Law firms don’t migrate websites for fun. You do it because you are changing brands, moving to a faster platform, consolidating multiple microsites, or switching from a vendor-controlled setup to something you can own. The risk is obvious: lose your organic rankings, and your intake dries up. The good news is that a well-run migration can preserve traffic and, in some cases, unlock gains you could not get on the old stack. The bad news is that most “SEO disasters” after a migration come from avoidable mistakes, especially URL mismatches and tracking blind spots.
I have guided law firms through rebrands, platform shifts, and domain consolidations across WordPress, Webflow, custom Laravel, and proprietary law-firm CMSs. The patterns repeat. The firms that succeed treat a migration like a surgical procedure: tight pre-op planning, careful execution, and close monitoring. What follows is a practical blueprint tailored to lawyer SEO. It favors control, simplicity, and verifiable outcomes.
What changes during a migration
“Migration” covers several scenarios, each with its own hazards. The most common for law firms: switching from one CMS to another, changing domain names, moving from HTTP to HTTPS, consolidating multiple practice-area microsites into a single main site, restructuring URLs, and refreshing design with new templates and content modules. Google cares less about the reasons and more about continuity. It needs to match the intent and authority of old pages to new ones. Anything that breaks that chain costs you rankings, sometimes for months.
The biggest ranking drivers that get disturbed are crawlability, indexing signals, and link equity. Crawlability hinges on internal linking, XML sitemaps, robots rules, and the server’s ability to serve content fast and consistently. Indexing signals come from title tags, headings, body content, and canonical tags that map pages to a stable address. Link equity is all the authority your site has earned from prior links, citations, and mentions. Lose the URL that earned links, or redirect it to the wrong place, and you waste that equity.
Risks unique to law firm sites
Law firm sites often have sensitive localized intent. “Car accident lawyer in Phoenix,” “New York employment attorney,” “probate lawyer near me.” These pages thrive on precise geographic signals. Small changes to NAP (name, address, phone) or the way location pages and practice pages interlink can shift rankings. Attorney bio pages often rank for name searches, peer links, and publications, and those bios drive conversions. Many firms also maintain blog archives that attract long-tail searches years later. If a site redesign buries that archive, changes publish dates, or removes author information, traffic drops where you least expect it.
Another pattern is vendor lock-in. If your current vendor owns your templates, content, or hosting stack, you may be exporting incomplete data. I have seen image alt text, schema, and even meta titles lost because they lived in proprietary fields. Confirm what you can extract before you set deadlines. If you discover gaps late, rush jobs lead to 404s and weak redirects.
A brief anecdote: a near-miss avoided
A mid-sized injury firm with three offices decided to fold five microsites into a new primary domain. Each micro had a dozen location and practice pages, plus several blog posts with links from local news outlets. The developer proposed a new, clean URL structure and said they would “globally redirect the old stuff.” When we reviewed the mapping, one pattern would have sent all blog posts to the root blog page. That would have thrown away years of link equity. We built a detailed URL map that redirected each high-value post to a matching article or, where none existed, to a newly created canonical article. The firm launched with less than a 5 percent dip and fully recovered in three weeks, then grew 18 percent in organic leads over three months. The fix was not fancy. It was precise.
Planning the migration like a case strategy
Good lawyer SEO mirrors good litigation strategy: discovery first, then a plan, then execution with evidence. Your discovery phase should produce a canonical source of truth for URLs, metadata, and content.
Start with a full crawl of the current site. Use Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or equivalent. Save the crawl file, export key fields, and document:
- All indexable URLs and their status codes, titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, headings, word counts, and inlinks/outlinks. Save this before any changes are made.
Augment the crawl with Google Search Console data. Export performance data for the past 12 months, segmented by page, query, and country. Identify your top 200 to 500 URLs by clicks, impressions, and links. Pull link data from Search Console and, if you have it, from Ahrefs or Majestic. This tells you what absolutely must retain continuity.
Inventory your local assets. Capture current NAP for each office, Google Business Profile URLs, hours, and tracked phone numbers. If you use dynamic number insertion, note how it is implemented and ensure the baseline NAP remains consistent in the HTML.
Audit your analytics and tags. Document GA4 property and data streams, existing conversions, call tracking, live chat, and intake CRM integrations. Note UTM conventions and events. Migrations often break tracking, which hides SEO wins or losses until it is costly to fix.
Catalog structured data and media. Export schema markup from key pages, especially local business schema, attorney person schema, and FAQ schema on informational pages. For media, note image alt text, captions, and document downloads that may carry backlinks.
