Google Business Profile for solicitors: one office, one profile, set up to rank

A law firm's Google Business Profile is a storefront profile, one per office, with the pin on the door clients walk through. Get the categories right for the practice areas you want, list the services with the fees the Transparency Rules already make you publish, add photographs of the office and the people, and run a review routine at the end of matters, and the profile does most of the work of getting each office into the map pack. Here is the set-up, in the order it matters.

1. One profile per office, pin on the right door

Google treats each address as a business. One profile for three offices leaves two invisible on the map and gives the third the wrong hours. Each office gets its own profile, its own people, its own photographs and its own reviews. The pin sits on the entrance clients use, with the floor or suite in the address line where the building is shared; we check it on Street View, because a pin two doors down loses trust and clients.

2. Primary category, then the true additional ones

The primary category is the strongest single factor. "Law firm" is the safe default; a specialist office may do better with the specialism. Then add every additional category that is true from Google's list: the names are American (family law attorney, estate planning attorney, real estate attorney, employment attorney), but each is a set of searches you can appear in. Do not add ones the office does not do; the reviews and the pages have to back the categories up.

3. Services, with the fees you already publish

Google's predefined services list moved up the ranking-factor surveys sharply this year, and few firms fill it in. Tick the practice areas, add your own in plain words (residential conveyancing, wills, lasting powers of attorney, probate, divorce), and add the from-fees or fixed fees the Transparency Rules already require you to publish for the regulated services. The same figure in both places is consistency; a different figure is a complaint waiting to happen.

4. Photographs of the office and the people, not the logo

Ten photographs of the reception, the meeting rooms, the building from the street and the people who work there outrank a logo. Clients want to see where they will sit and who they will meet. Commission them once, add a few each quarter, and retire the stock images.

5. Description, hours, telephone, appointment link, website link

A description in plain words: the practice areas, the towns, how long the firm has been there, what it is known for. Hours that reflect when the telephone is answered. The office's own number. An appointment link if you book online. The website link pointing at the office page, tagged so Search Console shows what the profile sends; a homepage listing twelve services is weaker evidence than an office page with the people who sit there.

6. Questions and answers, seeded by the firm

The profile has a public Q&A that anyone can post to. Seed it with the questions reception is asked: is there parking, do you do legal aid, can I come in without an appointment, do you do home visits. Answer them yourselves. Empty, it fills with strangers' questions or nothing.

7. Reviews: the routine, not the burst

One review invited at the end of every matter, with the work and the office in it, replied to within a day. No incentives, no selecting, no staff accounts. A steady flow of a few a month per office is what moves the map; a burst of twenty after a partners' meeting gets some removed and looks like what it is.

8. Keep it right

Google changes the categories and the services list, competitors add keywords to their names, a fee earner leaves and the photographs go stale. Once a quarter: categories and services re-checked, hours and holiday closures corrected, new photographs, spam profiles in the town reported, and the directory entries checked against the profile. That is the upkeep part of the retainer; the one-off build is the same work done once, per office.