Last reviewed: February 2026
Google Business Profile: The SEO Asset Law Firms Ignore
A law firm can spend $8,000 per month on SEO and still lose local leads to a competitor whose website is objectively worse. The reason, in most cases, has nothing to do with content or backlinks. It comes down to a Google Business Profile that was set up once, during a lunch break, and never touched again.
According to industry data compiled by local SEO practitioners and referenced across multiple 2025 ranking factor studies, GBP signals account for roughly 32% of all map pack ranking factors. That estimate comes from one widely cited framework (other models weight factors differently), but in every version, GBP is the single largest controllable variable in local search visibility. And yet the average law firm treats it like a formality.
The Mistakes That Suppress Your Visibility
The most common GBP errors on law firm profiles are not dramatic. They are boring, administrative, and devastating.
Virtual office addresses. Firms using a Regus suite, coworking space, or virtual mailbox address as their GBP location are playing a game Google has been penalizing with increasing aggression. Google’s verification process, which as of mid-2025 frequently requires video verification, is specifically designed to confirm a real, staffed business location. If Google flags the address as a virtual office, the profile can be suspended without warning, which means disappearing from local results entirely. If you genuinely operate from a shared space, the space must be one where your firm has a dedicated, permanent presence with signage. A mailing address you visit once a month does not qualify.
Incomplete profiles. A GBP listing with just a name, address, phone number, and a generic description is a listing that tells Google almost nothing about what the firm does. Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey and BrightLocal’s consumer review research both show that law practices with comprehensively optimized profiles: complete categories, detailed service descriptions, populated Q&A sections, and regular photo uploads, generate significantly more click engagement than incomplete listings. Forget aesthetics. The point is giving Google enough structured information to match your profile to the right queries.
Unclaimed or unverified profiles. Some firms do not realize they have a GBP listing at all, because Google creates placeholder listings from publicly available data. An unclaimed profile cannot be optimized, cannot respond to reviews, and cannot post content. Worse, it can contain inaccurate information that you cannot correct. If your firm has been in business for more than a year and you have not claimed your GBP, someone else’s outdated data is representing you in local search.
Each of these errors is fixable, usually within a week. The cost of ignoring them is measured in lost map pack positions and the leads that go to the firm sitting in those positions instead.
GBP Category, Description, and Service Fields: Priority Order
Not all GBP fields carry equal weight. Your optimization time should be disproportionately focused on the fields Google’s algorithm uses most heavily for matching and ranking.
Your primary business category is the single strongest relevance signal in your profile — a point Google’s own local ranking documentation confirms and practitioners like those at Whitespark and Local Falcon have validated through years of testing. “Law Firm” is almost never the right primary category. If your firm primarily handles personal injury cases, your primary category should be “Personal Injury Attorney.” If family law, “Family Law Attorney.” If criminal defense, “Criminal Justice Attorney.” The more specific the category, the better Google understands which searches should trigger your listing.
Secondary categories extend your visibility to adjacent queries. Google allows up to nine additional categories, and you should use them strategically. A personal injury firm might add “Car Accident Lawyer,” “Workers’ Compensation Attorney,” and “Medical Malpractice Lawyer” as secondaries. But do not add categories for services you do not actually provide. Irrelevant categories dilute your relevance rather than expanding it. Whitespark’s annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey consistently identifies GBP category relevance as one of the top-weighted local ranking signals, and practitioners report meaningful visibility gains — sometimes substantial — when adding accurate secondary categories to profiles that previously used only a primary category.
The business description field matters for conversion more than ranking. Google has stated that description content does not directly influence ranking position. But it does influence whether someone clicks your listing or skips to the next one. Write a description that explains what you do, where you do it, and what makes your practice different. Use natural language. Mention your location and practice areas, but do not keyword-stuff. The description has a 750-character limit, and you should use most of it.
Services and products fields give Google additional structured data about what you offer. Each practice area should be listed as a service with a clear name and description. These fields are relatively new additions to GBP’s interface and are worth completing thoroughly because they provide Google with explicit categorization data beyond what it infers from your website content.
Choosing Categories Without Diluting Your Relevance
Multi-practice firms face a specific challenge: they cannot make every practice area the primary category. The primary must be the practice area that represents the firm’s core identity and generates the most revenue.
Say a firm does personal injury, family law, and criminal defense. If personal injury accounts for 60% of revenue, the primary category should be “Personal Injury Attorney.” Family law and criminal defense categories go into the secondary slots. Prestige doesn’t factor into this decision. Google needs to know what your listing is primarily about.