The URL map: the heart of migration for SEO for lawyers
If you do only one thing perfectly, make it the URL map. Treat every old indexable URL as a witness you need to shepherd to the right courtroom. For each URL, list the exact new destination. Prioritize one-to-one matches. If you consolidate pages, create a destination that inherits the strongest content and link signals.
Good URL maps include columns for old URL, new URL, redirect type, priority tier, and notes. Priority tiering keeps you sane at launch. Tier 1 might be your top 100 organic landing pages, attorney bios, and core practice and location pages. Tier 2 covers the rest of the indexable set. Tier 3 addresses odd files, tag pages, and low-value archives.
A critical detail: no redirect chains. Do not send /car-accident-lawyer to /auto-injury, then to /personal-injury. Go straight from old to final. Chains waste crawl budget and dilute equity. Also avoid redirecting to the home page unless the page truly has no equivalent. For blog posts with links, your best option is to keep the URL intact. If the path must change, build a one-to-one redirect to a close match and copy forward the on-page elements that made it rank and earn links.
Content fidelity: keep what works, strengthen what’s weak
Law firms like to refresh their copy during a redesign. That can help, but it is risky if you remove sections that rank. Before rewriting, identify which pages drive organic traffic and inquiries. Compare top pages’ search intent to your proposed new content. If your current “Slip and fall lawyer” page ranks because it answers liability questions, contains local statutes and venue details, and includes a case result snippet, keep those elements. Improve structure, clarity, and internal links, but do not strip the meat.
Long-tail content matters. Blog posts answering specific questions, like “How long do I have to file a claim in Texas for a dog bite,” often carry durable traffic and links. If you decide to consolidate thin posts into a comprehensive guide, carry forward the best paragraphs and update them, then place redirects carefully. When you combine, give the new article a strong, precise H1 and preserve subtopics that matched past queries.
Attorney bios deserve special attention. Include credentials, bar admissions, notable verdicts, and publications. Keep the attorney’s name, slug, and schema consistent to preserve entity recognition in search. If you must change the slug, 301 it and replicate structured data. These pages often catch branded searches and media links.
Technical guardrails before launch
Before you move an inch, stabilize the technical layer. A migration reveals weaknesses in hosting, caching, and security policies that never mattered under low load, but bite you when search engines and users hit new templates.
Set up the staging environment to mirror production. Block indexing on staging with either password protection or robots noindex rules and ensure the block cannot leak into production. Run a full crawl on staging to check internal links, navigation, meta tags, canonicals, structured data, and page templates. Aim for feature parity where it matters: title tags, meta descriptions, and H1s should carry over or improve, not vanish.
Validate page speed and Core Web Vitals. Image dimensions, lazy loading, font loading strategies, and script order should be tuned before launch. Lawyers often rely on heavy media banners and chat widgets. Optimize images, defer non-critical scripts, and choose an accessible chat provider that does not block rendering.
XML sitemaps should reflect final URLs, not staging paths. Keep sitemaps lean. Avoid listing noindex pages. Segment by content type if your site is large enough, for example, practice pages, location pages, attorneys, blog. Ensure canonical tags point to the final HTTPS version.
For local SEO, confirm that each office page has consistent NAP, embedded map, and local business schema. If you are adding or retiring locations, plan citation updates and Google Business Profile edits to align with the launch timeline, not weeks later.
Launch-day process that avoids unforced errors
You only get one first crawl. Treat launch day like a courtroom appearance with a checklist and a fallback plan.
- Freeze content and code 24 hours before launch, back up the old site, and verify redirects in a staging-like environment.
Migrate DNS during a low-traffic window. Keep TTL low to speed propagation. As soon as the new site resolves, verify the HTTPS certificate, HSTS, and that no staging noindex header carries into production. Spot check top pages manually and with a quick small crawl. Test from a clean browser and device.
Submit new sitemaps in Google Search Console, one at a time. Inspect and request indexing for Tier 1 pages. Run the redirect map through a batch tester. Fix any 404s or 302s immediately, then re-run. Watch server logs to see Googlebot behavior within the first 24 to 48 hours. Large firms with many URLs benefit from log analysis to confirm that bots hit your Tier 1 pages early.
Verify analytics and conversions. Confirm that GA4 is firing once, not twice, that goals or events for form submissions and calls are recorded, and that cross-domain tracking is intact if you use third-party intake forms. If your phone system uses dynamic numbers, check that search visitors still see numbers that match your tracking rules and that the base NAP remains visible in the DOM for crawlers.
