Struggling to get your law firm to show up in local search results?
In today’s fast-moving SEO landscape, local SEO for law firms has evolved far beyond just Google reviews and directories. We’re breaking down three actionable strategies your firm can implement right now to boost visibility, protect your reputation, and gain a competitive edge—without a huge budget or advanced tech skills. From AI-friendly review hacks to scammer-proofing your Google Business Profile and optimizing for ChatGPT via Bing Places, these tips are tailored for attorneys ready to grow fast in 2026.
Three Main Takeaways for Local SEO for Law Firms
Your Google Reviews Might Be Invisible to AI
Due to JavaScript limitations, AI tools like ChatGPT can’t see your five-star reviews unless you use text-based schema markup on your website. Fix this to unlock visibility in AI search.
Protect Your Google Business Profile from Review Attacks
Scammers are using fake negative reviews to extort law firms. Learn the step-by-step process to report, appeal, and defend your profile before it tanks your reputation.
Use Bing Places to Win in AI Search
Bing Places feeds directly into ChatGPT’s results. Most firms ignore it, but optimizing your listing gives you a serious edge as AI-driven search becomes more common.
Transcription:
00:00:04:15 – 00:00:12:05
When your next potential client searches on JPT, are they going to find you or the competition?
00:00:12:05 – 00:00:31:29
Welcome back to the Optimize Law Firm podcast, where we help you build a more profitable and enjoyable law firm. I’m your host, Patrick Carver. I’m the owner of Constellation Marketing. And in today’s episode we are going to be talking about the latest strategies to boost local SEO for law firms.
00:00:32:01 – 00:01:03:12
We’re going to break down the newest stuff, some of the most practical things that we’re seeing right now that can add value to your business. And we’re going to cover how to outsmart AI’s blind spots when it comes to Google or Google reviews, we’re going to defend against spam attacks that can take your reputation overnight. And then finally, we’re going to talk about a little bit of unknown but impactful local optimization that can help you, especially when it comes to showing up in AI searches and get specifically.
00:01:03:12 – 00:01:12:01
So three for a fast, high impact episode of Local SEO for Law Firms that can help you move the needle. Then this episode is for you.
00:01:12:01 – 00:01:44:27
Let’s get started with the review hack for A.I.. The truth is that your five star reviews are invisible to AI unless you do this one thing. And the problem here is that A.I., the tools like Chat gb, t and other web crawlers really don’t play well with JavaScript, and this creates a problem where they can’t read your reviews on Google because it is being generated in JavaScript.
00:01:44:27 – 00:02:15:14
And the issue with this is that then your information and your reviews are not going to be necessarily tied to your business. You’re not going to be found with that information. When people are searching on GPT, Gemini or Claude, and you’re unable to really get the value for all of that hard work and time you’ve put in to building a solid review presence on Google.
00:02:15:17 – 00:02:44:00
The good news is that this is kind of an easy hack or it’s an easy thing to fix. And basically what we are attempting to do here is make sure that your presence, your reviews that are found on Google themselves or other review platforms are actually being found on your website as well, or being integrated into the information that’s being pulled about you into charge, CBT or the other providers.
00:02:44:00 – 00:03:22:08
And so a little bit more on the technical piece of this is that there’s essentially your website and elements like Google reviews are going to get crawled by these crawlers like from church or Google itself. And they’ve a really hard time with JavaScript. The reviews that are on Google are put there, they are in JavaScript. This creates this kind of wall where the crawlers can’t effectively get information from your website or the review platform itself, the Google business profile.
00:03:22:10 – 00:03:47:02
So you kind of have to come up with a workaround to make sure that this information is getting clearly in from your Google business profile and onto these review platforms, because as of right now, there is no solution for this. There’s no easy fix. It does not appear to be on the radar. It’s kind of a big challenge between these crawlers and the Google business profile as it stands.
00:03:47:02 – 00:04:12:20
So what do we do? Well, the good news is we are here with a solution that you can implement very, very quickly. And so if you’re a more tech forward person, you can actually go in and do this yourself. But the better route is probably to hand it off to your young cousin or somebody who can actually go in and do the technical side of this, because there is a little bit of nuance or just a little bit of technical knowledge needed to do this.
