Why your law firm isn't showing up on Google, and the twenty-minute check

In September 2026 we pulled 490 consumer-practice law firms in Houston off Google Maps and looked at what a person searching at 11pm would actually find. Of the 490, 184 had no website in their listing. That is 38 percent of firms with reviews, a phone number and a pin on the map, and nowhere for the searcher to go next.

Then we started calling the ones that looked worst, and the picture got more specific. Several of the firms our first pass had labeled “no website” turned out to have one. The listing simply did not point to it. Two of the twenty we prepared to call had a domain that no longer loaded at all, though Google still listed it. Nobody at those firms knew, because nobody at a firm types their own web address.

So “my firm isn’t showing up on Google” is almost always one of four things. Here is how to tell which, in about twenty minutes, and what fixes each.

The four cases

1. No website. The listing has years of reviews and the website field is empty. People read the reviews, look for somewhere to go, and call whoever came up next.

2. A website Google does not know about. There is a site. The listing does not link to it, or links to an old one. In our sample this was about a quarter of the “no website” firms, and the fix takes ten minutes.

3. A website that is dead. The domain expired, or the hosting lapsed, and the address now shows a registrar’s parking page or nothing. Search engines and directories keep citing it for years. We wrote a separate guide on what to do when your firm’s website is down.

4. A website that exists, is linked, and is invisible anyway. It loads slowly on a phone, or it has one page that says “we handle family law, criminal defense, personal injury and immigration”. When someone searches “DWI lawyer Houston”, Google shows the firms with a page about DWI in Houston. A general page is not that.

The twenty-minute check

Do this on your phone, on cellular data, not on the office Wi-Fi. That is how your clients see you.

Minute 1 to 3. Search your firm’s name and city in a private window. Note what appears: the map panel with your listing, and below it whatever pages Google has for you. If the panel has no “Website” button, you are in case 1 or 2.

Minute 3 to 6. Search your office phone number in quotation marks. This is the only reliable way to find your own site if you have forgotten it exists, and it also surfaces every directory that lists you. If a result points to a domain you do not recognize, or one that will not load, you are in case 2 or 3. We learned this the hard way: guessing “yourname-law.com” finds squatters and other attorneys more often than it finds you.

Minute 6 to 12. Open your Business Profile. Search your firm’s name while signed in to the Google account that manages it, or go to business.google.com. Choose Edit profile. Look at the Website field. If it is empty, or it shows an address that does not match the site that loads, fix it, enter the full address including “https://”, and save. Google’s help page walks through it, and the profile has to be verified before the link will publish. Check that the name, address and phone on the profile match the ones on the site to the character.

Minute 12 to 15. Type your domain into the browser. With and without “www”. If you get a page from a registrar, a “this site can’t be reached” error, or a builder’s default template, that is case 3. Go to the website-down guide now; the clock on an expired domain is real.

Minute 15 to 18. Time your site. Count seconds until you can read it and tap the phone number. If it is more than three or four, or you have to pinch to read, that is case 4 and it is costing you the people who did find you.

Minute 18 to 20. Search the way a client would. “Divorce lawyer near me”. “DWI attorney” and your city. “Immigration lawyer” and your neighborhood. Look at who shows up and open one of their sites. Each of them has a page about that exact problem in that exact place. If you do not, you will not be there, and no amount of fixing the listing changes that.

What fixes each case

• Case 1, no website. You need one. Not a large one. A page for the firm, a page for each thing you do, the phone number on every page, working on a phone. It can be live on your own domain in seven days; that is what we build for independent firms.
• Case 2, unlinked website. The ten-minute fix above. Then check the other places that list you (the state bar profile, Avvo, Yelp, Justia) and make sure they point to the same address.
• Case 3, dead website. Renew or re-register the domain today if it is still available, or pick a new one and update every listing. The website-down guide has the order of operations.
• Case 4, invisible website. One page per practice problem, written for the person with that problem in your city, loading fast on a phone. This is a writing job more than a design job.

Two things not to do

Do not stuff the business name. “Smith Law, Best DWI Lawyer Houston” in the profile name violates Google’s business-profile rules and gets listings suspended. Your name is your name.

Do not let the fix make a claim you cannot support. In Texas, Rule 7.01 of the Disciplinary Rules applies to the whole website, not just an ad: no false or misleading communication about the lawyer’s services. “Top-rated”, “guaranteed results” and made-up specializations belong to the firms that end up in the disciplinary reports. A plain page that says what you do, where, and how to reach you is both compliant and, in our experience, what converts.

If you would rather not do any of this

We do the twenty-minute check before we ever speak to a firm, and we build the first version of the site before the call so you can see what we mean. Seven days from the call to your site live on your own domain, with the listing fixed and every missed call texted back within a minute.