Most law firms spend months refining their brand message and practice pages, then wonder why the phone remains quiet. The problem often isn’t the copy or the design. It’s the spine of the site, the way pages connect, the signals search engines read to understand what the firm does and whom it serves. Site architecture sits upstream of content and links. When it respects how clients search and how Google crawls, rankings move and intake improves. When it fights either one, you’ll pay for every lead.
What follows reflects patterns I’ve seen across firms of all sizes: solo practitioners with a few dozen pages, statewide firms with hundreds, and national practices with tens of thousands of URLs. The specifics change, but the principles hold.
Start with demand, not departments
Law firms are often organized around attorneys and internal departments. Prospective clients don’t search that way. They speak to problems, locations, and outcomes. Architecture should mirror demand, so Google can confidently map your pages to search intent.
Think about a personal injury firm in Chicago. Internally, there might be an Accident Group, a Medical Malpractice Group, and a Trial Team. Search demand, however, clusters around “car accident lawyer Chicago,” “truck accident attorney near me,” “slip and fall lawyer Chicago,” and questions like “How long to settle a car accident claim in Illinois.” If the architecture buries those needs under generic “Practice Areas” and a single “Personal Injury” page, the site forces one page to compete for dozens of distinct intents. That page will either dilute itself with a wall of subtopics or never rank for the terms with transactional intent.
A better structure distributes demand across intentional hubs, ensures each hub is internally coherent, and avoids cannibalization. For the example above, that means a Personal Injury hub at the top, then specific accident types as child pages, each with related FAQs, case results, and attorney bios tied to it. You’re still one firm. You’re just letting the site surface each intent with a focused, deep page.
One primary topic per URL
The most consistent technical win in lawyer SEO is ruthless topical focus. Search engines reward pages that answer one intent thoroughly. Homepages are allowed to be generalists; every other key page should behave like a specialist.
Where I see this fail:
- A general “Criminal Defense” page that also tries to rank for DUI, assault, expungement, gun charges, and federal cases. The consequence is broad impressions, weak click-through, thin engagement, and a rank ceiling in competitive markets. A “Family Law” page where divorce, custody, and adoption each get a paragraph. Google can’t assign authority, and users bounce.
Create a page whose title, H1, subheadings, internal links, schema, and calls to action revolve around a single intent such as Chicago DUI defense lawyer. Support it with related education and FAQs on the same topic, and interlink those pieces back to the parent page so the path is obvious.
Hubs and spokes that match real journeys
Most firms benefit from a hub-and-spoke approach. The hub answers the high-intent, commercial query. The spokes cover subtopics that a serious visitor will evaluate before hiring a lawyer: statutes, timelines, defenses, damages, checklists, and local rules. The goal is not to inflate page count. It is to give search engines a clear map and give visitors a navigable path without opening new tabs.
A defense firm example: hub page for “Federal White Collar Defense Lawyer,” spokes covering wire fraud, mail fraud, securities fraud, grand jury subpoenas, cooperation and proffers, and federal sentencing guidelines. Each spoke links back to the hub with a consistent anchor like “federal white collar defense.” The hub links out to spokes from a visibly grouped section. Internal linking stays descriptive rather than “learn more.”
This interlinking performs two jobs. It pushes PageRank to the money page and keeps users from dead-ending on a narrowly focused article. It also signals topical authority. When a crawler finds a dense, internally consistent cluster, it learns you didn’t just publish a page on “mail fraud” in isolation. You cover the neighborhood.
Don’t skip the geography
For most consumer-facing practices, location modifiers are not optional. Architecture should respect the way local intent stacks with practice intent. The pattern varies by market size and firm footprint, and the wrong choice can either starve pages of authority or create duplicate content issues.
Three workable patterns:
- City-specific service pages beneath the practice hub: /personal-injury/chicago-car-accident-lawyer, /personal-injury/evanston-car-accident-lawyer. This fits well when the firm serves a metro with distinct search volumes per suburb, and you can give each city page authentic substance: court locations, hyperlocal crash data, photos from the courthouse area, relevant case results, and attorney admission to local bars. A single state page with subsections for major cities when volumes are small or resources are limited: /dui-defense/illinois with prominent anchors to Chicago, Naperville, Joliet. This contains thinness, then expands later as demand justifies city-specific pages. Separate “Locations” hub where office pages live, each interlinked with the relevant practice pages: /locations/chicago, /locations/wheaton. The office page focuses on address, directions, parking, intake, and staff. Service pages carry the ranking burden. Link both ways so relevance flows.
Avoid creating dozens of nearly identical city pages that swap “Chicago” for “Aurora” in the same text. That pattern used to skate by. It now drags down trust and wastes crawl budget.
Navigation that sells and ranks
Menus and internal link patterns shape how crawlers and people move. The main nav should do three things: surface your highest-converting practice areas, expose your key geographies if local intent dominates, and give a straightforward path to social proof and contact.
