How to Get Found in Local Search

Tell me if this sounds familiar. A firm spends months chasing some clever new AI visibility tactic that goes nowhere. Meanwhile, their Google Business Profile sits neglected, they’re not earning mentions outside their own website, and they rarely ask for reviews. That new tactic was never going to work because the fundamentals required to support it weren’t there.

Local SEO is successful when you get the fundamentals right before chasing novel strategies or tactics. That’s true across the map pack, local organic results, and AI-generated local recommendations. It’s evident in empirical search data and in our own eyeballs.

Underneath every local SEO strategy and tactic is the same question, asked by a person deciding who to call and an algorithm deciding who to recommend. Can this law firm be trusted?

If you’re ready to get serious about your law firm’s local SEO, this guide will show you how. Read it start to finish, or use the table of contents to hop around to the strategies most relevant to your needs or interests.

Google Business Profile

Start with the most important local search asset: your Google Business Profile (GBP). Your GBP controls what shows up in the map pack, which usually appears above organic results for most local searches. (For those unfamiliar, the map pack is the block of three business listings that appears next to or just below the map embedded in local search results.)

GBP Signals Are the Biggest Drivers of Local Visibility

Google ranks a business by how well it answers the questions a local searcher actually has. Things like: Is this what I need? Is it nearby? Is it any good? Can I get to it? 

So, it’s no surprise that the GBP factors that carry the most weight in Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey are the signals that answer those questions. That’s the whole logic behind every tactic in this section. Create a local presence that points to your business as a solution for local searchers.

No cheat codes are hiding in this list. Each of these ten factors is Google trying to answer a question a user is asking about local businesses.

Make Sure Your GBP Is Complete

Completeness is a factor in its own right according to Whitespark’s survey. It’s ranked 16th out of 187 factors, and it relates to nearly everything else on the list. A complete profile means:

• Legal business name, matching your signage and website
• Primary category and additional categories if warranted
• Verified listing for every office
• Accurate hours, including 24/7 hours if you’re reachable around the clock
• Services specific to each office
• Description that names your practice areas without stuffing keywords
• Current photos of your team, office, and building
• Steady flow of strong reviews
• Address that’s accurate and pinned to the right spot on the map

Go through the profile section by section and don’t leave anything half-done. We cover the full setup, with steps for each, in our GBP basics guide.

Multi-Office Firms Need Multi-Office GBPs

Don’t make the mistake of creating a single GBP to cover all your offices. If you have three offices, you need three GBPs, each reflecting that location. For example, a Boca Raton office handling auto accidents and slip and fall cases should list services to reflect that. If the Fort Myers office only handles auto accident cases, its services list should omit slip and fall.

Each Office’s GBP Should Reflect That Office

Legal Directories

A citation is any place online that mentions your firm’s name, address, and phone number, even without a link back to your site. Google cross-references that information across the web to confirm you’re a real, findable business, which is why NAP consistency showed up as its own ranked factor back in the GBP section. Legal directories are one of the most important places to build citations.

Which legal directories should I join?

If you’re going to join or claim your profile on only a few legal directories, join or claim these:

If this seems like a big, crowded field of competing directories, it’s really not. Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, Lawyers.com, Nolo, FindLaw, and Super Lawyers all belong to one company, Internet Brands. That’s why a Martindale-Hubbell profile shows its own Peer Reviews and Client Reviews, plus a third section, Avvo Reviews, pulling straight from your Avvo profile. And it’s why a FindLaw listing can show a Super Lawyers badge.

Justia, meanwhile, will list your profile in the Legal Information Institute (LII) Lawyer Directory as well, even with a free profile.

If you’re going to start somewhere, start here:

• Claim free profiles wherever they’re available: Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Martindale-Hubbell, Lawyers.com, and your state bar.
• Pursue Super Lawyers recognition through peer nomination.

Are There Paid Options and Should I Sign Up?

Yes, most directories offer a paid option.

