Law Firm Marketing Audit Checklist: What to Check in 30 Minutes

In short: a law firm marketing audit checklist covers five things a potential client sees before they call: your Google Business Profile and reviews, where you show up in search, your website, your directory listings and, if you run them, your ads. You can check all five from your phone in about 30 minutes. Start with your Google profile and reviews. If you only have five minutes, that's the check that matters most.

What is a law firm marketing audit?

A law firm marketing audit is a structured look at everything a potential client sees on the way to calling you, and where they drop out. It isn't a report on clicks and impressions. It answers one question: when someone in your city needs your kind of lawyer, do they find you, trust you and reach you?

When we audit a firm, we score five areas, 20 points each, and every point has to come from something anyone can check on the public web. This checklist follows the same five areas, so you can run a version of it yourself. Here's how to spend the 30 minutes:

The website gets the most time because it's where we find problems most often.

If you only have 5 minutes, what should you check first?

Check your Google Business Profile, your reviews and whether you reply to every review. Before most people visit a firm's website, they've already seen its Google profile in the map results, and they've already formed an opinion from its rating, its recent reviews and how the firm responds.

Search your firm's name and city on your phone, and look at:

• Is the profile complete and accurate? Hours, phone number, website, categories and services should all be right. The mistake we see isn't an empty profile. It's a profile set up once and never updated.
• How recent is your newest review? A firm whose last review is from last year looks quieter than it is, whatever its rating.
• Have you replied to every review? That includes the good ones, and especially the bad ones. A calm, professional reply to a negative review often tells a reader more than the review does. Google recommends replying to reviews (Google Business Profile Help, 2026). Keep replies free of anything confidential: the ABA's ethics opinion on responding to online criticism says lawyers can't reveal client information in a public reply (ABA Formal Opinion 496, 2021).
• Do you have a way to ask for reviews? If happy clients only leave reviews when they think of it themselves, you'll always have fewer than you should. Google lets you create a link to request reviews and doesn't allow incentives for them.

Your Google profile and reviews also feed other channels. They affect how Local Services Ads rank, and what AI tools say when someone asks them to recommend a lawyer.

Does your firm show up when people search for your practice area?

Find out by searching the way a client would: your main practice area plus your city, on your phone. Try "divorce lawyer [your city]" or "immigration attorney [your city]", not your firm's name.

Check three places on the results page:

1. The map results. Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence includes your reviews and how well known the firm is (Google Business Profile Help, 2026). Note whether you appear and where.
2. The regular results below the map. Some firms are strong in the map and missing below it, or the other way round.
3. Your other practice areas. If you handle family law and criminal defense, search both. Firms often show up for one and not the other.

Then search your firm's name on its own. Your Google profile should appear. If it doesn't, people looking for you by name may be finding someone else.

Our audit goes further here. We check your position for each practice area you offer, and what Google's AI answers say when someone asks for the best lawyers of your type in your city. That's the part of search changing fastest, and it's hard to check fairly on your own, because Google tailors results to whoever is searching.

Does your website turn visitors into calls?

This is the most common problem we find: websites that don't convert. The site gets visitors, but they don't call or fill in a form. Usually it isn't one big flaw. It's a series of small obstacles between landing on the page and making contact.

Spend 10 minutes on your own site, on your phone, and check:

Then do the test that matters most: submit your own contact form after hours and time how long the reply takes. If you can't answer a new lead right away, respond within 3 minutes. A lead that waits goes cold.

Why your law firm website is leaking leads goes through each of these leaks and how to fix them. Most can be fixed without a rebuild. When a rebuild is the right call, our approach to law firm websites explains how we decide.

Is your firm's information the same everywhere?

It should be. Your firm's name, address and phone number should match across your website, your Google profile and every legal directory you're listed on. Mismatches confuse clients and make it harder for Google and AI tools to be sure which listing is really yours.

In five minutes, search your name and your firm's name with "lawyer" and your city, and open the directory profiles that come up. Check:

• Is the information the same as on your website? Watch for old addresses, old phone numbers and different versions of the firm name.
• Is the profile under your name or the firm's? Many legal directories list the attorney, not the firm, so a profile can exist without you knowing.
• Does any directory show client reviews? Reviews on a second site help people who check you somewhere other than Google.

Is your ad budget going to the right people?

If you run Google Ads, two checks take five minutes and catch the most waste.

First, open the search terms report, which shows the actual searches that triggered your ads (Google, 2026). Look for searches you'd never want to pay for: competitors' names, "free", "jobs", "pro bono" and practice areas you don't handle. If you see many of them, your keywords are probably set to broad match. With broad match, ads can show for searches that are only loosely related; exact match keeps them to searches with the same meaning (Google, 2026).

Second, check when your ads run. Ads running at odd hours, when nobody can answer the phone, are one of the most common things we find in Google Ads accounts. Google lets you set an ad schedule so ads only run when it makes sense (Google, 2026).

While you're in the account, click a few of your own ads. Each one should land on the page for that practice area, not your home page.

This is what an audit found for one firm. Its account was running on broad match. Switching to exact match saved 80% of the budget from being wasted. The firm didn't need a bigger budget. It needed the money it was already spending to reach the right people. How we run Google Search Ads covers the setup.

What can't a self-check show you?

A self-check shows you what a potential client sees. It can't show you where cases leak.

Between someone searching and someone signing, there are many places a case can slip away: an ad shown for the wrong search, a call that came in after hours, a form nobody followed up on, a lead who called twice and never got through. You can't see those from the outside. You see them by looking at the ad accounts, the call tracking and which leads actually became clients.

That's why our work starts with Strategy. We don't start over. We start with what's working: we go through everything you've already done, find what's bringing in cases and show you where they're slipping away. We don't run intake; your team signs the cases. Our job is to show you where the leaks are and fix the marketing around them. The Frankfurt Law case study shows what that looked like for a family law and criminal defense firm in Dallas: a 300% increase in qualified online leads and a 4x decrease in wasted marketing spend.

Want the full audit, scored?

This checklist covers the basics. Our free law firm marketing audit goes further:

• your firm scored out of 100 across the five areas;
• your position in the map for each of your practice areas;
• what AI search says about lawyers like you in your city;
• the major legal directories, checked under both your name and your firm's;
• the three things that stand out most.

Enter your website and the report arrives as a PDF within 24 hours. No logins, and no access to your accounts needed.