Law firm SEO
You can rank first and still lose the case to voicemail.
Legal is the most expensive search market in the country, which means the firms that win it are the ones treating intake as part of the marketing rather than after it.
The problem
Why is law firm SEO different?
Practice areas are separate businesses wearing one letterhead.
Personal injury, family and criminal defence have different urgency, different economics and different searchers. A single firm page covering all three competes for none of them.
Every claim on the page is regulated.
Specialist, expert, best, and any reference to past results carry state bar advertising rules. An agency that writes legal copy without knowing them ships a page that has to come down.
The conversion is a phone call answered by a person.
This is a market where a single signed case can be worth more than a year of the marketing budget, and where most firms still send the eleven o'clock call to an answerphone.
What we do
What do you actually do for a law firm?
A page per practice area, written to the bar rules
Each area competing on its own terms, with the claims checked against what a firm in this state is permitted to say.
Measure intake, not traffic
Answered calls, after-hours coverage and what happened next. A ranking that leads to voicemail is not a result.
Build reviews the permitted way
Clients are reluctant to be publicly attached to a divorce or an arrest. Asking well, at the right moment, within the rules, is real work rather than an afterthought.
How the work is done
How would you approach it?
Here is the method, step by step. Every one of them is something we actually do.
Practice areas are separate businesses
Personal injury, family and criminal defence are different buyers with different urgency and different economics. One firm page covering all three competes for none of them, which is why the firms that win build a page per area.
Every claim is governed by the state bar
Specialist, expert, best, and any statement about past results carry advertising rules in California. Copy written without them is a page that has to come down, and it is the agency's job to know that before it ships.
The intake call is the whole conversion
A firm can rank first and still lose every case to voicemail. After-hours intake is worth more than another thousand visitors, and almost nobody measures it.
Reviews decide the map pack, and clients are reluctant
People are not eager to be publicly associated with their divorce or their arrest. Asking well, at the right moment, in a way the bar permits, is a real piece of work rather than an afterthought.
Contingency and hourly need opposite pages
No fee unless we win removes the price objection entirely. An hourly practice that copies that tone loses the client who wanted to know what an hour costs.
Judge it on signed retainers
Consultations are easy to generate and tell you almost nothing about whether the marketing is finding the right cases. The number that means anything is engagements signed.
The same approach, across every trade we work in: how we run contractor marketing.
Pricing
What does it cost?
These are starting figures. What you actually pay depends on the size of the work, and we will tell you the real number before you commit to anything.
Before any of it, we look at what you have and tell you what is wrong with it, in writing. That costs nothing and does not depend on you hiring us.
The website, and keeping it found
The site itself, and the work that keeps it turning up when somebody searches. Build it once; the rest is monthly and optional.
$5,000
A full website
For a business whose site is the thing holding it back, or that has no site worth keeping.
Custom coded on Next.js, launched on Vercel, with a page for every service in every city you serve. No templates, no site builders.
Paid once. It is built to gather merit rather than to need rebuilding, which is the difference between a site worth more in a year and one quietly worth less. We do not sell changes by the job afterwards: either the site is on management and changes are part of it, or the built site is yours to take to whoever you like: the pages, the markup and the stylesheet, which another developer can read and add to. What stays with us is the source we build from. We are not looking for the next job. We are looking for the businesses we can grow.
$1,000 a month
Management
For a business that has the site and wants somebody keeping it found.
We look after the site, the search work, and what people find when they search your name.
Only for sites we built: we do not take on sites developed by someone else, because we cannot stand behind work we cannot see inside.
$2,200 a month
Management, on a site we did not build
For a business with a site it already trusts, that wants the same work done on it.
The same management, on somebody else's build, once we have looked at it and can stand behind it.
We look first, and we can say no. If we are selling you somebody being answerable for the outcome, we have to be able to be answerable, and we cannot be for work we cannot see inside. It costs more than our own because the risk is ours and the code is not.
The marketing, and who runs it
Three depths of the same job, from running the whole thing to running only the ads. We take clients we can see a way to work with, and we work in months rather than one-offs, because a single month teaches nobody anything.
$4,000 a month
The CMO service
For a business that wants one team accountable for the whole thing, from the first ad to the lead landing in the sales process.
Everything in management, plus the ad spend, the running of it, and the decisions about where the money goes and what to change when something stops working.
It also wires the leads into your CRM and the way your team follows them up, so none of them sit. We do not do the selling. We feed your own sales team.
$3,000 a month
The CMO service, without the CRM work
For a business that wants the marketing run but is not ready to open up the handoff into sales. We do not recommend it, and it is here because some people will want it.
The paid marketing on top of the web management, without the marketing-to-sales handoff or the work that follows it.
The handoff is where most leads are won or lost after we deliver them, so this version leaves value on the table on purpose. Move up whenever you want to.
$2,000 a month
Paid marketing on its own
For a business that already has a site it trusts and wants only the advertising run.
The ad accounts built, run and reported, plus 10% of whatever budget we manage for you.
The fee is paid up front and the 10% is invoiced at the end of the month against what was actually spent. It applies to every dollar of managed spend from the first one, and it only makes sense once the fee is small next to the budget - which in practice means an established business rather than a first test, because paying us more than you spend teaches nobody anything.
One thing that sits under both
Not a tier and not a service we sell on its own. It touches the search work and the advertising alike, which is why it is here rather than inside either.
At cost up to $600
Citations
For clients we already work with, when the name, address or phone number changes, or the listings have drifted apart.
Run through BrightLocal, maxed out, billed at what it costs us with nothing added.
Annually, or whenever the details change. It is not only the name, address and phone number: any of it moving is what breaks the uniformity across listings, and that is what forces a resubmission.
We run our own: God's Eye holds the work, and the ARC scans and SEO Labs reports are how we read what is happening. The raw numbers come from the same places anybody can buy them - what is ours is the reading, which is the part that decides what to do on Monday. We mention it once because it is worth knowing who is holding your numbers, and then we stop, because software is not what we sell. We do marketing, and we grow businesses into brands.
There is no minimum term. You can stop whenever you want to, and there is a short, organised handover when you do, so it ends as a working relationship rather than a row.
We are not a supplier you swap out when you want to try a different ads agency. We run all of it: where the money goes, which channels are worth opening, and what to do when one of them stops working. We are here to make money for you and for us, in that order, because the second one does not happen without the first.
Talk to us
Tell us what you need. We’ll tell you what we’d do.
What you send goes to us so we can answer you and for nothing else. We do not sell it or share it for advertising. What we collect and why.
Or email orca@genesis98.com.