• Justia offers Gold and Platinum tiers. Gold gets you rotating sponsored positions above the free listings, plus traffic stats and a profile without competitor ads. Platinum provides a fixed top spot on listing pages, but it’s exclusive: only one attorney per practice-area/metro combination, so if it’s taken, you’re on a waitlist.
• ProVantage is a paid product available from Martindale-Avvo. It offers enhanced profiles on Martindale, Avvo, Lawyers.com, and Nolo. It provides a single portal to manage reviews, acquire peer endorsements, and work towards the AV Preeminent® rating. It also includes performance-tracking tools.
• Authority Suite includes optimized profiles across six sites: the four already covered by ProVantage, plus FindLaw and LawInfo. It also includes performance tracking, integrates chat on profiles, and an Authority Preference account gives you prioritized visibility.
• FindLaw sells a Premium Profile starting around $158/month.

Explore what works best for your firm, but consider bundled options that provide benefits across several directories at once.

Don’t Overlook Non-Legal Directories

AI systems also pull from general directories when searchers ask about lawyers in their area, not just legal directories.

These non-legal directories also offer paid options.

• Yelp Ads is a cost-per-click program that puts your business in paid placements above search results and on competitor pages. Cost per click varies widely by industry, up to $40 or more for a competitive category like law.
• Yelp’s Upgrade Package provides enhanced profiles: photo slideshow, custom call-to-action button, competitor ad removal, and a verified license badge.
• Expertise.com allows businesses to advertise on their page for more visibility, but only if they’ve passed the review and selection process.
• YP.com offers a paid product called ypLocalAds. It gets you prominent placement in your category on the first page of results, plus an Enhanced Business Profile, historically sold on a cost-per-call basis.

AI Search Loves Directories

If you ask the major AI platforms to recommend a lawyer, you’ll probably get an answer referencing or citing one or more of these directories. 

This answer from ChatGPT drew from 12 sources, many of them legal directories, including four Avvo pages. One firm was recommended partly for being “highly rated on Avvo.” Expertise.com is cited, too, and another firm is highlighted for its 400+ Google reviews.

This is a Google AI Overview. Different city, different practice area, but the same pattern is evident. It draws from Expertise.com, Avvo, and Super Lawyers, all of which it cited by name.

This is a Claude output. It cites Justia, Super Lawyers, and Yelp, along with some of the firms’ own sites.

Perplexity relied heavily on law firms’ websites but also cited directories like Super Lawyers and Justia.

So, we have four AI tools, four cities, four practice areas, and the same handful of directories referenced or cited every time. This alone is reason enough to take the time to make sure your firm and attorneys are present in the major directories.

Reviews

Go back to that GBP ranking table from earlier. Reviews show up twice in the top 10: “high star ratings” sits at sixth and “reviews with actual text” sits at ninth.

Where to Focus Your Review Requests

Most people will only leave a review on one platform. They won’t hop around and leave one everywhere you ask, so be selective. Usually, that means asking for Google reviews.

The AI examples from the citations section back this up too. In that ChatGPT test for personal injury lawyers in Des Moines, one firm was cited as “highly rated on Avvo,” but the very next line recommended another firm based on its Google star rating and review count.

AI systems pull from directories, but Google reviews are prominent too. So, don’t spread your effort thin chasing reviews everywhere when Google has the greatest visibility across all search platforms.

Caution: Do not buy fake reviews or otherwise violate Google’s review policies. And if you spot fraudulent reviews on another business’s profile, you can report the fraud to Google.

Yelp’s Deal With OpenAI (ChatGPT)

In July 2026, Yelp struck a licensing deal with OpenAI that lets ChatGPT surface Yelp reviews and ratings in local answers. That’s worth keeping in mind, but Yelp’s algorithm discounts one-off reviews, so a single review from someone who never reviews anything else on Yelp probably won’t affect your rating much.

The exception is if you know a client is an active Yelp reviewer. In those cases, their review there carries weight, so it might be worth asking them to review your law firm on Yelp. Otherwise, keep pointing people to Google.

Make Asking for Reviews Part of Your Routine

Build a system in your office so that every time your firm successfully resolves a client case, someone asks the client for a review.

