstand a service, the page may need a clearer explanation.

Record Where You’re Starting

You’ll have a hard time evaluating progress if the first useful report arrives six months into the engagement.

Before major changes begin, record available search traffic, important landing pages, inquiries, consultations, and signed matters. Separate branded searches, where someone already knows your name, from searches for a service or legal question when the reporting allows it.

Check that the tracking means what you think it means. A click on a phone number doesn’t confirm that a conversation happened. A submitted form could be spam. Agree on what counts as a qualified inquiry and how duplicate contacts will be handled.

AI visibility needs context, too. Google includes traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode within Search Console’s Web reporting. Bing’s AI Performance report measures citation activity across supported AI experiences, which is different from clicks or signed clients.

Treat those measurements as different pieces of the picture. A screenshot showing your firm in an AI answer is interesting. It takes more evidence to establish a reliable source of business.

Make Your Public Business Information Agree

Check your website, Google Business Profile, attorney profiles, and important professional directories for outdated facts.

Look for old phone numbers, moved offices, departed attorneys, inaccurate services, and hours that no longer reflect how the firm operates. Start with the places prospective clients are most likely to encounter you.

Google’s Business Profile guidelines call for accurate representation of the real-world business. Adding practice-area keywords to the business name or claiming an office where the firm doesn’t actually operate can create problems. Practitioner and office profiles also deserve an eligibility check before anyone starts creating new listings.

We’ve written about the broader local SEO ecosystem, including reviews, community connections, and third-party mentions. Start by making the existing information reliable. Expanding a digital footprint containing the wrong phone number is a remarkably efficient way to spread the wrong phone number.

Gather Access and Assign a Reviewer

Find out who controls your domain, website, hosting, analytics, search reporting, and business profiles. Make sure the firm retains appropriate ownership and recovery access. Give providers individual, role-appropriate access instead of passing around a shared password.

Collect the materials a writer or strategist will need: current biographies, service descriptions, approved photography, brand assets, existing content, and information supporting factual claims.

Then assign someone to review the work. For legal content, the appropriate attorney should check jurisdiction-specific explanations, advertising claims, confidentiality concerns, and required disclosures before publication.

Agree on a realistic review window and a backup reviewer. A content calendar can look impressive while every article waits in the same inbox.

Build Useful Content Before Chasing AI Shortcuts

Start with the pages that explain your firm: priority practice areas, attorneys, locations, and the consultation process. Add answers to genuine client questions where they help someone understand a service or take the next step.

Your law firm SEO content should explain what you handle, provide relevant context, and make important facts easy to find. Source legal claims carefully and keep time-sensitive information current.

Google’s guidance on AI features says established SEO practices still apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode. It doesn’t require special AI files or a separate type of schema. Eligible pages must be indexed and able to appear with a snippet, and inclusion isn’t guaranteed.

Platforms do have their own controls. OpenAI’s crawler documentation distinguishes OAI-SearchBot, used for search, from GPTBot, used for potential model training. Have your technical provider review those settings against the firm’s goals. Allowing search access and allowing training are separate choices.

That deserves an informed conversation. A promise to make ChatGPT recommend your firm deserves considerably more skepticism.

Agree on the Work and How You’ll Judge It

Before approving a proposal, ask which services and markets come first, what will be delivered, who handles implementation, and what the firm must contribute. Discuss the starting condition of the site, competition, budget, and review capacity before accepting a timeline.

Set an early review around completed work and verified tracking. Later reviews can examine visibility, qualified inquiries, consultation outcomes, and whether the campaign is attracting the work you wanted.

Some preparation will happen with your provider’s help. That’s reasonable. The important part is making the responsibilities visible before everyone starts wondering why progress has stalled.

At Blue Seven, we want to understand the firm behind the website before deciding what that website needs to say. If you’re preparing to invest in SEO and AI search visibility, talk with us about your services, goals, and what needs to happen first.

A clear brief, working intake, and useful information give the project a much better place to begin.