The tricky scenario is when a firm genuinely splits evenly across multiple areas. In that case, you optimize the GBP for the most competitive and highest-value practice area as the primary, and use your website and supporting content to establish relevance for the others. The GBP primary category is a single-slot choice, and trying to be everything at once results in being nothing in particular.
A common mistake is selecting too many secondary categories under the assumption that more is better. If a personal injury firm adds “Immigration Attorney” because they occasionally handle a visa matter, that category sends a confusing signal. Google may start showing the profile for immigration queries, where the firm does not have competitive content or reviews, resulting in low engagement signals that can indirectly hurt overall profile performance.
The practical test: can your firm credibly serve a client who finds you through any of your listed categories? If the answer is no for a given category, remove it.
Photos, Q&A, and Attributes Are Not Decorative
Most firms skip these. That’s a mistake.
Photos have a measurable impact on profile engagement. Google’s own data has shown that businesses with photos receive more direction requests and more website clicks than those without. Legal practices are no exception. The photos that perform best for law firms are the ones that signal legitimacy and professionalism: the office exterior (so clients can find you), the office interior (so they know what to expect), and headshots of the attorneys (so they feel like they are dealing with real people). Stock photos do nothing. Photos uploaded by the firm on a regular basis, even monthly, signal to Google that the profile is actively managed.
The Q&A section is an open door for misinformation if left unmanaged. Anyone can ask a question on your GBP, and anyone can answer it, including competitors, disgruntled individuals, or well-meaning people with wrong information. The firm should seed the Q&A section with the questions prospects most commonly ask: what are your office hours, do you offer free consultations, what areas of law do you handle, do you serve a specific county or region. Answer them yourself, clearly and accurately. Then monitor the section weekly for new questions and answer them before someone else does.
Attributes are a set of binary indicators Google provides: wheelchair accessible, women-led, free consultation, online appointments, and others. These are not ranking factors in a direct sense, but they appear on your profile when someone views it, and they influence click behavior. If your firm offers free initial consultations, marking that attribute gives you a visible advantage over a competitor whose profile does not mention it.
Posting Frequency That Actually Matters
GBP posts are the most misunderstood feature of the platform. Firms either ignore them entirely or treat them as a social media channel, neither of which is correct.
The honest answer on whether posts affect ranking: the evidence is mixed. Google has not confirmed posts as a direct ranking signal. Practitioners have observed correlations between regular posting activity and map pack visibility, but correlation and causation are not the same thing. What posts demonstrably affect is engagement and conversion. A profile with recent posts showing activity, case results (where ethically permissible), community involvement, or legal updates looks more active and credible than a profile with no posts since 2023.
The content types that generate measurable interaction for law firms are update posts announcing firm news, event posts tied to local community involvement, and posts addressing timely legal topics relevant to the firm’s practice areas. “Offer” posts can work for firms that run specific promotions like free case evaluations, but the legal industry generally gets less traction from offer-style posts than service businesses.
Post frequency should match what you can sustain consistently rather than spike and drop. One post per week is a reasonable baseline. If you can do two, better. If you can only manage two per month, that still beats zero. The key is that the cadence remains steady. A profile that posts weekly for six months, then goes silent for three months, then posts five times in one week sends erratic signals.
Each post should include an image, should be written in natural language (not keyword-stuffed), and should include a call to action that drives toward a specific next step: call the firm, visit a practice area page, read a blog post. A post without a CTA is a missed conversion opportunity.
How to tell if your posting strategy is working: track profile interactions in GBP Insights monthly. Direction requests, phone calls, and website clicks from your profile are the metrics that matter. If those numbers trend upward during periods of consistent posting and flatten when posting stops, you have your answer for your specific profile.
What counts as “good” in GBP Insights depends on your market size, but here are directional benchmarks for a single-location law firm: if your profile generates fewer than 50 direction requests and fewer than 30 phone calls per month, optimization has room to improve. Profiles in competitive metros that are fully optimized typically see 100+ direction requests and 50+ calls monthly. Track these month over month. A 10% or greater increase sustained over a quarter confirms your changes are working.
Your GBP does not exist in isolation. It feeds directly into map pack rankings — the three-pack of local results that appears above organic listings for most legal queries. How Google decides which firms appear in that pack, and what you can do beyond GBP optimization to influence it, is covered in our map pack rankings post.
GBP optimization does not require a developer, a content writer, or an SEO agency. One person with access to the profile and two to three hours. That is all. The competitive gap between an optimized and an unoptimized profile is measurable in lead volume, and the math is unforgiving: if your competitor’s optimized profile generates even five additional calls per month at an average case value of $5,000, that is $300,000 per year in potential revenue their GBP captures while yours sits incomplete.