Audit Local SEO for Legal Services

Local Legal SEO Audit is a skill scoped specifically to legal and professional services sites - law firms, attorneys, forensic experts, legal consultants - where trust signals, local authority, E-E-A-T, and directory presence are the primary ranking levers rather than generic technical SEO. It opens with an initial-assessment phase gathering practice area, firm size, single vs. multi-location, current Google local pack visibility, existing Google Business Profile and directory listings, and the client's goals (calls, form fills, ranking for specific case types, or building expert-witness authority).

Its audit framework is prioritized specifically for legal/forensic sites: Google Business Profile and local pack first (highest impact for local queries), then E-E-A-T and trust signals (legal sites fall under Google's YMYL - Your Money or Your Life - classification, so these are heavily weighted), then on-page optimization, technical foundations, directory/citation consistency, content strategy, and reviews/reputation last. The GBP audit checks profile completeness (exact name match, correct primary/secondary categories, service area, hours, Q&A), photos, review count/rating/response rate versus competitors, and posting cadence. The E-E-A-T audit is broken into the four components: Experience (documented case history, expert-witness court appearances), Expertise (bar registration number, academic credentials, publications), Authoritativeness (external citations, directory listings, media mentions), and Trustworthiness (verifiable address, HTTPS, no outcome-guarantee claims, legal disclaimers).

On-page checks cover dedicated practice-area pages (one per specialty, primary keyword in title/H1/URL, LegalService schema), location pages for multi-city firms (unique content per city, embedded map, consistent NAP, no copy-paste duplication), homepage trust signals above the fold, and a legal-specific title tag format ([Service] em [City] | [Firm Name]). Technical checks focus on mobile click-to-call prominence, Core Web Vitals thresholds (LCP < 2.5s, CLS < 0.1, INP < 200ms), crawlability, and clean URL structure. The directory/citation audit lists core legal directories for Brazil (OAB, Jusbrasil, Escavador, ORCID) and internationally (Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, Martindale-Hubbell), plus general citation sources, checked for NAP consistency and duplicate-listing cleanup. Content strategy covers FAQ pages targeting long-tail question queries with FAQ schema, practice-area topic-cluster blog articles with credentialed author bylines, and forensic-expert-specific content (case-type explainers, expert-witness process descriptions, published-research summaries).

Output format:
Executive Summary -> GBP Findings -> E-E-A-T & Trust Findings -> On-Page Findings ->
Technical Findings -> Directory & Citation Findings -> Prioritized Action Plan
(Critical / High impact / Quick wins / Long-term)

Each finding is reported as Issue / Impact (High/Medium/Low) / Fix, rolling up into a prioritized action plan from critical blockers (missing GBP, no HTTPS, no practice-area pages) through long-term content and link-building work.

Use this skill when auditing or improving local SEO for a law firm, attorney, forensic expert, or similar legal/professional services website, or when the goal is visibility in Google's local pack, legal directories, or local organic results for specific practice areas or cities.

Do not use it for a general SEO health check outside the legal/local context (use seo-audit instead), or for investigating a sudden traffic or rankings crash (use seo-forensic-incident-response instead).

Inputs: the firm's practice area, location(s), current GBP and directory presence, review count and competitors, and existing site structure (practice-area and location pages).

Outputs: a structured audit report (Executive Summary, GBP/E-E-A-T/On-Page/Technical/Directory findings each with Issue/Impact/Fix, and a prioritized action plan from critical to long-term).

Hands off to schema-markup for LegalService/Attorney/FAQ structured data, seo-audit for general non-legal SEO checks, seo-forensic-incident-response for ranking-drop investigations, ai-seo for AI-search and featured-snippet optimization, and page-cro for conversion-rate work on practice-area and contact pages.

SEO practitioners and legal marketers auditing or improving local search visibility for law firms, attorneys, and forensic experts.