REFERENCE
Law Firm Marketing Glossary
The terms agencies use in reports and proposals, explained in plain language — including the ones that sound impressive and mean very little. If a term here is being used to justify an invoice, this page will tell you whether it should be.
Local search
- Map pack — the block of three business listings with a map that appears above the ordinary results for a local search. On mobile it is effectively the whole first screen and takes the majority of clicks.
- Google Business Profile — the free listing that decides whether you appear in the map pack. Formerly Google My Business. The single highest-return asset in local legal marketing and the one most firms have never finished.
- Proximity, prominence and relevance — the three broad factors Google weighs for local ranking. Proximity is the distance between the searcher and your listed address, prominence is your general authority and review strength, relevance is how well your profile matches the search.
- Citation — a mention of your firm's name, address and phone number on another site, such as a legal directory. Consistency across citations matters more than volume.
- NAP consistency — whether your name, address and phone number are identical everywhere Google reads them. Conflicting records suppress rankings, and it is the most common unrecognized problem we find.
- Service area — the geography your profile claims to cover. Claiming too much dilutes relevance and weakens every position inside it, which is the most frequent self-inflicted ranking problem.
Paid search
- Local Service Ads (LSA) — the ad unit above everything else, carrying the Google Screened badge, charged per lead rather than per click. Usually the best economics available to a law firm.
- Google Screened — the verification badge on Local Service Ads, requiring background checks, license confirmation and insurance evidence. Typically two to four weeks to obtain if somebody chases it.
- Cost per click (CPC) — what you pay when someone clicks an ad. Legal keywords are the most expensive in Google Ads; competitive injury terms can exceed a hundred dollars a click.
- Quality score — Google's estimate of how relevant your ad, keyword and landing page are to each other. A higher score lowers what you pay per click, which is why sending every ad to the homepage is expensive as well as ineffective.
- Negative keywords — terms you tell Google not to match. Without a list, broad match on "lawyer" buys clicks for law schools, salaries and free advice at full price.
- Match type — how loosely Google may interpret your keyword. Broad match without negatives is the most common cause of wasted legal ad spend.
- Offline conversion import — sending signed matters back into Google Ads so bidding optimizes toward cases rather than form fills. The highest-impact measurement change most firms can make, and very few have it.
Measurement
- Cost per signed matter — what it costs in marketing to produce one signed case. The only number that should be at the top of a report. If something else is, the report is measuring the agency's activity.
- Call tracking — using dynamic phone numbers to attribute a call to the campaign, keyword or listing that produced it. Essential for law firms because most legal inquiries arrive by phone and analytics does not see a single one of them.
- Attribution — connecting an inquiry back to the source that produced it. Without it, budget decisions are made on lead counts, which routinely point at the wrong channel.
- Conversion — an action you count as valuable. The common failure is counting a form fill as a conversion, which makes a wrong number and a signed matter look identical.
- GA4 — the current version of Google Analytics. Configured out of the box it measures pages rather than outcomes, which is why most law firm analytics are decorative.
Content and technical
- Schema markup — structured data that tells a crawler what a page is about. Used properly it can produce FAQ accordions and breadcrumbs in the results.
- Core Web Vitals — Google's page experience measurements, principally loading speed, responsiveness and layout stability. They matter for ranking and matter considerably more for conversion.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — how long until the main content of a page appears. On a mobile inquiry made in an urgent moment, anything over about two seconds costs you visitors.
- Search intent — what the person actually wants. A page that matches the intent of a search outranks a longer page that does not, which is why word count is a poor target.
- Internal linking — links between your own pages. Content that links nowhere passes no authority to the practice pages that convert, which is why most law firm blogs produce nothing after years.
- Canonical URL — the address you declare as the authoritative version of a page. Prevents two URLs with the same content competing with each other.
- hreflang — markup telling Google which language version of a page to serve. Necessary for multilingual pages, otherwise they are treated as duplicates.
Terms to be skeptical of
- Domain authority — a third-party estimate produced by SEO tools, not a Google metric. Useful as a rough comparison, useless as a target. A report showing it rising while inquiries stay flat has told you nothing.
- Guaranteed rankings — not a thing anybody can deliver. Google does not sell placement.
- Impressions — how many times something was shown. Impressions do not pay salaries and a report leading with them is usually avoiding a harder number.
- Doorway pages — near-identical pages made to rank for many locations, differing only by the place name. Google penalizes them, and the penalty lands on the whole domain.
- Private blog network (PBN) — sites that exist only to sell links. When detected the consequence falls on your domain rather than theirs.
- Leads — an ambiguous word doing a lot of work in agency reporting. Ask whether it means a form fill, an answered call, a qualified inquiry or a signed matter, because those are wildly different numbers.
Professional conduct
- Advertising filing requirement — the obligation in some states, including Texas and Florida, to submit advertisements to the bar for review. Georgia has no such requirement.
- Solicitation — direct contact with a specific person known to need legal services, regulated far more tightly than general advertising. New York restricts it for thirty days after a personal injury incident.
- Certified specialist — a formal credential in states including California and North Carolina. Using the word without holding the certification is a rules problem, not a stylistic choice.
- Alternative business structure (ABS) — a legal services entity permitted to have non-lawyer ownership. Arizona permits them; Utah operates a sandbox allowing similar models. Prohibited in the other states.
- Attorney advertising label — the requirement in some states, including New York and Ohio in defined circumstances, to mark certain communications as advertising.