Common mistakes include mega menus with five levels that bury anything valuable, and “Resources” buckets that mix firm news, FAQs, and life-cycle content with no hierarchy. A better approach puts Practice Areas in the main nav with the top five money pages as first-level items. If you have more than five, prioritize by volume and lead value, then expose the rest through the Practice Areas page and smart hubs.
Bread crumbs help both users and crawlers. Keep them consistent and descriptive: Home > Personal Injury > Truck Accidents. Ensure the breadcrumb links reflect the canonical hierarchy, not the path the page happens to sit in your CMS.
Footer links still matter. Use the footer to enumerate your key practice pages and offices, but keep the list tight. Hundreds of footer links dilute equity and invite noise.
URL patterns that stay out of the way
Clean, predictable URLs signal professionalism and reduce maintenance. Lawyers often inherit messy structures from legacy CMS setups: query strings, date-stamped slugs, and mixed-case paths. Clean them up and then leave them alone.
Healthy patterns look like this: /personal-injury/car-accident-lawyer, /family-law/child-custody, /criminal-defense/dui. Use lowercase, hyphenated slugs, and avoid years or temporary qualifiers. If you must migrate, map one-to-one with 301 redirects and test thoroughly. Expect https://dicedirectory.com/gosearch.php?q=everconvert.com a short dip as Google reprocesses, then a rebound if you improved clarity and internal links.
Avoid bloated slugs like “/practice-areas/personal-injury/car-accident-lawyers-in-chicago-illinois-free-consultation.” Short up to a point, but descriptive is the priority.
Internal linking is your unsung ranking lever
A strong architecture earns its keep through internal link placement and anchor text, not just menus. Link where users naturally need a next step, and label links in a way that teaches crawlers.
In practice, after an article on “Statute of Limitations for Car Accidents in Illinois,” add a short “Think you’re running out of time?” paragraph that links to the Chicago car accident lawyer hub with precise anchor text. From the hub, link back to that statute article under “Deadlines and Filing.” Repeat through the cluster so no spoke sits orphaned, and ensure the money page receives the lion’s share of internal links. You’re building a funnel, not an encyclopedia.
Avoid the temptation to over-optimize anchor text. Natural variants are fine. Link volume should feel organic in the prose, not like a tag cloud.
Navigation depth and crawl efficiency
Crawl depth matters more on larger sites. If a page takes five clicks from the homepage to reach, it is less likely to be crawled frequently and might struggle to rank for competitive terms. Aim to keep primary practice and city pages within two to three clicks from the homepage.
For multisite networks or firms with hundreds of legacy blog posts, use a combination of updated category hubs and curated “best of” pages to pull valuable content closer to the surface. A blog index that dumps every post into a reverse-chronological feed becomes a graveyard. A themed resource hub such as “Illinois Car Accident Guide” can rescue a dozen older posts by linking them purposefully and trimming redundant ones.
Avoid cannibalization with a sitemap-level view
As firms grow, the most common SEO problem becomes internal competition. Two or three pages target the same keyword in slightly different ways and then split authority. Diagnose this with a spreadsheet of target queries, mapped to a single canonical URL. When two pages share a primary target, decide which wins and give the other a new role.
Options include merging content, 301 redirecting to the winner, or reframing the supporting page to a complementary intent. For example, if you have “Chicago slip and fall lawyer” and “Slip and fall attorney Chicago” on separate URLs, fold them. If you have “DUI penalties in Illinois” and “DUI first offense Illinois,” keep both but make sure the penalties page is broad and informational while the first-offense page is focused on the scenario, and link both to the main DUI attorney page.
Structured data that aligns with your architecture
Schema helps machines read your site the way humans do. On a well-structured legal site, the following markup supports rankings and rich results:
- Organization and LocalBusiness schema on the homepage and office pages, with consistent NAP data, hours, geo coordinates, and sameAs for bar profiles. LegalService schema on practice and subpractice pages with areaServed and serviceType set thoughtfully. FAQ schema on pages with real questions and answers, ideally those that receive search impressions in Google Search Console. Review or rating schema only when you control the reviews and they match Google’s self-review policies. Many law firm sites misuse this. Err on the side of caution to preserve trust.
Structured data won’t save a muddled architecture, but it amplifies a clear one.
Performance and indexation habits
SEO for lawyers isn’t just links and content. It is also the absence of friction.
Keep Core Web Vitals in range. On image-heavy attorney profiles and case result pages, lazy-load below the fold and compress aggressively. An LCP over 2.5 seconds on mobile will hurt conversion and sometimes rankings.
Control indexation with intent. Block faceted pages, parameter URLs, search results pages, and pagination noise from the index. On blogs, consolidate tag pages or remove them entirely unless they serve as real resource hubs. Maintain a hand-curated XML sitemap of canonical, indexable URLs, and monitor it. If more than 10 percent of the URLs in your sitemap are excluded or discovered but not indexed, you’re leaking crawl budget or publishing duplicates.
