Law firm SEO agency: turn Google into a source of new cases
Since the 2014 reform, a French lawyer may advertise and solicit clients directly. Article 10 of the Règlement Intérieur National sets the frame, and it contains at least one rule that decides your SEO strategy before the first line of content is written. Our law firm SEO agency builds your Google visibility in France practice area by practice area, inside that frame, and measures the result in qualified leads rather than raw organic traffic.
Semantic silos by practice area, content signed by a named author, reinforced E-E-A-T for this YMYL sector, and none of the superlatives the RIN prohibits.
What article 10 of the RIN changes for your law firm's website
Most agencies treat legal SEO like any other local market, then discover the Règlement Intérieur National when the bar council asks a question. Three sub-articles of the code of ethics are worth reading before you choose a domain name or write a meta title, because they shape the whole SEO strategy that follows.
Article 10.5: your domain name must carry your name
The RIN requires the site's domain name to contain the lawyer's name or the firm's name, and it prohibits generic domain names evoking the title of lawyer or a branch of law. In other words, the exact-match domain strategy, along the lines of "divorce-lawyer-paris.fr", is closed to you. Opening the site must also be notified to the bar council. So must any substantial change to it.
Article 10.2: specialisation mention or dominant activity
You may state your specialisation mentions, your titles and your dominant areas of activity. You may not claim a specialisation you do not hold. Comparative or disparaging wording is out too. On a service page that translates very concretely: "employment law lawyer in Paris" passes, "best employment tribunal lawyer in Paris" does not.
Article 10.3: advertising, solicitation and notification
Advertising and personalised solicitation are permitted provided the information is sincere. Solicitation must be in writing, by post or email, never by text message to a mobile, and must state how fees are determined. All advertising is communicated to the bar council.
The keywords that bring cases in, practice area by practice area
Each legal speciality has its own search results page, its own search intent and its own case value. A firm handling four matters needs four content structures, not one "our practice areas" page that mentions them all and ranks for none. Lawyer SEO is decided there, in the relationship between site structure and the real variety of queries.
Family law, employment law, criminal law
The three highest local search volumes in the legal field. Divorce, child custody and maintenance on one side; dismissal, settlement agreements and employment tribunal claims on the other; police custody and immediate appearance for criminal law, where intent is urgent and mobile page speed counts as much as the ranking itself.
Business law, tax law and corporate law
A B2B clientele, high case value, lower search volumes and markedly thinner editorial competition. Commercial litigation, commercial leases, tax audits, share transfers: these are the pages where genuinely technical legal content ranks quickly, because almost nobody writes it.
Real estate law, inheritance, immigration law, personal injury
Four steady niches. Co-ownership disputes and latent defects link naturally to joint ownership and inheritance. Immigration law carries strong national volume and often justifies an English version. Personal injury remains highly contested, and standing out there runs through anonymised, quantified case pages. Each of these niches deserves its own landing page and content written for its own local competition.
Semantic silos: the architecture of legal organic search
Law is a YMYL sector, where Google assesses the expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of every page more strictly than elsewhere. Our answer combines silo architecture with writing driven by contextual density, the Contextual Density method from ProStar SEO.
A parent page per area, child pages per problem
One parent page for "employment law lawyer"; beneath it, one page per real problem: unfair dismissal, settlement agreement, workplace harassment, unpaid overtime. Each answers a distinct search intent and ranks on its own keywords, instead of competing with its neighbours for the same ones. Keyword research comes first, and the content strategy follows the matters that actually pay.
Internal linking and the legal long tail
Queries of four words and more make up most of a law firm site's organic traffic, because a client describes a situation rather than a legal category. Internal linking carries authority up from those detail pages to the parent, and carries trust back down to the practice area pages and the contact form. That is what turns diffuse traffic into intake, and what lifts the conversion rate of the contact form. The long-tail queries are also where client acquisition is cheapest.
Structured data: LegalService, Attorney, FAQPage
Schema.org markup tells Google what it is reading: LegalService for the firm, Attorney for each partner with their bar, FAQPage for client questions, Article for case-law commentary. A coherent graph links the author, the practice structure and the subject matter, improves indexing of deep pages and supports on-page SEO across the silo. Answer engines read the same markup.
Local SEO: the Google Maps pack, your listing and client reviews
On "lawyer + city", the local pack captures a large share of clicks before the first classic result. For a firm with a local clientele, those three slots often weigh more than the first organic position.
Your Google Business Profile by practice area
Primary and secondary categories aligned with your dominant activities, exact address and hours, photos of the office, pre-filled questions and answers on the most frequent reasons for consultation. The old Google My Business changed name, not weight in local rankings, and the map pack still decides the first call.
Google reviews and professional secrecy
A client review describing a matter can reveal what you are bound to protect. Collection therefore comes with guidance on wording, and the firm's public replies never confirm that a case exists. A steady, sober flow beats a spike of glowing reviews. That holds for the local pack and for credibility alike.
Legal directories and citation consistency
Bar directories, national legal directories, specialist legal media and general business listings. Identical citations everywhere reinforce Google's confidence, your domain authority and your local visibility; an old practice name left on one directory dilutes all three. Article 10.4 of the RIN also governs what may appear in those directories.
