The problem isn’t your strategy. It’s the technical foundation nobody’s checking. Hidden technical issues are quietly destroying your rankings while you focus on content and links.
Most law firms don’t discover these problems until they’ve already lost months of potential cases. Let’s find them before that happens.
Crawl Budget Waste on Worthless Pages
Google doesn’t crawl every page on your site every day. It allocates a crawl budget based on your site’s size, authority, and update frequency. When Google wastes that budget on junk pages, it doesn’t crawl your important content.
Law firm sites are notorious for this. Your site might have hundreds of auto-generated tag pages, archive pages from old blog software, or parameter URLs from filtering systems. Every one of those pages eats crawl budget that should go to your practice area pages.
Check your server logs or Google Search Console’s crawl stats. If Google’s crawling 1,000 pages but you only have 50 important ones, you’ve got a problem.
The fix: Use robots.txt to block crawling of admin pages, search result pages, and thank-you pages. Implement canonical tags on duplicate content. Delete or noindex thin pages that don’t serve clients. Make Google focus on what matters.
JavaScript Rendering Issues
Modern websites use JavaScript heavily. Contact forms, chat widgets, interactive elements. But Google doesn’t always render JavaScript the way your browser does.
If critical content or links only appear after JavaScript loads, Google might not see them at all. Your navigation menu could be invisible to search engines. Your practice area links might not exist as far as Google knows.
Test this with Google’s URL Inspection Tool. Submit a page and compare the rendered HTML to what you see in your browser. If they don’t match, Google isn’t seeing your full page.
The fix: Use server-side rendering for critical content and navigation. Don’t hide important text or links behind JavaScript that might not execute. Test every major template in your site with the URL Inspection Tool.
Broken Internal Link Architecture
Your internal linking structure tells Google what’s important on your site. When that structure is broken, Google can’t figure out your hierarchy.
Common problems: orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them. Pages buried six clicks deep that should be two clicks from the homepage. Practice area pages with weak internal linking while random blog posts get dozens of links.
Your most important pages should be closest to your homepage in click depth. Personal injury page? One click. Bankruptcy services? One click. That blog post from 2019 about a minor legal update? Fine if it’s buried.
The fix: Audit your internal link structure. Use a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to identify orphan pages and calculate click depth. Build strategic internal links from your highest-authority pages to your most important practice area pages. Every new blog post should link to relevant service pages.
Core Web Vitals Failures
Google explicitly uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. These metrics measure real user experience: loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for your main content to load. Google wants this under 2.5 seconds. Most law firm sites fail this because of huge hero images, unoptimized photos, or slow servers.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness throughout the entire page lifecycle. Google wants this under 200ms. Heavy JavaScript from chat widgets, tracking scripts, and form builders often causes failures here. INP replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. If elements jump around while the page loads, you fail. Common culprits: images without dimensions, ads that push content down, or fonts that load late and change text size.
Check your scores in Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report or PageSpeed Insights.
The fix: Compress and resize images. Use a content delivery network. Lazy load images below the fold. Set explicit dimensions for images and embeds. Preload critical fonts. Remove unnecessary JavaScript. Switch to a faster hosting provider if needed.
Duplicate Content Across Multiple Domains
You have www.yourfirm.com and yourfirm.com. Both versions work. Google sees them as separate sites with identical content. That’s duplicate content, and it dilutes your authority.
Same problem if you’ve got HTTP and HTTPS versions both accessible. Or if you’ve got multiple practice area pages with nearly identical content for different cities. Or if your site generates printer-friendly versions of every page that Google can crawl.
The fix: Pick one primary version of your domain (typically HTTPS with www) and 301 redirect everything else to it. Implement proper canonical tags on near-duplicate pages. Use parameter handling in Google Search Console for URL parameters that don’t change content.
Missing or Broken Schema Markup
Schema markup tells Google exactly what your content represents. For law firms, this is critical. Without proper schema, Google can’t show your star ratings in search results. Can’t display your practice areas. Can’t understand your service area.
Many sites have schema markup that’s broken or incomplete. Missing required fields. Wrong property types. Nested incorrectly. Google just ignores it.