00:04:12:20 – 00:04:46:03
And so the solution is that we want to take your Google reviews from your Google business profile and slap them on your Web site. And the reason we want to do this, we want to basically all change that content that’s coming up in the form of JavaScript and actually put it into text. This is the type of content that crawlers can easily understand, and we’re going to do it even better because we’re not just going to put the text there, which they could pick up and you could say, you know, these are reviews.
00:04:46:06 – 00:05:06:11
They will more or less get the understanding for that, but we can actually put it in a format that’s going to make their lives easier by doing it with a review schema. And if you’re not familiar with schema, it’s basically like back in short code that you can put on your website for a variety of things like reviews or FAQs, different things like that.
00:05:06:18 – 00:05:31:17
And you’re basically giving crawlers like with Google or GTI or any others, a bit of a cheat code for what’s on that page. And so instead of them having to go through a lot of images and a lot of text to kind of get their own understanding of what the relationship chip is between things or is this review or what the structure of the information is.
00:05:31:20 – 00:05:57:21
You’re basically telling them that and they like that because all of their efforts using crawlers come at a cost. They have to pay for the machines that are out. They’re going to crawl on your website and so on. And so any time you can make that run a little bit better, a little bit smoother, you are helping them and they are going to give you a bit of an advantage compared to other websites who are not following this modern protocol.
00:05:57:23 – 00:06:39:08
And one last little hack that you can do to kind of double up on the value of this. So you’re created this page and it has a schema with your reviews. You can actually ask your clients to give location specific and practice area specific call outs in those reviews, because not only is that going to help on the Google business profile site, but also on these pages that you are or the page that you’re creating when it scans your website, they’re going to get this relational data that you are a personal injury attorney in Omaha and that is going to be a key piece of what they are looking at to form their responses and who they actually recommend it to potential clients.
00:06:43:08 – 00:07:12:01
Scammers are extorting law firms like yourself. And here’s the best way to fight back fast. So we’ve seen a disturbing trend that scammers are sending these review attacks where essentially they are sending a bunch of negative reviews to your Google business profile and then trying to extort you by going to a place and giving money.
00:07:12:01 – 00:07:42:25
And that way they can then retract the negative reviews that they have put up on your website. And I am infinite and intimately familiar with this because we had our first negative review attack about a month ago. And the way this looks is like one day randomly you’ll start to see a wave of these negative reviews come in and it’ll all be using nondescript generic names and the feedback will all be the same.
00:07:42:26 – 00:08:10:02
For us. It was like, I mean, this may be different for what you see in practice when it comes to you, but I’ll give you a little bit about my experience with this. We saw like 6 to 10 reviews come in and they were all basically the same thing. It basically just talked about how we’re a terrible company and, you know, we didn’t do a good job and very generically, didn’t really say anything specific.
00:08:10:05 – 00:08:35:05
And so at first it caused me a lot of anxiety. So this immediately, you know, you worked really hard. We certainly have to build a reputation and get, you know, a good list of reviews online. And so when I saw this, it’s like a punch in the gut. But then I saw it, too, and I saw the third one came in and it really hit home to me that, okay, there’s something funky going on here.
00:08:35:07 – 00:09:13:05
So to prevent this, there’s a couple of things you can do to prevent it that may not be the right word, but I would say to act quickly on this and be able to get these reviews, these negative reviews off without having to pay anybody any money or be extorted. So Google doesn’t always have a glowing reputation when it comes to support for their Google business profiles because there’ve been countless situations where we had a really difficult time getting changes made or different things like that.
00:09:13:05 – 00:09:34:04
But I will give them credit on this front that they had a very quick, effective process that allowed us to take these reviews and get them removed within a couple of days. So let’s break down what you should do to make sure that you’re in a good position if this happens to you, which obviously I hope it does not.
00:09:34:05 – 00:10:07:12
The first thing you want to do is make sure you are the owner of your Google business profile and you have your notification settings. This is good for a couple of things. Number one, you get immediate notification when you get a review. This is just good to have because when you get a review from someone that is actually positive or negative, you want to get in and respond to that review very, very quickly because that is going to help you show Google you are a responsive business will impact your overall Google business profile rankings.
