Memorandum
- To
- Harlan & Pike, Attorneys at Law (a fictional firm), Tessamer, a county seat of about 31,000
- From
- The Law Firm SEO Agency
- Date
- October 2026 (example)
- Re
- Where the firm shows up on Google for the cases it wants, who shows up above it, and the first three fixes
Question presented
The firm told us it wants more car and truck accident cases from Tessamer and the two neighboring counties, more divorce and custody work in Tessamer County, and that it gets most of its cases now from referrals and a television spot. When a person in Tessamer searches for an injury lawyer or a divorce lawyer, does Harlan & Pike appear, and if not, what stands in the way?
Brief answer
Not counting a search for its own name, the firm appears in the map pack for two of the ten searches we checked and on page one for four. It is absent for the truck accident searches it wants most, where it has no page, and for both family law searches, where its only mention of family law is one line on the home page. The Google Business Profile lists the firm as a "Law firm", carries 14 reviews with none in the past seven months, and shows hours that say the office is closed on Fridays, which the firm tells us is wrong. A second profile for Mr. Harlan uses a phone number that rings to his old office. Third-party estimates put the firm's website at 190 ranked searches in October 2026 against 310 in October 2021, a drop of 39%. All three of the first fixes are to the profile and can be made within two weeks.
Searches checked
Each search run from a desktop browser with the location set to Tessamer, October 2026. "Map" is the firm's place in the map pack, "web" its place among the organic web results below the map. "Above" describes who held the higher spots, by kind; the firm names are in the attachment the firm receives.
| Search | Map | Web | AI Overview | Above the firm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| personal injury lawyer tessamer | 2nd of 3 | 4th | yes | Map: one local firm. Web: Justia, Super Lawyers, one local firm |
| car accident lawyer tessamer | 3rd of 3 | 6th | no | Map: two local firms. Web: Justia, Super Lawyers, three local firms |
| car accident attorney tessamer | not shown | 8th | no | Map: three local firms. Web: two directories, five local firms |
| truck accident lawyer tessamer | not shown | not on page one | no | Map: three local firms, one with a truck accident page. Web: two directories, a regional advertising firm's Tessamer page, four local firms |
| personal injury attorney near me (from Tessamer) | not shown | 9th | yes | Map: three local firms. Web: two directories, six local firms |
| wrongful death lawyer tessamer | not shown | not on page one | yes | Map: two local firms, one from the next county. Web: two directories, a regional advertising firm, five local firms |
| divorce lawyer tessamer | not shown | not on page one | no | Map: three local firms, two of them family law firms. Web: two directories, seven local firms |
| child custody lawyer tessamer | not shown | not on page one | yes | Map: three local firms. Web: two directories, seven local firms |
| injury lawyer [neighboring county seat] | not shown | not on page one | no | Map: three firms in that town. Web: two directories, seven firms, none from Tessamer |
| harlan and pike reviews | 1st (own profile) | 1st | no | Nothing; the firm's own profile and site, then two directory listings for the firm |
| Example figures. In a real memo each row links to a dated screenshot. | ||||
Two things stand out in the table. The firm is competing for seven web spots in each search, because the two directories hold the same two places every time, which matches our October snapshot of 14 towns, where directories held two or three of the nine. And the searches the firm wants most are the ones where it has nothing to rank: no truck page, no wrongful death page, no divorce or custody page, and no page about the neighboring county at all.
Findings: the Google Business Profile
Category and services
The primary category is "Law firm". The three firms in the map for "car accident lawyer tessamer" all use "Personal injury attorney" as the primary category. Google's local ranking help says relevance is how well the profile matches what someone searches for. In our reading the category is the largest part of that. The services list names "Personal injury" and "Family law" and nothing more specific, so divorce, custody and each kind of injury case are missing.
Fix: set the primary category to Personal injury attorney, add Family law attorney and Divorce lawyer as secondary categories, and list each case type the firm wants (car accidents, truck accidents, wrongful death, divorce, child custody) as a separate service with a one-sentence description an attorney approves.
Hours, address and the second profile
Hours show Monday to Thursday, 9 to 5, closed Friday. The firm is open Friday until noon. The address matches the sign and the website. A second profile, "John Harlan, Attorney", exists with the firm's address and a phone number that rings to Mr. Harlan's previous office; it has 2 reviews and no photos. Google's guidelines allow a profile for each practitioner at a multi-lawyer office, titled with the practitioner's own name, as long as it is the practitioner's real contact information.
Fix: correct Friday hours; on Mr. Harlan's profile, change the phone to the firm's main line and add Mr. Pike's profile under his own name so the two practitioners and the firm each have one. Do not delete Mr. Harlan's profile; it carries two reviews and a history.
