Step 1: Establish the baseline
We record where you rank today for probate terms across every city and county you serve, your map pack positions, your organic traffic to probate pages, your review profile against competitors, and whether AI systems mention you at all. Everything after this is measured against that starting point.
Step 2: Fix the foundation
Site speed, mobile usability, indexation, broken links, duplicate pages, missing schema. