Module 9 · Launch and get found
Get found: Google, Maps, directories
The site is live. Nobody knows it exists. This lesson is the last mile — the handful of places a firm has to appear, in the order that actually pays, and the honest version of the eligibility rules that most law-firm marketing advice gets wrong.
Two different searches, two different worlds
When somebody types “divorce attorney near me,” they get a map with three firms on it and a list of links underneath. When somebody types “how is property divided in a Colorado divorce,” they increasingly get an answer written by Google, and never click anything.
Both Ahrefs and Whitespark measured this through 2025, in separate studies, and they agree on the direction: the searches that produce a client still resolve into a map and blue links; the searches that produce a reader are being answered on the results page. You can check it yourself in ninety seconds — search both phrasings for your own practice area and look at what comes back.
That split decides how you spend today. The map listing and a small number of authoritative profiles are where the hiring happens. Blog posts about points of law are not where you start — the last lesson in this module has the honest version of what content is worth writing later.
Your Google Business Profile
This is the free listing that puts you on the map and in the little three-firm box above the search results. For a local practice it is worth more than the website you just built — and the two work together, because the profile links to the site and the site corroborates the profile.
Google requires a real place. Its published guidelines say a business needs a physical location customers can visit, or that it travels to customers — and that a rented mailing address you don’t work out of, a “virtual office,” is not eligible. A desk at a coworking space only qualifies if it has your firm’s permanent signage, is staffed by your own people during business hours, and receives clients there.
Listing an address you don’t occupy is the fastest way to lose the profile entirely, and getting one reinstated is slow and unpleasant. Don’t.
There are exactly three honest positions. Find yours before you fill anything in.
| Your situation | What you do | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| A real office with your signage, where clients come to you | A standard profile with the address visible | Nothing. This is the strong position |
| Home office; you meet clients at their location, at a neutral place, or by video | Set up as a service-area business: enter the address, then hide it, and define the areas you serve | Real ranking disadvantage. Distance from the searcher is computed from an address nobody can see, and firms with a downtown address have an edge you can't buy back |
| A registered-agent address, a mailbox, or a virtual-office suite you don't work from | Stop. You are not eligible for this | A listing built on it can be suspended |
If you practice family law, domestic violence or criminal defense out of a home office, a publicly listed home address is a safety question before it is a marketing one. Hide it. The ranking cost is real, and it is the right trade.
Setting it up, in the order that matters
Whitespark surveys local-search practitioners every year and scores what moves the map listing. Three findings from the 2026 report are worth your attention because they contradict what most people spend their time on:
Primary category ranks #1
The single biggest individual factor in the local pack. Pick the most specific category matching what you actually do most — not the most flattering one.
The Services field climbed hardest
It moved from #81 to #22, the biggest jump in the survey — and almost no firm fills it in. One entry per practice area, thirty minutes' work.
Title length is a myth
The length of your page title ranked #184 out of 187 factors. Ignore every tool that scolds you about it.
Two of the top factors — how close the searcher is to you, and whether your address sits in the city being searched — are facts about where your office is, not things you can optimize. Knowing that up front saves you a year of paying someone to fight geography.
- Go to
google.com/businessand sign in with a firm email you will keep forever — not a personal address, not a former employee’s. - Search your firm name first; a listing may already exist for you to claim.
- Enter your exact registered firm name. No practice area, no city, no “— Denver Personal Injury Lawyer” appended.
- Make the address decision from the table above, and set service areas if you’re hiding it.
- Primary category: the most specific match to your main practice. Then one to three honest secondary categories.
- Phone: the number you actually answer, and the same number as on your website and everywhere else.
- Website: your new
https://www.address, exactly as you wrote it down last module. - Hours: accurate. Add genuine extended hours only if you really take those calls.
- Verify. Video verification is common now — have your signage, your bar card and your workspace ready.
- Description, 750 characters: what you do, who for, which city, how to start.
- Services: one entry per practice area, each with a plain-English description.
- Photos: ten or more real ones. The exterior with your signage, the interior, real headshots. No stock.
- Q&A: post your five most-asked questions and answer them from the business account, before somebody else fills that space.
- Turn on notifications so you see new reviews and questions the day they land.
The business name. Stuffing practice areas or a city into it violates Google’s guidelines, is reportable by any competitor in about four clicks, and for a law firm also runs into the rules about what name you may hold yourself out under. Use your real name.
The description and the services. Everything you type here is advertising for legal services, exactly like the website. Superlatives you can’t support and anything that sounds like a promised result belong to the compliance check in Module 6 — run the profile text through it the same way you ran the site.
Claude can write the whole profile for you. You supply the true facts; it does the drafting.
Write my Google Business Profile content
Write the content for my Google Business Profile. Firm: [NAME] · City: [CITY, ST] · Practice areas: [LIST] · Consultation: [free / $X] · Languages: [ ] · Hours: [ ] · What genuinely makes me different (true things only): [ ] Produce: 1. A business description, 750 characters max, plain English, naming my city and what I do and who for. No superlatives I can't support, no promised results. 2. A Services list — one entry per practice area, with a name (no prices or phone numbers in the name; Google rejects those) and a two-to-three sentence plain description. 3. Five Q&A entries — the questions clients actually ask before hiring (fees, consultation cost, do you handle X, where do we meet, what should I bring) — each with an answer I can post. 4. A shot list of ten photos I should take, and what each one signals. Then flag anything in your output I should check against my state's attorney-advertising rules before publishing, and re-run your compliance-check skill over the description and services.