• Ask right after a case resolves, while the experience is fresh.
• Have someone the client trusts ask. For example, the attorney who handled the case or a paralegal the client worked with regularly.
• Share a direct link to your Google review page. That’s more reliable than asking someone to search for your business and find the review button themselves.
• Put the review link in follow-up materials. A closing letter, final invoice, or case-wrap-up email is a natural place for it.
• Follow up only once if you don’t hear back, then let it go. Repeated asks start to feel like pressure, which could be a compliance risk (see below).
• Respond to every review. For a good review, send a quick, warm thank-you. For a bad one, acknowledge the concern, stay professional, and avoid specifics.

Caution: State Bar Rules for Soliciting Client Reviews

How you ask for reviews is a bar compliance concern. Rules vary by state, so check yours. But generally, you’re safe if you avoid these:

• Offering payment or anything of value for a review (some narrow exceptions exist, see below)
• Drafting the review yourself or telling the client what to write
• Coercing, pressuring, or conditioning anything on the review being positive
• Disclosing confidential client information in a response to a review
• Asking a client to say something you couldn’t ethically say yourself in an ad

Here are some examples of state-specific nuances to soliciting reviews. This is a sampling, not an exhaustive list, so check your own state’s bar before finalizing a review request process.

Local PR & Brand Building

Earning recognition in your community can help in three big ways, two of which help whether the recognition is offline or online:

Name recognition increases click-through, whether it comes from billboard advertising, radio spots, or online mentions. Someone who’s seen your name is more likely to click your listing on a non-branded search like “car accident lawyer in St. Louis,” simply because they recognize your firm.

Community-wide awareness can increase on-site conversion. Familiarity builds trust before someone lands on your site. Once they’re there, that trust makes them more likely to call or fill out a form.

Brand mentions across the web correlate with AI visibility. Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions correlate at 0.664 with being cited or recommended across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews, roughly three times stronger than backlinks at 0.218. This is a correlation, not proof that mentions alone cause it, but it’s a documented relationship.

So how do you build this kind of recognition? In many cases, the best way to build locally relevant brand mentions online is to engage with the community offline.

Offline Efforts That Yield Online Mentions

A few things you can do now to explore these opportunities within the communities you serve:

• Look at your community’s rec sports leagues and their sponsorship processes and costs.
• Identify local charities or organizations you’d want to be associated with, and find out what it takes to sponsor or get involved.
• Join your bar association if you haven’t already. Look for opportunities to attend events, which can lead to speaking opportunities down the line.

Online Local PR That Earns Mentions

A few things you can do now:

• Respond to journalist queries. Platforms like those mentioned above can connect you with reporters looking for sources.
• Contribute a guest article to a legal industry publication or a local news site that accepts outside contributors on relevant topics.
• Do a podcast interview in your practice area or local community, as most podcast sites publish an episode page online, which will likely include a mention.
• Publish original research or data worth citing. Not only might high-quality proprietary content lead to a backlink for your site, but it’ll likely include a mention of your law firm.
• Show up in editorial “best of” roundups like Expertise.com, covered in the citations and directories section. You can’t pay for placement there, but you can request a review.

Onsite Content

So far, everything in this article has been about local signals from outside your website: your Google Business Profile, citations and directory listings, reviews, and offsite brand mentions. This section is about the things on your website.

Where to Add Local Content to Your Website

Unique & Local Practice Area Pages

Create a dedicated page for every practice area and location you serve. What separates a real page from a thin or generic one is whether it reflects your law firm, or whether it’s a template with the city and case type swapped in.

Google calls the former non-commodity content and the latter commodity content. A practice area page should describe you representing people who have that specific problem:

• Your experience handling these cases
• Your perspective on those cases
• What you’ll do for a client
• What makes you different

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Commodity version: “Our firm handles personal injury cases including car accidents, slip and falls, and wrongful death. We fight for maximum compensation for our clients. Contact us today for a free consultation.”

This just tells the reader what a personal injury firm does and the types of cases it typically handles. There’s nothing unique about it. It’s commodity content.

Non-commodity version: “We’ve represented injured clients in St. Louis for over 20 years, and one thing hasn’t changed: insurance companies undervalue soft-tissue injuries in the first settlement offer almost every time. We build our cases around independent medical documentation because we’ve seen what happens when firms wait. Like the person who came to us after accepting a $4,000 settlement two weeks after a rear-end collision, before an MRI showed a herniated disc that needed surgery a year later, with no way to reopen the claim. When you call, you’ll talk directly with the attorney handling your case, not an intake coordinator.”