00:10:07:15 – 00:10:31:16
But in this case, this gives you an immediate action you can take to see when something like this comes in. You’ll know if it’s a client or not unless you’re doing hundreds and hundreds of clients. But either way, you can easily get to the bottom of this and you want to immediately flag this to Google and you go in and you get a couple of options about why this is not a legitimate review.
00:10:31:18 – 00:10:55:16
There’s one option that is, you know, this person is not actually a customer, and that’s going to be that’s going to be your go to. Then you want to follow up with this because as I mentioned, Google doesn’t have a great track record of customer support when it comes to Google business profile. A lot of this, I suspect, is due to the fact they’re trying to automate as much of this as possible.
00:10:55:16 – 00:11:38:06
So all their interactions or appeals or things that you might be requesting are going to get filtered through an automation system. So I highly recommend that you or someone in your office follow this closely because you will actually be able to see when this gets taken down or when your appeal has been answered. And so you want to set a timetable up so that you do this and then check back in in five days or a week and usually in my experience with these, you will get them deleted pretty quickly, but they may go on and you may have to set up another ticket or do it again, because what we have learned going through
different types of issues with Google Business Profile is that when something is not being paid attention to, there’s really not a lot of harm in adding another ticket and kind of trying to get your ticket to the front of the line. Because, like I said, it’s our assumption that they are using a lot of automation. And so you want to try and get yourself to make it known that, you know, you are paying attention and whatever actions you can take to let them know, let them know that, then you’re going to be improving your case.
00:12:11:28 – 00:12:41:14
And I’ll add a link to the actual specific link that you can use to do this. And it explains a little bit more about the specific details that you would want to employ when going through one of these appeals. But I highly recommend doing this, doing it quickly and doing it with all of your negative reviews that are spam related, that are not actual native reviews.
00:12:41:16 – 00:13:03:04
For true negative reviews, we recommend a different process. We still recommend that even if it is a client and they give you a negative review, number one, try and get that review removed by going and correcting the issue or talking with the person who left that. That’s usually the best in easiest path to get that removed. Often they just want to be heard.
00:13:03:04 – 00:13:30:27
They want to they want you to deal with whatever issue they had. But if it’s impossible and you know, maybe they have no interest in removing it, it’s still good to get a response out there because again, Google is looking at the responsiveness. One other item I want to mention in this section is going to be a process for making sure that your positive reviews stay put and stay sticky on your Google business profile.
00:13:30:29 – 00:14:04:14
On the flipside of getting negative reviews is getting good reviews and having those disappear. This is a phenomenon we have seen with a number of our clients, and we’ve actually seen it with ourselves where you get a positive review and someone else potentially a competitor or whoever is maybe going in and saying, Hey, we think this is a fraudulent review, a an auto generated or spam generated review, that this review is not received properly.
00:14:04:14 – 00:14:29:25
And we know in the legal space that other marketing agencies and lawyers are out there trying to do that to other competitors in their area. So you have to be aware of this because again, going back to the point about Google, a lot of their support is going to be automated. And so they’re not it’s not like they have a person who’s empathetically reviewing this stuff.
00:14:29:28 – 00:14:49:16
And I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. If there are certain markers that fit their automated process, there’s a good chance this review is going to go away and you might not even know it. Right. And this has happened to us on a number of occasions, and then we have no real recourse to try and get that review back up.
00:14:49:16 – 00:15:12:25
So here’s what I would do is make a copy of all positive reviews. You get, put them in a spreadsheet, take a screenshot, and every couple of weeks just make sure or maybe once a month, go back and look and make sure all of your reviews are up, that your count is the same as you expected it to be.
00:15:12:28 – 00:15:42:26
And if something is missing, file a claim with Google. You can do this through the Google Business Profile dashboard. If you’re one of our clients, we would do that for you and be that person in your organization that you can rely on to follow up and really make sure that Google does what they’re supposed to do. But by doing this, you then have the ability to make a really good case to Google and say, Hey, this is a positive review, there’s nothing fraudulent about it.
00:15:42:28 – 00:15:58:26
And we have been able to get reviews restored for our clients and for ourselves. So it’s a small thing you can do that can have a really big impact when you’re fighting for reviews. And every single review can have a huge impact on your business.