Tell Google the website exists
- Go to
search.google.com/search-consoleand sign in. - Add your site and follow the verification it offers you. If it asks for a file or a code, hand the instruction to Claude and let it do the technical part.
- Submit your sitemap — a list of your pages, which your site already has from the Module 6 audit. It is usually at
yourfirm.com/sitemap.xml. - Come back once a month. You’re looking for coverage errors and manual actions, not for a daily traffic number.
The directory sweep — in this order
Legal is the one industry where directories still carry real weight. Some of them already have a page about you, built without your involvement, and an incomplete one with no photo is actively costing you.
| Where | Cost | Do it because |
|---|---|---|
| Your state bar directory | Usually in your dues | Free, authoritative, and the most trustworthy public confirmation that you are licensed and in good standing |
| Justia | Genuinely free | Best free-to-value ratio in legal. High authority, complete profile, no upsell required |
| Avvo | Free to claim | A profile about you probably already exists. Claim it and complete it — an abandoned one with a low rating is worse than none |
| Martindale-Hubbell / Lawyers.com | Basic listing free | Claim the free listing. Referral sources still read the peer ratings |
| Free | Complete the personal profile and add a firm page. It keeps turning up in research about how AI tools answer questions about lawyers | |
| Local chamber, bar sections, alumni directories | Usually included | Real, local, hard to fake — and exactly the kind of curated list that gets cited about you |
| FindLaw | Largely paid | The classic annual-contract trap for a solo. Skip for now. If you're already in one, check whether you own your domain and your content |
| Super Lawyers | You cannot buy in | Selection is editorial and by peer nomination. Get nominated; don't buy advertising there on day one |
Write your firm name, address and phone number down once, in one exact form, and never deviate. Not “Ste. 300” here and “Suite #300” there. Not a tracking number on the directory and your real one on the site. This is the most boring hour in this module and one of the highest-return: consistency across independent, authoritative sources is what tells Google — and every AI tool reading about you — that you are one real, verifiable practice.
The five-minute check that beats every “AI SEO” package
Nobody outside the companies that build them knows how AI answer engines choose their sources. Anyone selling you a formula is selling you a guess. But one thing is documented by the platforms themselves, and it is the only part of this worth your time today: you have to let their crawlers in. A crawler is an automated reader that visits your pages so a search tool can quote them later, and every site carries a small file telling those readers what they may look at. Plenty of law-firm sites block the AI ones by accident — and a blocked site is invisible to those tools no matter what else it does.
Check I'm not blocking the AI search crawlers
Please check my site's robots.txt file — the file that tells automated crawlers what they may read. 1. Confirm OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT's search crawler) and PerplexityBot are ALLOWED. If either is blocked, unblock it and tell me what was blocking it. 2. Confirm Googlebot is allowed and my sitemap is listed in the file. 3. Explain in plain English the difference between the crawlers that let me show up in AI search answers and the ones that collect content for training models — I want to allow the first group either way. 4. Show me the finished file, then save a snapshot and push it so my live site updates.
An llms.txt file. Google has said it doesn’t use it, no major AI provider documents it as a signal, and measured usage of the files that exist is close to nothing. It costs ten minutes and buys nothing. Don’t pay anyone for one.
Special code for AI. Google states plainly that there is no special markup needed to appear in its AI features — markup being the hidden labels on a page that tell a search engine what kind of thing it is looking at. Your site already carries the right ones: the build kit used the LegalService label, and deliberately did not put a star rating on your own site, because rating yourself is exactly the pattern Google penalizes. If a vendor tells you to switch to the Attorney label, they are working from an old tutorial — it has been marked deprecated, and half the law-firm guides online still teach it.
Your Google Business Profile is submitted for verification, with the right primary category, filled-in services, real photos and seeded questions. Search Console shows your sitemap received. Your state bar and Justia profiles are complete and point at your new domain. Your name, address and phone read identically in every one of those places.
Verification is taking days. Normal. Video verification can queue, and postcards take a week or more. Keep building out the profile while you wait — the work saves; only the public listing is held.
Verification was rejected. Nearly always the address or the signage. Re-read the eligibility table above and be honest about which row you’re in; a service-area profile that gets approved beats a street-address profile that never does.
A duplicate listing for you already exists. Don’t create a second one. Claim the existing listing and use Google’s own duplicate-removal flow, or the two will compete with each other forever.
Watch this step
Your Google Business Profile is usually the single biggest source of local visitors, and the setup screens change often enough to be worth watching once. This one is recent. It is filmed for businesses generally — the eligibility rules and the category advice in this lesson are the law-firm layer on top of it. It’s from an independent creator — credited below, so go give them a follow.
Google Business Profile Set Up: 2026 Step-by-Step Tutorial
More learning resources
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