Now we’re telling the user about this law firm, its perspective (insurers undervalue soft tissue injuries), exactly what it does and why (independent medical documentation, with a story to boot), and something unique about this firm (the reader will speak directly to the lawyer instead of intake operators).

The first paragraph could sit on any firm’s site in any state. The second one couldn’t. Google and AI platforms ultimately try to answer a person’s question with the best available sources. If a user is asking about attorneys in their area, but your page says the same thing every other firm’s page says, those systems have no reason to prefer yours over a competitor’s, or even a directory page that covers the same ground.

Unique content gives search engines and AI platforms a reason to surface your page. A unique page alone won’t outrank a firm with stronger fundamentals, but a genuinely unique page is the right place to start.

Weave Trust Signals Throughout the Site

Trust signals can live on case results and testimonials pages, but don’t limit them to an isolated corner of the site.

Work trust signals into the pages people land on most often and that are meant to convert visitors into leads. A home page banner citing a real settlement or verdict converts better than a stock image of a smiling attorney. Or a pull quote from a client testimonial lends support to your exceptional service.

Share real stories in your local content. A practice area page that weaves in a real (properly anonymized) client story to illustrate a legal concept is more valuable than an abstract explanation. If you’re explaining how a statute of limitations works, for example, a real example of a case where the client missed an important filing deadline illustrates the idea with a relatable story, demonstrates your real-world experience, and provides an opportunity to reference locally relevant procedures or rules.

AI Search

In the introduction to this guide, we explained the cause behind most local SEO frustration: chasing a new tactic while the fundamentals underneath it are missing. This pattern shows up most frequently in AI search. Partly because it’s new, so it feels like it should need its own separate strategy.

But mostly because it’s so poorly understood that it’s easy to talk yourself into believing almost any strategy or idea as plausible. That’s not helpful, so let’s walk through the AI search questions most important to a local business.

Which Queries Generate AI Overviews?

AI-generated answers have been common in informational search for a while. E.g., “how does X work?” What’s newer is AI Overviews appearing more frequently in commercial search too. Commercial queries come from users in a research phase, including those looking for a lawyer.

We saw this play out in the screenshots earlier in this guide that showed commercial searches for an attorney triggering an AI Overview that named law firms outright. AI Overviews are willing to name names when users ask about local businesses. The Albany screenshot from earlier, for example, shows the AI Overview naming three firms in its first sentence.

Several other analyses also found AI Overviews growing for many of the query types local businesses care about.

• More than 40% of U.S. searches now trigger an AI Overview, per Similarweb’s 2026 Generative AI Landscape report.
• Semrush’s study of 600,000 keywords found AI Overviews on commercial searches grew 71% over six months, though commercial still lags informational intent queries overall.
• A separate Peec AI analysis of 500,000 decision-stage queries found commercial searches triggered an AI Overview 88.5% of the time.

Which Platform(s) Should I Worry About in Local Search?

Mostly, still Google. A survey from Adobe found 77% of ChatGPT users say they use it as a search engine. But that’s self-reported data from people who already use ChatGPT. That doesn’t mean 77% of the general population uses ChatGPT as a search engine.

Some data tells a clearer story:

• SparkToro and Datos analyzed 41 major websites, expanding the definition of “search” beyond search engines and AI chatbots to include Amazon and YouTube where people might search for things they need. Even then, Google accounted for 73.7% of all desktop searches in the US in Q4 2025, while all AI tools combined made up just 3.2%.
• An earlier SparkToro analysis of 2024 data found Google received roughly 373 times more search-like queries (the kind of query someone would otherwise type into a traditional search engine) than ChatGPT that year. That data is a couple of years old, but it reflects how people have generally used AI platforms relative to Google.
• First Page Sage’s 2026 market share report found Google holds 90% of transactional-intent queries specifically, the kind most important to businesses, compared to 5% for ChatGPT.
• Even within the AI chatbot space itself, ChatGPT’s share is eroding. First Page Sage found it fell from roughly 87% to 62% of AI chatbot traffic between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026, while Gemini and Claude gained ground.