Handling domain changes without pulling the rug
Changing domains is the riskiest move but sometimes necessary for a rebrand or to escape a hyphenated relic. Prepare for a temporary dip. You can cushion the fall by perfecting redirects and signaling the change to Google through Search Console’s Change of Address tool. Keep the old domain registered for several years and maintain redirects indefinitely. Do not let the old site die. If you do, you sever many links.
Update major profiles and citations quickly: state bar profile, Google Business Profiles, Avvo, Justia, Yelp, BBB, Chamber of Commerce, and any local sponsorship pages. Where you control anchor text, keep branded anchors consistent with the new domain. Notify top referring sites that your URLs have changed. A short, courteous email with the exact new URL and context is often enough to earn an updated link.
Location and practice architecture that preserves intent
For multi-location firms, architecture matters. The safest pattern puts each office on its own location page with unique content, then links to relevant practice pages that reference that city or metro. If you previously used city-specific practice pages like /phoenix-car-accident-lawyer, keep them if they rank. If your new brand prefers a single practice page with a location module, tread carefully. A generic page rarely replaces a high-performing city page. Consider a hybrid: maintain city-specific pages for top markets, consolidate niche or low-traffic variants into stronger hubs, and use internal links to show relationships.
Make internal linking explicit. Practice pages should link to relevant attorneys with experience in that area. Attorney bios should link back to their practice areas and their primary office. Location pages should feature key practice areas with brief localized blurbs, not boilerplate lists. This mesh helps crawlers understand topical and geographic relevance.
Structured data that helps disambiguate entities
When you launch, validate schema with Google’s Rich Results Test. For law firms, LocalBusiness or LegalService schema fits, with multiple locations if appropriate. Include name, address, phone, URL, geo coordinates, opening hours, and sameAs links to authoritative profiles. For attorneys, Person schema can reference the firm, bar numbers if available, areas of expertise, and publications. Use FAQ schema sparingly on pages with genuine Q&A content. Do not spam. The goal is clarity, not decoration.
Measuring the right things after launch
If the site was healthy before, expect a short wobble, then stabilization within two to six weeks. Watch leading indicators daily for the first two weeks, then at a measured pace for the next two months.
Your core metrics:
- Canonical errors and 404 volume on Tier 1 pages. A clean error profile after week one is a good sign.
Track keyword baskets rather than single vanity terms. Group by practice and city: “car accident lawyer Phoenix,” “truck accident attorney Phoenix,” “injury lawyer downtown Phoenix.” Rankings move around, but landing page performance tells the real story. Are your location and practice pages receiving impressions and clicks at similar or rising levels? Are forms and calls from organic holding steady?
In GA4, segment conversions by channel and landing page. For call tracking, measure unique call volume from organic search and new versus returning callers. Pull intake data, not just phone rings. If your CRM allows, tag organic leads by first-touch channel and landing page, then compare to the pre-migration period.
Common mistakes I still see, and how to avoid them
The most destructive mistake is losing one-to-one redirects for high-value pages. The second is changing content too aggressively on ranking pages. Third, analytics setups break, wiping your visibility into what happened. Fourth, indexing blocks carry over from staging, sometimes via an X-Robots-Tag header. Fifth, not updating canonical tags or leaving them pointed at old or staging URLs.
Another recurring issue is nav and footer simplification that hides key links. Designers love clean menus. SEO requires https://lukasuque832.huicopper.com/lawyer-seo-optimize-press-releases-for-local-visibility predictable pathways. If you reduce menu items, ensure your important pages still receive internal links from prominent spots.
For local SEO, neglecting Google Business Profiles after a migration causes confusion. If your site URL changes, update it in GBP the same day. If office landing pages change, reflect that. Keep hours and services accurate. Add a short post about the new site for users who find you via the profile.
When consolidation helps, and when it hurts
Consolidation helps when you have several thin pages cannibalizing each other. Five blog posts that each rank on page two for related subtopics can become one strong guide. The redirect consolidates signals. Consolidation hurts when you remove a city-specific page that held a top-three spot with strong local links. A central practice page rarely replaces that ranking unless it includes robust, localized sections, internal links from the location page, and external links from local sources.
The rule of thumb: keep what is already winning, especially in geo-modified queries. Consolidate around gaps or duplication. Measure cannibalization by checking which pages rank for the same queries. If two pages share 70 percent of queries with similar intent, merge thoughtfully and keep the stronger URL or redirect to a new, better resource only if you must.