Case results, testimonials, and attorney pages belong in the spine
These assets often rank for firm-name searches and close the sale after a generic practice query. They deserve architectural respect.
Build a Case Results hub with filters by practice, venue, and outcome range rather than a simple chronological list. Each result gets its own URL with concise facts, the legal issue, jurisdiction, and a short lessons-learned paragraph that links to the relevant practice page. This creates both social proof and topical interlinks.
Attorney bios should not be vanity pages off in a corner. Link them from practice hubs and subpages wherever that attorney leads the work. Add structured data for Person, include bar admissions, publications, languages, and relevant practice specialties, and ensure the bio’s URL stays stable. When a journalist or a referring lawyer searches for your name plus practice, this page should appear authoritative and connected.
Content depth without bloat
Length isn’t authority. The pages that win lawyer SEO combine clarity, scannability, and trustworthy detail.
On high-intent service pages, craft a shape visitors can skim in 30 seconds, then settle into if they’re serious. Start with a direct summary of what you handle and for whom, add a clear CTA, then build sections on how cases work in your jurisdiction, common defenses or strategies, timelines, and what to bring to a consultation. Sprinkle proof points: representative results, testimonials, and relevant statutes with links to the source.
Avoid padding a page with long generic definitions. If a subtopic is genuinely useful and searched, spin it out to a spoke article and link it. If not, keep the main page tight. More words are not a substitute for smart architecture.
The local trio: GMB, citations, and site architecture
Local pack visibility lives at the intersection of proximity, prominence, and relevance. Your site architecture influences relevance and prominence, even if the map pin sits in Google Business Profile.
Make sure each office page mirrors the name, address, and phone format used in your profile and major citations. Link the office page in the GBP website field if local queries are your lead driver, or route to the most relevant service page if you have one office but multiple specialties. Internally link practice pages to the nearest relevant office page with anchors like “Schedule at our Loop office,” not just “Contact us.” This reinforces the entity connection between practice and place.
Migrations and mergers: preserve equity by design
Firms merge, rebrand, and replace CMS platforms. The wrong move erases years of equity in a weekend. Before you migrate, inventory every indexable URL and its inbound links. Map each to a new destination with the same or tighter intent. Don’t rely on broad pattern-based redirects unless your old structure was immaculate.
Expect to fix these after launch: missing 301s for old tag pages, images and PDFs that lost URLs, office pages that now 404, and unexpected parameter duplicates from filters or plugins. Give crawlers a simple post-launch experience, then let the redirects sit indefinitely. Equity follows persistence, not perfection.
Analytics that reflect architecture
If you restructure, measurement should follow. Group pages into content sets that mirror your hubs: practice hubs, spokes, city pages, bios, office pages, and resources. Track organic entrances, click-through from nav elements, time to contact, and assisted conversions for each set.
I’ve seen firms conclude that “blogs don’t convert” because last-click attribution missed the fact that a visitor entered on a statute page, visited the DUI hub, read a case result, then called from the bio page. Architecture creates paths. Analytics should show which paths lead to consultations.
Edge cases worth planning for
- Multistate firms serving both consumer and corporate clients need parallel architectures, not a blended soup. Keep consumer practice content and corporate counsel content in separate hubs, with limited crosslinking that makes sense for referral scenarios. Highly regulated niches such as immigration and securities benefit from updates pages that explain changes in rules, then link to the affected service pages. This builds freshness signals without rewriting core pages for every memo from a regulator. Firms with dozens of languages should avoid auto-translated duplicates. Build dedicated language sections with hreflang tags, use native translators, and adjust geography references. A Spanish page that references counties and courthouses incorrectly will never earn trust.
A short operational checklist for site architecture
- Map each target query to one canonical URL with a simple, descriptive slug. Keep practice and city pages within three clicks of the homepage, supported by breadcrumbs. Build clusters with a hub-and-spoke pattern, and interlink in both directions using descriptive anchors. Use clean navigation with no more than five first-level money pages in the main menu, and reserve the footer for a curated set of practice and office links. Monitor indexation and cannibalization quarterly, merging or redirecting pages that collide.
Where firms see the fastest wins
When we tune architecture, three areas usually move the needle within a quarter. First, splitting an overloaded practice page into focused subpages aligned with search demand often yields quick ranking improvements for mid-tail queries. Second, adding city-focused service pages in metros with clear local intent and real substance tends to unlock map pack synergies and better organic click-through. Third, tightening internal links so that every spoke pushes to its hub, and each hub links to a handful of high-performing spokes, concentrates authority instead of scattering it.
None of this requires tricks. It requires choosing what each page is for, placing it where people and crawlers will find it, and giving it the support it needs through internal links and navigation. That is the heart of lawyer SEO. When your site architecture respects intent, geography, and proof, the rest of your marketing works harder.