Reviews
14 reviews, 4.7 average, most recent seven months ago. None has a reply. The top three firms in the map have 86, 61 and 44 reviews, all with recent ones. In a 2025 survey of 3,000 adults (Scorpion), over half of people said they would not consider a firm rated under four stars; the firm's rating is fine, its count and recency are not. One review mentions the amount of a settlement; nobody at the firm wrote it, but the firm should not quote it anywhere.
Fix: a single review request sent by the firm to every client at the close of a matter, by text or email, with no incentive and no screening, and a reply to every review that thanks the person without mentioning anything about their matter. Rule cites for the firm's state go in the plan.
Photos, description and posts
Three photos: a logo, a stock gavel and a street view. The description repeats "Tessamer injury lawyer" four times and names no lawyer. No posts have been made.
Fix: eight to twelve photos of the real office, the reception, the sign and the two attorneys (with their consent), a description in plain English that names the responsible lawyer and the office location as the state's advertising rule requires for anything the firm publishes, and a post a month about something true (a new attorney, changed hours, a guide the firm wrote).
Findings: the website
Pages for the cases the firm wants
One page, "Personal Injury", of about 400 words, covers every kind of case in general terms. There is no page for truck accidents or wrongful death, family law is one line on the home page with no page for divorce or custody, and there is no page about the neighboring counties the firm serves. Every firm holding a page-one spot for "truck accident lawyer tessamer" or "divorce lawyer tessamer" has a page for it.
Fix: one page per case type, 900 to 1,400 words each, written around the questions clients ask in the first meeting, drafted by us and approved by an attorney before publication. Truck accidents and divorce first.
Speed, phone layout and reachability
On a phone, the largest content on the home page loads in 4.1 seconds on a throttled connection; Google's guidance treats 2.5 seconds as the threshold. The attorney bios are images of text, which Google cannot read. The contact page's phone link is missing the "tel:" prefix, so tapping it does nothing. Google has indexed 11 of the site's 14 pages; the three missing ones are the bios.
Fix: compress the four hero images (they account for 3.1 of the 4.6 MB), replace the bio images with text, fix the phone link, and resubmit the bios for indexing. We can do these ourselves with access, or send exact instructions to the firm's web person.
Disclosures and rules
The site names no lawyer as responsible for its content and does not state the office location on every page, which the firm's state rules require for advertising. The home page says "Tessamer's top injury firm", a comparative claim the firm cannot substantiate. A page lists three past results with no disclosure of expenses or of whether the amounts were collected.
Fix: a footer on every page with a responsible lawyer's name and the office city; remove "top"; and either remove the results or add the disclosures the state requires, which the firm's attorneys decide.
Technical markup
No structured data on any page. Adding LegalService markup to the home page and Attorney markup to each bio tells Google what the pages are without changing anything a client sees. The site has an SSL certificate that expires in 19 days.
Fix: add the markup, renew the certificate, and check both monthly.
Five-year trend
A third-party estimate of how many searches the firm's website ranked for: 310 in October 2021, 190 in October 2026, down 39%. Estimates of this kind are rough and move with the tool's own index, so we read them for direction only. The two firms that lead the map for the firm's searches went up over the same period.
The first three fixes, in order
- The profile's category, services and hours, within two weeks. This is the shortest path into the map for "car accident lawyer tessamer", where the firm already holds third of three and is one category change from a stronger match.
- The truck accident page and the divorce and custody page, drafted in weeks two and three, approved and published by week five. These are the searches the firm wants and currently has nothing for.
- The review request, live for every closed matter from week three. The rating is fine and the count is the gap: the top three firms have three to six times as many reviews.
After those: the wrongful death, motorcycle and premises pages, a page for each neighboring county the firm genuinely serves (with the courthouse that hears those cases and the real office address), the speed and markup work, and a reply to every review as it arrives. We write the 90-day plan with dates once the firm has read this memo.
What we would not do
We would not buy Local Services Ads or search ads on the firm's behalf; we do not run ads. The firm should know that the Local Services block sits above the map in Tessamer for "car accident lawyer" and that it is pay per lead; if the firm wants it, it can run it alongside the work above and we will keep clear of it. We would not pay for a Super Lawyers or Justia upgrade before the profile is right; the free Justia profile is worth claiming today. And we would not touch the television spot, which is bringing in cases.
The fee for this plan
In a real memo this section states one flat monthly fee for the plan above, in writing, with no setup fee and 30 days' notice on either side. This example carries no figure.
What this memo is and is not
Everything above came from public information: the search results, the profile and the pages anyone in Tessamer can see. It is about where the firm shows up on Google. It is not legal advice, and where it touches advertising rules, the firm's attorneys decide what applies. The memo is the firm's to keep whether or not it hires us. If the firm wants the plan, it replies; if not, that is the end of it.
Example memorandum. Harlan & Pike and Tessamer are fictional; any resemblance to a real firm or town is accidental. Figures are illustrations of the kind of figures a real memo carries. The Law Firm SEO Agency, Austin, Texas.