00:15:58:26 – 00:16:06:15
For the final hack of today, we’re going to talk about something that is outside of the realm of what you might think of with local SEO for law firms.
00:16:06:15 – 00:16:39:29
It is a non Google business profile action. You can take that set you up really, really well for the coming change of people going in using air search predominantly for how they go and find lawyers. So this overlooked tool feeds straight into chat, gets results and can help you get an outsized amount of attention in the platform. So why are we talking about BING right? Bing is always the less well known sidekick or, you know, minority share holder of search compared to Google. And you know, for good reason, Google still controls 85% or more of the search ecosystem. But being has a very powerful kind of hidden weapon with what they have going on right now. And that really is their proximity to catch up.
00:17:10:13 – 00:17:40:11
They have a big deal between Microsoft and chat CBT for Bing data being search results to be feeding into chat chips and is some of the primary referential material that they are using to generate the results. It’s true. They also appear to be using Google search results, but they do not have a direct data pipeline like they do with Microsoft and as part of that Bing.
00:17:40:13 – 00:18:23:20
So Google Business Profile has a complimentary tool in being and that’s called being places. And being places actually just launched a kind of rebrand or a refresh of this with a new dashboard. And they are basically putting more features, more attention into it. And this can be a nice little asset in on top of your regular business profile work that you might be doing with your local SEO for law firms and there are some key benefits to doing this now and making it a strong piece of your local SEO toolkit.
00:18:23:20 – 00:18:52:09
The first one is that I believe local searches will continue to grow on Chargeability. And so what I’m talking about is people going on to search for best lawyer in my area, best personal injury lawyer, a lawyer with free consultation in Omaha, Nebraska, things like that. And this has historically been Google’s domain that when people want a lawyer, they get out their phone and they’re going to Google. They need a lawyer in this area, I need a lawyer near me, etc..
00:18:52:12 – 00:19:16:22
But I think with time people are getting more comfortable with chat, CBT and in the end, let’s be real. People are lazy and if they can get GPT to give them a prescreened or pre-created answer as opposed to even this, you know, small action of going through and trying to find a lawyer out of five results or something like that.
00:19:16:24 – 00:19:39:17
There’s no question in my mind that this is going to be the preference of the average American that they can go and type one thing and it actually does the background research for that and even gives them a reason why this is going to be the best lawyer for you, then that’s what’s going to happen for sure. May not come tomorrow, maybe not this year.
00:19:39:17 – 00:20:01:02
But in the end, I do believe this will happen and this will be the way that tools like ChatGPT which I’m talking about a lot, because it has the most market share of the AI search tools that are out there. So we want to kind of go where the most people are going to try and optimize your presence as a as a law firm.
00:20:01:05 – 00:20:30:19
So I feel as though optimizing for being places and optimizing for the contributing resources or references that are going into GPT results like Bing placements or like Bing Search results is a great investment in the future because as these local searches continue to happen, more and more people are using this tool more and more than you are already ahead of everybody else who hasn’t paid attention to this.
00:20:30:26 – 00:20:56:13
And you are going to be in a prime position because you are satisfying the technological needs of the GPT when it’s going out and looking for the data it needs to try and come up with an answer of who is the best lawyer in the area. They’re going to lean on things like reviews are on Bing and on in the data that comes with you. Putting your information into that, that Bing placement which creates that local data pipeline for you.
00:21:02:29 – 00:21:31:17
The good news about everything I share today is that it’s quick. You can get these things implemented in your firm very, very quickly and really have a low effort, high value kind of return on time investment for any of these. And of course, if you are looking for someone to do all of this for you and live in the the docs, the at Google and be on the lookout protecting your reputation online.
00:21:31:17 – 00:21:55:23
We would absolutely love to do that. You can check us out at go constellation dot com but I want to send you a very hearty thank you for listening to the optimize law firm podcast and if you got any value at all or any of these hacks seem like they will help your business, please share them with other attorneys and don’t forget to subscribe like the episode.
00:21:55:23 – 00:22:11:11
It really does help us understand if what we’re talking about resonates with you and helps other law firm owners who may be in the same boat get the same information, just come to the show. So thank you so much for your time and good luck with your business.