Vendor transitions and content ownership
If your current vendor controls your content or media, negotiate export rights early. You want raw HTML, images, PDFs, redirects, and custom fields. If they refuse, at least copy the on-page content and metadata for your top pages. Rewriting from scratch on launch invites ranking loss. For media with licensing, line up replacements ahead of time and compress and tag them properly in the new CMS.
Map any proprietary plugins to open equivalents. For example, if your old site used a custom FAQ module that auto-generated schema, rebuild that logic in a standard way. Document where features will be recreated and tested. This is tedious, but saves you from launching with empty placeholders.
Security, compliance, and accessibility as SEO allies
Lawyer sites handle sensitive inquiries. A migration is a chance to fix security posture. Enforce HTTPS, redirect HTTP to HTTPS, and audit mixed content. Implement security headers like Content-Security-Policy and X-Content-Type-Options. These steps improve trust and can improve crawl consistency.
Accessibility is not optional. Screen-reader-friendly headings, alt text, proper contrast, and keyboard navigation help users and search engines. If you switch to a new design system, run accessibility tests and fix issues before launch. Many legal verticals see higher engagement on accessible pages, which correlates with better organic performance.
A realistic timeline that fits law firm operations
Rushed migrations cause most ranking losses. A realistic schedule for a medium-sized firm site might look like eight to twelve weeks. Two weeks for discovery and inventory, two to four for development and content mapping, one for redirect planning and QA, one for launch prep, and two to four for post-launch monitoring and fixes. If your site has thousands of URLs or several languages, double the timeline.
Align this with marketing campaigns and intake staffing. Do not launch the week you run a major TV campaign or during trial-heavy weeks for your partners. You need time and attention to watch metrics and act quickly.
Recovery steps if rankings dip more than expected
If you see a sustained drop beyond 20 to 30 percent after the first two weeks, triage like an incident response. Re-crawl the site. Compare the indexable URL count to pre-launch. Check the redirect map for misses and chains. Inspect canonical tags and hreflang if used. Review server logs for 500 errors or throttling. Confirm sitemaps are clean and recent. Evaluate content changes on top landing pages and roll back where necessary.
If the drop concentrates in one practice area or city, restore the old URL path through redirect changes, or bring back a city-specific version. Sometimes the fastest fix is to temporarily reinstate content sections you removed. Submit affected pages in Search Console for re-crawl after fixes. If external links pointed to pages you consolidated, consider reaching out to top referrers with updated URLs.
How lawyer SEO judgment guides tough calls
SEO for lawyers rewards focus. Decide where you must be perfect, and where “good enough” works. Perfect the redirect map, top content fidelity, and analytics. Be disciplined about location signals and internal links. Accept that secondary blog posts might shift temporarily, and avoid thrashing titles and slugs trying to chase every fluctuation. Stable signals win trust.
There is also an ethical layer. Do not hide disclaimers, misrepresent results, or stuff footers with cities you do not serve. Google’s systems and state bar rules both punish that path. If you expand into a new city, support the claim with an office, staff, and localized content that demonstrates real presence. Your rankings, reviews, and referrals will follow.
A compact pre-launch checklist for law firms
- Complete a full crawl and export of the current site, plus a 12-month Search Console and analytics export for benchmarking. Build a one-to-one URL map with priority tiers. Eliminate redirect chains. Keep high-performing slugs where possible. Preserve or improve titles, H1s, body content, internal links, and schema on top pages. Lock down attorney bios and location pages. Validate staging: noindex in staging only, clean canonicals, optimized images, working navigation, accurate NAP, and compliant accessibility. Prepare analytics, call tracking, forms, and CRM integrations to fire once and record conversions by channel and page.
This list is short on purpose. If you nail these five, most migration problems never surface.
The quiet advantage of a migration done right
A clean migration can reset technical debt, clarify your site architecture, and tie content to real-world strengths. I have seen firms pick up featured snippets, earn richer local pack positions, and see faster indexing because they finally trimmed bloat, improved internal linking, and fixed slow templates. The act of auditing forces decisions that were long overdue.
The core idea in lawyer SEO holds: align with searcher intent and make it easy for crawlers to understand and trust your pages. A migration does not change that. It exposes where you were leaning on inertia. With careful planning and disciplined execution, you can move your website without dropping your caseload, then use the momentum to grow.