The point isn’t to ignore AI search platforms. It’s worth tracking visibility and doing what you can to show up in ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLMs. The point is that if you were forced to choose between focusing only on Google or only on LLMs (say, because your budget forces you to allocate time and resources), you’d pick Google, and it’s not really close.

You’re not forced to make that choice, of course, but it’s a good reminder as you delegate budget, time, resources, and tracking to your firm’s digital marketing efforts.

From Which Sources Does AI Search Pull for Local Queries?

Lots, but if we had to boil it down to the two most important sources you should care about, it’s these.

Legal directories. Avvo, Justia, Super Lawyers, and the rest of that ecosystem show up constantly as sources across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview answers. We covered this in detail in the citations and directories section earlier.

Google Business Profile. Yes, OpenAI struck a deal with Yelp to surface branded data, including reviews, in local queries. But Google is still king here, and we don’t see that changing right now. We’ll watch where the OpenAI-Yelp deal takes us, but even in the days after the deal, ChatGPT pulled from Google reviews. And, in case we haven’t made the point clear enough, Google still owns a substantially larger part of the search market than ChatGPT and other AI platforms.

Your own website. Your site may get pulled into commercial searches when someone’s comparing their options. Your on-site content should contain trust signals, establish your local presence, and help someone who’s researching their options.

Google’s default search experience is increasingly becoming an AI experience. So, local businesses should monitor where AI Overviews and AI Mode source answers to commercial queries.

Do I Need a Different Strategy for AI Search?

You don’t need a new, radical strategy to earn AI search visibility. The things that are most correlated with AI visibility aren’t so different than the tactics you’ve used in SEO for years. In other words, you’re not missing some secret cheat code guaranteeing endless AI visibility.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reevaluate your digital strategy, though. 

Reevaluating your search strategy is always a good idea when search changes or evolves, especially when Google updates its algorithm, interface, or features. And guess what. AI has drastically changed search.

AI’s biggest effect on search so far has been a shift in user behavior and expectations. Conversational search, instant answers, context, nuance, follow-up questions, unexpected or anticipatory outputs.

When ChatGPT emerged a few years ago, Google worried how much it’d eat into its hold on the search market. But several years later, Google still dominates search behavior. Part of that could be that most people are used to using Google to search the web, but a big part could also be that Google added AI features to its search engine.

ChatGPT hooked users on conversational search and instant answers, and while Google rolled out People Also Ask and Featured Snippets long ago, AI Overviews take instant answers to another level. Now, AI Overviews and the tighter integration of AI Mode in the search experience enable conversational follow-ups, creating a “ChatGPT-like experience” right in the Google results.

As you reevaluate your strategy, you’ll likely adjust how you emphasize and prioritize the same tactics you’ve relied on for 10 or 15 years. Not discovering some cheat code that unlocks limitless AI visibility.

What earns AI visibility in local search?

Most of the tactics we’re seeing earn visibility in AI are the same things that’ve been part of SEO and marketing strategies for decades, just emphasized accordingly given this new development in search.

• Organic content is not the only front door. A well-optimized practice area page used to be the primary way searchers found and evaluated your firm. Now an AI Overview can handle that evaluation step before anyone clicks on your site.
• Directories used to require someone to click. A prospective client used to have to visit Avvo or Justia directly to see your reviews and credentials there. Now an AI system pulls that information straight into its answer, which makes actually being listed more consequential, not less.
• Reviews and GBP completeness carry lots of weight, since they’re common inputs AI systems use when deciding whether to mention your firm in response to a local commercial query.
• Brand mentions and community presence are important for the same reason: an AI system deciding whether to recommend your firm to a local searcher looks for the same trust signals a person would.

Start With the Fundamentals

Every section in this guide points at the same target: Can this law firm be trusted?

Keep that question in mind as you build your SEO strategy and execute each tactic in this guide. You’re trying to build local relevance everywhere so Google search and AI platforms answer in the affirmative.

Start where this guide started, with the fundamentals. Everything else builds on that.

About the author

Alex Valencia

Alex Valencia is an influential entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, podcaster, and CEO of We Do Web Content, one of Inc. 5000's fastest-growing businesses in America. His agency implements game-changing content marketing strategies and produces top-ranking web content for law firms, medical professionals, and small businesses nationwide.