Expert legal content and E-E-A-T: what Google measures in a YMYL sector
An anonymous legal article, republished without a date and without sources, is worth little. The same content signed by an identifiable lawyer, attached to their bar, with case law cited and a last-updated date, carries real weight. That requirement holds for Google and for answer engines alike.
Named author, bar, case law cited
Every page carries its author's name, bar of admission and practice structure, which article 10.2 of the RIN requires in any case. Decisions are cited with their full reference, statutes with their article number, procedural deadlines with their source. Exact procedural vocabulary does the rest: it separates a lawyer's content from a generalist copywriter's, for the reader and for search engines. This is where legal content marketing differs from ordinary legal marketing.
Getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini
Someone asking an assistant which lawyer to consult about an unfair dismissal in Lyon gets an answer, sometimes a list of names. Appearing in it is close to classic SEO work, with demands of its own: short factual sentences, explicit named entities, clean structured data, consistency between the site and the directories. Our AI SEO agency page covers the method, and the effect of AI Overviews on click-through rate is already measurable.
How much does a law firm SEO agency cost?
Published offers in this market start around €675 excluding tax per month and rise well beyond that for a business law firm. The gap has less to do with hours billed than with the number of practice areas to cover and the competitive density of the bar you are targeting.
Law firm SEO audit
A one-off engagement: technical SEO, site compliance with the RIN, Google Business Profile, current rankings by practice area, contextual density gap against the three firms ahead of you. It also covers user experience on mobile and the conversion path from page to enquiry. Delivered with a prioritised action plan, a budget range and pricing you can hand to whichever SEO company you choose.
Monthly engagement
The semantic silo for one or two practice areas, child page writing, local SEO, editorial backlinks and monthly rank tracking in Google Search Console. Monthly reporting ties each page published to the enquiries it produced. The most common format for a firm of one to five lawyers, and the core of our SEO services for attorneys.
Business firm and multi-office structure
Several silos in parallel, a page per partner with Attorney markup, management of multiple Google listings, an English version for international clients, advanced reporting and generative share of voice tracking. The format for firms aiming beyond their own bar, whether that is the Paris Bar or another, and the closest thing we offer to full law firm marketing.
FAQ: law firm SEO in practice
Is a French lawyer allowed to do SEO and buy advertising?
Yes to both. The law of 17 March 2014 and the decree of 28 October 2014 opened personal advertising and personalised solicitation to the profession, and article 10 of the RIN sets the conditions. Organic search, attorney SEO and paid ads are therefore all open channels for a French law firm, provided the information stays sincere, non-comparative and respectful of the profession's essential principles. That is a clear difference from dental surgeons, for whom bought priority in search results is prohibited.
Can I buy a domain name like divorce-lawyer-paris.fr?
No. Article 10.5 of the RIN requires the domain name to contain the lawyer's name or the firm's name, and prohibits generic names evoking the title of lawyer or a branch of law. The exact-match domain strategy, common elsewhere, is closed to a law firm. In practice this is not a serious handicap: authority is built on content and internal linking, and a domain carrying the firm's name suits entity markup and citation by answer engines better.
How long until legal SEO produces results?
The local pack can move in two to three months with a complete Google listing and a steady review flow. Organic rankings in a contested area such as family law in a major city take more like six to fourteen months of editorial production and link building. Technical, under-written areas such as tax law or corporate law rise considerably faster.
Is a semantic silo better than one page per practice area?
A single page per practice area plateaus quickly: it cannot answer unfair dismissal, settlement agreements and workplace harassment in depth at once. The silo keeps a parent page per area and adds child pages per problem, each ranking on its own queries, all connected by internal linking that concentrates authority. It is the model that holds on the legal long tail, and it serves the client journey from first article read to first contact. It is also what SEO for lawyers means in practice, as opposed to a homepage rewrite.
How do you collect client reviews without breaching professional secrecy?
The difficulty is not the request but its content. A client describing their case in public reveals what you are bound to protect. We put in place wording guidance focused on the experience of working together rather than on the matter, and a reply rule that never confirms a case exists. The reviews stay genuine and professional secrecy stays intact.
Can I write "best lawyer" or "specialist in employment law"?
"Best lawyer" is a comparative element, which article 10.2 of the RIN prohibits. "Specialist" is subtler: the specialisation mention is an awarded title, and you may only claim it if you hold it. If you do not, the compliant wording is dominant area of activity. That nuance runs through the whole site: meta titles, H1s, anchor text, Google listing description. The CNB publishes guidance on these points, and a solicitor or attorney reading this from outside France will find their own bar has an equivalent.
Does the firm's website have to be notified to the bar council?
Yes. Article 10.5 of the RIN provides for notification to the bar council when the site opens and on any substantial modification of its content. An SEO rebuild clearly falls into that category. For that reason we produce a summary of pages created and modified at each delivery, which the firm passes on to its council.
Working in another regulated profession? Our dentist SEO agency and plastic surgeon SEO agency pages cover the corresponding frameworks. Firms with clients abroad will find their answer in international SEO. Two further markets where copy has to clear a compliance read before it is published: construction SEO and SEO for CBD stores. The about page sets out the background behind the agency.