Local SEO and the map pack for law firms

You can search for a lawyer near you, and the first results are the three business listings with a map that make up the map pack. This page is front loaded with the most cost effective work, for reasons given below.

What decides the map pack

Every year Darren Shaw at Whitespark comes up with a survey for a panel of local search practitioners. The 2026 results include 47 practitioners' scores for 187 possible factors on the map pack, local organic rankings, conversions and AI visibility¹.

None of them has any access to Google's code. The report does say this plainly. What makes it useful is the judgement of the practitioners, and each of them does local search testing for a living.

Here are the top ten factors I've annotated:

Clearly this order is the whole budget case for a local firm and the reason the steps below start at the point that they do.

Two of the shifts in the 2026 scores are worth acting on¹:

• The Services section climbed 75 places, to 35
• The hours set on your profile climbed 64 places, to 21. A profile that reads as open is a better bet for the search happening right now.

What Google says, including the part that kills most pitches

Google's own page on local ranking is short and easy to quote. Two lines of that page usually settle the argument²:

"Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity."

"There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

Google is defining distance as how far each business is from the person searching. It also says plainly that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking"².

The biggest challenge you face is that Google constantly changes your map results based on where the searcher is standing, and where they are driving. No amount of money can replace the advantage of a closer office if you're across town. The map pack is fluid and hyperlocal in a big metro but you can't expect to be handed the whole metro via one office.

Step one: the Business Profile, in one sitting

You can do this by opening your Google Business Profile and working down the fields all in one sitting. This is probably the most valuable hour for local legal SEO.

1. Primary category. It was the top-ranked of all 187 factors in the Whitespark survey. In legal, it's often set too broad. If you want to get collision cases, picking "Personal injury attorney" over "Lawyer" is the more effective technique. It wins, because Google is matching the narrower category against the narrower search. Better keep it narrow and stable.
2. Additional categories. The additional categories field is eighth on the list, empty on most law firm profiles. If you want, just add the ones you genuinely practise.
3. Hours, fifth on the list of factors. If you are taking calls until 9pm through an answering service, your evenings are business hours.
4. Services. The section climbed up 75 places this year from the last edition. You're listing the actual matters you handle in the client's own words, which show them what your work is.
5. Map pin, tenth. Check that it is pinned on your door, not just in the right block.
6. Photographs. Please consider making your office and team photos real photographs. Photo and video quality are ranked at 45 by the same survey. Stock photos and images are named directly in the scoring¹.

There are two things to leave alone in there.

1. Do not put keywords in the business name.

It lifts rankings, which is why it scores third, but it doesn't meet Google's guidelines. For example, if you have a law firm profile, make sure its name is the one on your signage, letterheads, website, etc.³. Competitors will sooner or later report it. Those reports aren't very rare, and in legal they seem to be a habit. A suspension will cost you more than you gained and be much harder to fix.

2. Do not buy a virtual office to widen coverage.

The Webris guide tells law firms and attorneys to rent serviced offices with part-time attorney availability for their coverage. An individual office of that kind costs about $2,550 to $4,600 a month per location in the guide's budget⁹.

Google wants your location to be staffed during its stated hours. Google is essentially pushing firms that serve clients elsewhere to one profile, so set a service area instead of chasing extra addresses³. Falling on the wrong side of those guidelines with an address nobody attends could leave the firm liable to a suspension of its Business Profile. The state bars all differ, but several have their own wording and their own rules on what a firm may call an office¹³.

Step two: a profile for every attorney, which almost nobody does

Google's guidelines for representing a business describe lawyers as being individual practitioners:

"Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents are all individual practitioners."³

Look at the rest of the rules in that document³:

• Practitioner profiles "may include title or degree certification (for example Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA)"
• "A practitioner shouldn't have multiple Business Profiles to cover all of their specializations"
• Where several practitioners share a location, the title "should include only the name of the practitioner, and shouldn't include the name of the organization"
• A solo attorney inside a branded firm gets one profile, named "[brand]: [practitioner name]"

The real limit imho is one attorney holding a profile per practice area and stuffing the firm name with keywords.

Google has no figure for what practitioner profiles do to firm rankings, so the people quoting one probably ran their own tests. In my testing an attorney's own name search is the profile's first win. That's where referrals land after a bar directory listing or a court appearance. Use a page about that attorney for the website link.