Test your markup with Google’s Rich Results Test. Fix any errors before worrying about warnings.
The fix: Implement LocalBusiness schema with complete NAP data. Add Attorney schema with your bar admissions and credentials. Use FAQPage schema for question content. Test everything to ensure it validates.
Mobile Usability Problems
Google uses mobile-first indexing. It ranks your site based on the mobile version, not desktop. If your mobile site has problems, your rankings suffer even for desktop searches.
Common issues: text too small to read without zooming. Links too close together to tap accurately. Content wider than the screen requiring horizontal scrolling. Pop-ups that can’t be closed on mobile. Forms that are miserable to fill out on a phone.
Check Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report for specific issues Google has detected.
The fix: Use responsive design that adapts to screen sizes. Make tap targets at least 48 pixels. Use legible font sizes. Test your site on actual phones, not just responsive design mode in Chrome. Make forms mobile-friendly with appropriate input types and autofill attributes.
Slow Server Response Times
Your server takes three seconds to start sending data. Even if your page then loads quickly, you’ve already lost. Server response time (Time to First Byte) should be under 600 milliseconds. Ideally under 200ms.
Cheap shared hosting often causes this. So does poorly optimized WordPress with 40 plugins. Or database queries that aren’t indexed properly. Or server-side processing that’s inefficient.
The fix: Upgrade to better hosting. Law firm sites should be on managed WordPress hosting or VPS at minimum. Implement caching properly. Optimize database queries. Remove unnecessary plugins. Use a CDN to serve static assets.
Redirect Chains and Loops
Page A redirects to Page B, which redirects to Page C, which redirects to Page D. That’s a redirect chain. Google follows it, but you’ve wasted time and lost link equity with every hop.
Worse is redirect loops. Page A redirects to Page B, which redirects back to Page A. Google gives up. The page effectively doesn’t exist.
These usually happen after site migrations, domain changes, or when multiple people manage redirects without coordination.
The fix: Audit all redirects with Screaming Frog or your preferred crawler. Any redirect chain should point directly to the final destination. Fix loops immediately. Never redirect to another redirect.
Broken Structured Data
You implemented schema markup six months ago. It worked fine. Then your developer changed something and broke it. Or your CMS updated and the plugin that generated schema stopped working. Or someone edited a template and accidentally deleted the structured data.
Nobody noticed because the site looks fine to humans. But Google’s not seeing your schema anymore. Your star ratings vanished from search results. Your practice areas aren’t displaying properly. Your local pack listing is worse.
The fix: Regularly test your key pages with Google’s Rich Results Test. Set up monitoring to alert you if structured data breaks. Document what schema you’ve implemented so changes don’t break it accidentally.
XML Sitemap Issues
Your sitemap includes 5,000 URLs but you only have 200 pages. It’s full of redirected URLs, blocked pages, or dynamically generated junk. Google crawls all those URLs, finds problems, and trusts your site less.
Or your sitemap hasn’t been updated in two years. Your newest practice area pages aren’t in it. Google eventually finds them through other means, but much more slowly.
The fix: Generate a clean XML sitemap with only indexable, canonical URLs. Update it automatically when content changes. Submit it to Google Search Console. Monitor the coverage report for errors.
The Technical Foundation of Rankings
Content and links get attention because they’re visible. But law firm SEO rankings depend on technical health. The best content in the world won’t rank if Google can’t crawl it properly, your site loads slowly, or your mobile experience is broken.
Most law firms check technical SEO once during a site launch and never again. That’s a mistake. Technical issues accumulate. CMS updates break things. Plugins conflict. Hosting degrades. You need regular technical audits to catch problems before they cost you rankings.
Start with the issues above. Run your site through Google Search Console and fix every error it shows. Check Core Web Vitals and get all metrics in the green. Test a few key pages with URL Inspection to ensure Google sees them properly.
Technical SEO isn’t glamorous. But it’s the difference between page one and page two. Between 100 leads per month and 20. Fix the technical foundation, and everything else you’re doing works better.
