Of everything covered in our local SEO for law firms guide, the Google Business Profile is the single item most firms leave half-finished. It costs nothing to run, it's the first thing a prospective client sees when they search "[practice area] lawyer near me", and yet most legal listings we audit are missing a service area, running the wrong category, or haven't had a photo added since the firm signed up. This guide is a deeper, standalone look at getting the profile itself right; if you want the wider picture of how local SEO fits into your overall marketing, that's covered separately.
Claiming and verifying your profile
Claiming a Google Business Profile starts at business.google.com, where you search for your firm, claim the listing if one already exists (Google often auto-generates a bare-bones listing from other web data before you ever touch it) or create a new one. Verification is where most of the friction happens for law firms specifically:
- Shared office buildings and serviced suites: Google's guidelines require a genuine, staffed location during stated hours. A firm operating from a shared professional suite or coworking space can be flagged or suspended if the address doesn't clearly correspond to that individual business, so make sure your suite number, signage and any shared reception all reflect the firm's name accurately.
- Service-area businesses: if you see clients at their home or workplace, or run entirely from a home office and don't want the address public, Google lets you set up a service-area profile instead of a storefront listing. You hide the exact address and instead list the suburbs or regions you cover. This suits some family law and conveyancing practices well, but it typically restricts how competitively you can rank for very tightly local "near me" searches compared with a verified street address.
- Verification method: postcard by mail remains the most common method, though phone, email or video verification are sometimes offered depending on the account history and category. Postcard verification can take one to two weeks, so factor that into any launch timeline for a new firm; our guide to marketing a new law firm covers the sequencing in more detail.
- Duplicate listings: if a previous employee, an old firm name, or a directory sync created a second listing at the same address, it needs to be merged or removed before Google will treat your primary profile as authoritative. This is a common, quietly damaging issue we find in audits.
Choosing the right primary and secondary categories
Category selection is one of the most consequential and most frequently mishandled parts of the whole profile. Whitespark's annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey, a widely followed industry study of what local SEO practitioners see moving rankings, has consistently placed the primary category among the heaviest-weighted profile-level signals in Google's local algorithm, and practitioners regularly point to an incorrect primary category as one of the most common reasons an otherwise solid listing underperforms.
For a law firm, the primary category is usually the generic "Law firm" or, where it fits better, a specific option such as "Family law attorney", "Personal injury attorney", "Criminal justice attorney" or "Real estate attorney". Google only lets you choose one primary category, so pick the one that best reflects your single biggest source of enquiries, then use the secondary category slots (Google allows several) to cover the rest of your practice: a firm doing family law and wills and estates might set "Family law attorney" as primary and add "Estate planning attorney" and "Divorce lawyer" as secondary categories. Avoid the temptation to stack unrelated categories purely for reach, Google's guidelines discourage it and it dilutes the relevance signal the category system is supposed to send. Review your category selection periodically too; Google adds new, more specific legal categories from time to time, and a firm that set up its profile years ago may now have a better-fitting option available.
Using the Q&A feature proactively
The Q&A section sits below your business description on the profile and lets anyone, not just verified customers, post a public question that anyone else, including people with no connection to your firm, can answer. Left alone, this becomes a liability: unanswered questions sit there indefinitely, and occasionally a competitor or an unrelated person answers incorrectly. The fix is straightforward but needs to be a standing habit rather than a one-off task:
- Seed the section yourself with the four or five questions prospective clients actually ask: "Do you offer a free first consultation?", "Do you work on a no win no fee basis?", "What suburbs do you cover?", "Do you offer after-hours appointments?" Answer each one from the business account so it's marked as coming from the owner.
- Check the profile for new questions weekly, or set up notifications through the Google Business Profile app. Questions that sit unanswered for weeks look neglected to anyone who scrolls down that far.
- Keep answers factual and specific rather than promotional, this section gets read by people doing genuine due diligence before they call.
Google Posts: what to post and how often
Posts appear directly in your profile and occasionally in local search results, giving you a small but genuinely visible space to share updates without needing a separate social media channel. For a law firm, useful post types include:
- A short note about a relevant change in law that affects your practice area, framed in plain language.
- A reminder tied to a seasonal trigger, end-of-financial-year estate planning reviews, for example.
- An update when you add a new solicitor, open a new location, or extend your hours.
- A link to a recent piece of content you've published, driving profile viewers through to a fuller answer on your site.
Posts expire after roughly seven days (with some exceptions for event and offer post types), so the practical cadence most firms can sustain is one to two posts a month, timed around something genuinely worth saying rather than posting for its own sake. A stale "Posts" tab with nothing from the last six months signals neglect in exactly the same way an unanswered Q&A does.
Photos: a real ranking and engagement feature, even though we don't use them ourselves
Worth being upfront about: Lawyer Growth's own website uses no photography, we work entirely in text and SVG icons, by deliberate design choice for this site. That's not a recommendation to skip photos on your Google Business Profile. Photos are one of the more measurable levers on a listing. BrightLocal, a well-known local SEO research and software company, has published data showing that Business Profiles with photos attract meaningfully more requests for directions and more website clicks than profiles without them, and Google's own guidance to business owners echoes this: profiles that include photos tend to earn more views than the average listing in the same category.
For a law firm, that means adding a genuine, current headshot of each solicitor (clients want to know who they're calling before they call), photos of the reception and meeting rooms so a first-time visitor recognises the building, your logo as the profile photo, and a simple cover photo. Avoid stock imagery, generic gavel-and-scales photos are an instant signal of a neglected listing to anyone comparing a few firms side by side. Refresh photos periodically rather than uploading a batch once and leaving them; a profile that looks actively maintained earns more trust than one frozen in time.
Responding to reviews
Review responses are part of the profile, not a separate task, and they're read by prospective clients almost as closely as the reviews themselves. A firm that responds promptly and professionally, to both positive and critical reviews, signals that someone is actually paying attention. Never argue with a critical review in public or disclose matter details in a response (obvious, but it happens); a calm, brief acknowledgement and an invitation to discuss privately is almost always the right tone. Generating a steady flow of new reviews in the first place is a bigger topic than this guide covers, our dedicated piece on getting more Google reviews as a law firm walks through the practical process, and the broader discipline of managing your online reputation sits under our reputation management service.
Google Business Profile optimisation checklist
Work through this list once to get the profile properly set up, then revisit it every few months as a maintenance check. Your progress is saved in this browser.
Where this fits into the wider picture
Google Business Profile optimisation is one piece of local SEO, not the whole of it; citation consistency, on-site local signals and your review volume all interact with it, which is why our local SEO for law firms guide is worth reading alongside this one if you haven't already. It also sits close to your firm's website, digital marketing and branding, since a strong profile only helps if what someone finds when they click through matches the impression it created. Firms in competitive metro markets, Sydney and Melbourne in particular, tend to see the biggest relative gain from getting this right, simply because the gap between a well-maintained profile and a neglected one is more visible against more competitors. If your firm handles personal injury, conveyancing or criminal law matters, all practice areas where people search and decide quickly, this is one of the highest-return hours you can spend this month. See our pricing if you'd rather have this managed for you, or get in touch for a free growth plan.