Last reviewed: February 2026
Multi-Location Law Firm SEO Without Duplicates
More location pages do not mean more visibility. They usually mean less.
The instinct makes sense: five offices, five pages, five chances to rank. But when those five pages use the same practice area descriptions, the same “why choose us” section, and the same attorney bios — swapping only the city name and address — Google classifies them as thin or duplicate content, ranks none of them well, and in the worst case flags them as doorway pages. The firm built five pages and got zero local visibility from them.
This failure is entirely predictable, and it happens because the shortcut of templating location pages seems efficient until Google’s quality systems catch it.
Doorway Pages: The Line Google Draws
Google’s documentation defines doorway pages as “sites or pages created to rank for specific search queries that funnel users to a single page or similar experience.” For law firms, the pattern usually looks like this: location pages with nearly identical content except for the city name, all funneling visitors to the same contact form or phone number.
The penalty isn’t always dramatic. More often, Google simply suppresses the pages in rankings, treating them as low-quality rather than formally penalizing them. The result is the same: your location pages sit on page three or four, invisible to the local searches they were supposed to capture.
How much unique content avoids the classification? There’s no published threshold, but industry practice and testing suggest that location pages need at least 60 to 70% unique content relative to each other to be treated as genuinely distinct pages. That’s not achievable by swapping city names in template paragraphs. It requires content that could only exist for that specific location.
What Makes a Location Page Worth Indexing
The content that differentiates a legitimate location page from a doorway page is content tied to the actual geography, not just the brand.
Local court information. Which courts serve this jurisdiction? What are the filing procedures specific to this county? For a family law firm, the difference between filing in Travis County versus Harris County is substantive. That substance is what makes the page valuable to a searcher and distinct to Google.
Jurisdiction-specific details. State law differences are obvious. But county and city-level differences matter too. Local ordinance variations, specific judges or court procedures, case processing timelines that vary by courthouse. These details prove the firm actually practices in this location rather than just claiming a service area.
Community-specific elements. Local legal aid resources, nearby courthouse addresses with parking information, references to local bar association chapters. A testimonial from a client in that market, even anonymized, carries more weight than a generic firm-wide review.
Local statistics. Crime rates, accident frequency, divorce filing trends for that county or metro area. Say a firm’s Austin location page includes Travis County DUI arrest statistics from the Texas Department of Public Safety. That’s content no template can replicate, and it signals genuine local relevance.
The goal isn’t to hit a word count. It’s to create a page that would be useful to someone specifically searching for legal help in that city, a page that couldn’t serve a different city without a rewrite.
Handling Multiple Google Business Profiles
This is where multi-location gets complicated fast. But when service areas overlap, the profiles can compete against each other.
Segmenting Service Areas to Prevent Profile Collision
Say a firm has offices in Dallas and Fort Worth, 30 miles apart, with the Dallas office generating 80% of personal injury cases and the Fort Worth office focused primarily on family law. Both profiles claim “Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex” as a service area. For a search like “divorce lawyer Arlington,” which sits between them, Google has to choose which profile to surface. If both profiles have similar authority, review counts, and content, the choice becomes arbitrary, and neither profile builds a strong enough signal to win consistently.
The solution is geographic segmentation of service areas where possible. The Dallas office claims Dallas and the cities east of Arlington. The Fort Worth office claims Fort Worth and the cities west. Arlington can be claimed by whichever office has the stronger connection, the attorney who handles more Arlington cases, the office closer to the Arlington courthouse.
For firms with more than three locations, this requires a documented service area map that prevents overlap. Without it, your own profiles compete against each other in the local pack, splitting the signals that should be consolidating.
Primary GBP categories should be consistent across locations if they offer the same services. But secondary categories can and should vary by what each office actually handles. If the Houston office has an immigration practice but the Austin office doesn’t, the immigration category belongs only on the Houston profile. The GBP optimization post covers category strategy in depth — the same principles apply here, multiplied by the number of locations.
Should Locations Sit Under Practice Areas or the Reverse?
URL hierarchy signals page relationships to Google. For multi-location law firms, two common structures exist:
Location-first: domain.com/dallas/personal-injury/
Practice-first: domain.com/personal-injury/dallas/
Neither is universally better. The decision depends on which dimension is more important to your business model.
If your firm is primarily defined by geography, each office operates somewhat independently, and clients choose based on proximity, location-first makes sense. As discussed in the map pack post, proximity’s relative weight in local rankings is declining — but for multi-location firms it remains the structural variable around which everything else organizes, because each location anchors a distinct geographic signal set. The location page becomes the hub, with practice area subpages underneath.
If your firm is primarily defined by practice areas, clients choose based on specialization, and locations are secondary, practice-first is stronger. The practice area page accumulates authority, and location variants serve as geographic qualifiers.
Pick one structure and apply it consistently. Mixing hierarchies, with some practice areas using location-first and others using practice-first, confuses the internal linking architecture and dilutes the signals you’re trying to build.
Breadcrumbs should reflect the chosen hierarchy. If you use practice-first, breadcrumbs read: Home > Personal Injury > Dallas. Navigation menus should mirror this structure. The internal linking architecture described in the post on internal linking mistakes applies here: location pages link up to practice area hubs, practice area pages link down to location variants, and blog content links to whichever level is most relevant.
How Do You Know Which Pages Are Working?
Not every location page will perform. Some markets are more competitive. Some offices are newer. Some locations simply don’t generate enough search demand to justify a standalone page.
In Search Console, filter the Performance report by page and compare location URLs. Before evaluating content performance, verify that the pages are actually indexed — multi-location sites are especially prone to the crawl errors and duplicate content flags the crawl errors post covers, and a page Google has not indexed cannot perform regardless of content quality. The metrics that distinguish a page with growth potential from one to consolidate:
Impressions trending upward over 3 to 6 months, even if clicks are low. That means Google is testing the page for relevant queries. Opportunity exists.
Flat impressions and zero clicks after 6 months. The page isn’t earning visibility. Either the content needs significant improvement or the search demand in that market doesn’t justify the page.
Declining impressions after an initial spike. Google tested the page, decided it wasn’t competitive, and reduced exposure. This usually signals a quality or uniqueness problem.
Give a new location page 4 to 6 months before making performance judgments. Competitive markets in top-50 metros may need up to 9 months. If a location page shows no signs of traction after that window, evaluate whether to consolidate it into a regional page, redirect it to the nearest performing location, or invest in significantly upgrading the content.
The comparison framework for multi-location performance is straightforward: in Search Console, filter the Performance report by each location page URL individually. Compare impressions, clicks, and average position across all your location pages for the same time period. The location page with the strongest metrics becomes your benchmark — its content depth, uniqueness, and local specificity is the standard the others should match. If your Dallas page generates 500 impressions per month and your Houston page generates 50 despite Houston being a larger market, the Houston page has a content or uniqueness problem, not a demand problem.
How many of your current location pages contain content that could only exist for that specific city? If the answer is “none” or “some of them, sort of,” those pages are working against you, not for you. Each location page is either a genuine local resource or a doorway page in disguise. Google can tell the difference, and the distinction is whether the content earns its existence by being useful to someone in that exact place.