What happens month by month in your first year of law firm SEO? Months 1-3 are technical foundation: site audit, Core Web Vitals fixes, schema markup, Google Business Profile setup, citation building, and initial practice area pages. Nothing ranks yet. Months 3-6 produce impressions and long-tail keyword movement (page 5 to page 3) but no phone calls. Months 6-9 shift traffic from informational queries to commercial intent, rankings move onto page one for secondary terms, and leads begin arriving. Months 9-12 are where the domain’s established authority makes new content rank in weeks instead of months, cost per lead drops, and the investment starts compounding. Most firms quit between months four and eight because the progress is invisible to anyone not reading Search Console data.
Here’s what actually happens each month, stripped of the agency language that makes every phase sound productive and every metric sound encouraging, because what partners need isn’t optimism, it’s a calendar that tells them when to expect what and what “on track” looks like when the phone hasn’t rung yet.
I’ve onboarded enough firms at this point to know that the gap between what partners expect at month three and what actually happens at month three is the reason more than half of firms quit strategies that were progressing exactly the way they should, and the only fix for that gap is setting expectations before the invoices start arriving rather than explaining it after the partner meeting goes sideways.
Month One Is Mostly Breaking Things Apart Before Anything Gets Built
What happens in month one of law firm SEO? The agency runs a technical audit of the site to identify broken links, slow page speeds, mobile rendering issues, and crawl errors. Core Web Vitals, specifically Interaction to Next Paint and Largest Contentful Paint, are addressed because Google suppresses sites that fail these thresholds regardless of content quality. The site architecture is restructured so every page is reachable within three clicks of the homepage. Schema markup (LegalService, Attorney, LocalBusiness) is added to help search engines categorize the firm by practice area and location. The Google Business Profile is claimed, verified, and populated with the correct primary category, geotagged photos, and Q&A entries.
Month one is ugly and nobody celebrates any of it. Your agency is running crawls to find broken links and 404 errors and mixed content issues, restructuring the site so pages aren’t buried six clicks deep, and fixing load speed problems that make the site feel slow on mobile, and none of that shows up on any chart or graph that a partner would recognize as progress.
Schema markup goes in during this phase, and what that means in plain English is that code gets added to the back of the site telling search engines “this is a law firm, these are the attorneys, these practice areas are what they handle, this is where they’re located,” and without that code the search engine has to guess what the site is about instead of being told directly, which slows down the categorization process by weeks.
Your Google Business Profile matters more during this phase than the website itself for local visibility. Getting the primary category right (selecting “Personal Injury Attorney” instead of the generic “Lawyer”), uploading real photos of the actual office, and populating the Q&A section with questions potential clients ask are all things that affect map pack rankings within weeks rather than the months it takes for the website to start moving.
Around Week Fourteen Something Shows Up in Search Console That Nobody Outside the Agency Notices
What happens in months 3-6 of law firm SEO? Long-tail keywords begin appearing in Google Search Console, typically ranking in positions 20-50. Main keywords like “personal injury lawyer [city]” are still on page 4 or 5. Impressions rise steadily while clicks remain flat because users rarely scroll past page two. Content production scales to build topical authority, and each new page is internally linked to related practice area pages to distribute authority across the site. Link building begins in earnest through directory submissions, local sponsorships, journalist quotes, and community partnerships. This is the highest-risk phase for attrition because the data shows progress that is invisible to anyone who doesn’t read Search Console reports.
Around week fourteen something shows up in Search Console that the agency gets excited about and nobody else cares about, which is that long-tail phrases like “what to do after a car accident in [county]” are appearing in the impressions report at positions 30 or 40, meaning Google is testing your pages in the results but so far back that no human being is scrolling deep enough to see them.
This is the phase where firms fire their agency because the invoices keep arriving and the phone doesn’t ring and the monthly report shows “keyword movement” and “impression growth” which sound like excuses when what you’re paying for is cases. But impressions tripling from 500 to 1,500 while rankings move from position 45 to position 22 is the SEO equivalent of a case moving from discovery to depositions, it’s progress that doesn’t look like progress until you understand the sequence.
Link building has to start during this phase or the next one stalls. Directory submissions, a local charity sponsorship that earns a link from the organization’s site, responding to journalist requests through platforms that connect lawyers with reporters, all of it sends authority signals to the domain that the technical fixes and content alone can’t provide. Without links coming in between months three and six, the content sits on a domain that Google considers technically sound but not yet endorsed by anyone else.
Between Month Six and Month Nine the People Calling Your Office Change
What happens in months 6-9 of law firm SEO? Traffic shifts from informational queries (“what is a tort”) to commercial intent queries (“car accident lawyer near me”). Rankings for secondary keywords move onto page one. The phone starts ringing with potential clients rather than people looking for free information. Google Maps rankings, which lag behind organic rankings by 2-4 months, begin materializing if review velocity has been consistent since month one. The priority shifts from producing more content to optimizing conversion rates on the content that’s already ranking: testing landing page layouts, placing phone numbers prominently, ensuring mobile click-to-call works, and reducing form fields.