Step three: reviews, done the way that does not get you in trouble

There are two distinct jobs for reviews in play here.

One. Whether Google shows you in the map pack.

Looking at the highest ranked factors in that Whitespark survey, four of the top 14 are review factors¹:

• Star rating, sixth
• Reviews with written text, ninth
• How recent they are, eleventh
• A steady flow rather than bursts, fourteenth

Two. Whether anybody rings you after they see you.

BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey⁵:

• 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and only 9% will use one with five or fewer
• 31% now require 4.5 stars or better, up from 17% a year earlier, and 68% require at least four
• 44% count a review from the last month among the most important things they look at
• 32% look for reviews from the last two weeks, and 37% look for the owner's reply

So the same review count improvement work does two jobs. Get the review count up and the ranking follows. Keep your reviews recent and use your replies to win the call.

Plenty of legal SEO advice has potential, though I disagree with the route the published review guides are taking. Here's why I think they're wrong.

The Webris page I read on getting more Google reviews for lawyers lists some of the closest contacts (family members, close friends, former colleagues) and they recommend asking those. It also tells firms to reward the staff for their review counts, in internal contests with monthly bonuses and prizes. Its listed incentives are restaurant gift cards, theatre or sporting tickets, extra paid days off and monthly bonuses⁸.

Always gauge all three practices against Google's review policy⁶:

Reviews "paid for, directly or in kind" are prohibited. So is "content that is based on a conflict of interest", which "may include current or former employment, a contractual or consultory relationship, or other professional or personal affiliations". Businesses may not pressure staff to "solicit a certain number of reviews", nor "selectively solicit positive reviews from customers".

The FTC's rule covers all the same ground under the law⁷:

• Under 16 CFR 465.5, as an officer or manager, never solicit the reviews of immediate relatives, employees or agents, unless the relationship is disclosed
• Under 465.4, paying for reviews is highly regulated and pay conditioned on a particular sentiment is an unfair or deceptive practice. The definitions section of the rule lets the FTC count contest entries and gift certificates as compensation

Generalised requests with no selection are the exempt ones under the rule. Which is nice because you don't have to do anything else for the steady flow of recent reviews⁵.

Reply to the bad reviews as well as the good, and keep quiet on the client details.

Step four: the pages your profiles point at

Google provides a definition in its spam policies about doorway pages "created to rank for specific, similar search queries". They give multiple city pages that funnel users to one page as their example¹⁰.

Cyrus Shepard's write-up on effort points to "5,000 location pages generated from the same template with city names swapped in" as an indicator of low-effort content¹¹.

This is the norm in legal SEO builds for a firm covering a state. A city page is a useful page when it carries:

• The courthouse, its address, and anything local about filing there
• The judges, and what practitioners know about appearing before them
• The roads and intersections where the collisions actually happen
• The hospitals the ambulances go to
• A named attorney who genuinely appears in that county

What AI answers change about local work

It changes a bit of the work, but the picture that emerges on ready-to-hire searches is quite reassuring.

The AI answers dominate the earlier questions, and that is the subject of the AI search section. Two of the study's numbers are changing the local job⁴:

• 60% of the sources AI Overviews cited were third-party publishers, including Reddit, Quora, Yelp and Thumbtack
• 40% were individual local businesses

Whitespark's reading is that three of the top five AI visibility factors are citation factors (listings and mentions rather than links)¹.

So now the directory profiles a firm ignored since 2015 have regained their old importance and they convert.

The sequence for that work is on the off-site page.

Ahrefs has numbers even on the top-ranking page, and the number of clicks it gets is 58% lower where an AI Overview appears¹⁴. But the loss happens on informational searches and not on "injury lawyer near me".

How I run a local audit, in order

1. Profile fields first: category, additional categories, hours, services, pin, photos. That's where the free wins are for most firms right now.
2. Business name against the real-world name, and a note of the suspension risk if it is stuffed.
3. Attorney profiles. Whether each attorney has one, whether any have grown a second for a practice area, and what page each points at.
4. Review history rather than review count. When the last ten arrived, whether the flow is steady or bursty around campaigns, whether requests are being filtered, and whether anybody replies.
5. Name, address and phone on the site against the profile, since that match scores 15 in the factor list¹.
6. The city pages, run through the delete-the-city-name test.
7. The directory profiles, checked for completeness and for details that disagree.