Between month six and month nine the composition of your traffic changes in a way that matters more than the volume does. Before this phase, most visitors arrived through informational searches where they wanted an answer to a legal question and had no intention of hiring anyone. After this phase, the search terms driving traffic shift toward people who are ready to hire and are comparing their options, and that shift is when the investment starts converting to actual consultations.
By month nine you’ll notice something confusing in the data: impressions climbing fast but clicks not keeping pace with them, and that’s because Google’s AI Overviews are answering simple questions directly on the search results page so the user never needs to visit your site. Content that just defines a term or explains a basic process is losing its traffic value, while content that describes strategy, experience, or specific case outcomes retains its value because AI can’t authentically replicate “I’ve handled 200 of these cases and here’s what I’ve seen.”
Conversion optimization replaces content production as the priority during this phase because a site getting 500 visits and producing 5 leads has a conversion problem, not a traffic problem. Testing whether a phone number at the top of the page performs better than a contact form, whether “Free Consultation” converts better than “Schedule a Call,” and whether shorter intake forms produce more completions than detailed ones are the decisions that determine how much revenue the existing traffic actually generates.
At Month Twelve a New Blog Post Ranks in Weeks Instead of the Months It Took in January
What happens after 12 months of law firm SEO? The domain’s established authority means new content ranks significantly faster than it did in month one. A blog post that would have taken 6-8 months to reach its peak ranking now reaches it in 2-3 weeks because Google already trusts the site. Cost per lead drops because organic traffic increases while the retainer stays fixed. Review velocity from 12 months of consistent generation cements the firm’s map pack position. The firm can either scale into adjacent practice areas or neighboring geographies using the established domain as a launch pad, or shift to maintenance mode (1-2 quality posts per month) while focusing on case work. Year one spend ranges from $12,000-$25,000 for budget-conscious firms to $60,000-$120,000 for aggressive growth, and the financial math inverts in year two as cost per lead continues dropping against a fixed or slowly increasing retainer.
At twelve months, a new blog post published on Monday shows up in the top twenty positions by the end of the following week, and that’s a completely different experience from month three when the same quality post would sit at position 60 for four months before moving. The domain has earned enough authority that the search engine gives new content the benefit of the doubt instead of making it prove itself from scratch every time.
The financial math inverts here in a way that makes the first twelve months of spending make sense retroactively. Your retainer is still $5,000 or $7,000 a month, but the organic leads that cost $800 each during the growth phase now cost $300 because the volume tripled while the spend stayed flat, and a competitor entering the market now has to survive their own twelve-month foundation period to reach where you already are.
Whether to scale or maintain depends on what the firm needs. A firm trying to expand into adjacent practice areas or neighboring cities can use the established domain as a launch pad where the new content benefits from the trust the site already built. A smaller firm happy with its current caseload can shift to one or two quality posts per month and focus on case work, and the local authority protects them from new entrants without requiring the same intensity that the first year demanded.
Publishing Fifty AI Pages in Month Two Feels Like Progress and It’s the Worst Decision You Can Make
Does publishing a lot of content early speed up law firm SEO? No. Google’s spam detection in 2026 is highly sensitive to volume without quality, and a firm that publishes 50-100 AI-generated pages in the first two months can trigger low-quality signals that extend the suppression period rather than shortening it. Content that mentions specific local details, like the county courthouse, local judges, neighborhood landmarks, or jurisdiction-specific court procedures, signals genuine human experience that generic content cannot replicate. Google categorizes law firm sites as “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL), which means the trust verification process is more rigorous than standard websites and cannot be shortcut with volume.
Publishing fifty AI-written pages in month two feels productive and it is the single worst decision a new law firm site can make in 2026. Google’s spam filters are specifically calibrated to detect “AI-generated scale without information gain,” which means a hundred pages that all sound the same and contain no detail that couldn’t have been written by someone who’s never practiced law in your state will extend the suppression period rather than shorten it.
Content that mentions your specific county courthouse by name, references the local judges who handle your practice area, or explains the procedural quirks of your jurisdiction tells the algorithm something that generic content can’t: this was written by someone who actually works here. Google classifies law firm sites as “Your Money or Your Life” content, meaning the trust verification is more rigorous and the penalty for faking local expertise is suppression that can last months longer than if you’d published ten genuine pages instead of fifty empty ones.
Want to know which month you’re actually in?
Send me your Search Console data and I’ll tell you whether your metrics match the phase you should be in. If you’re at month six and your impressions haven’t grown, something went wrong in the foundation. If you’re at month three and your partner is asking where the leads are, I’ll put together the benchmarks that show what “on track” looks like before the phone starts ringing.
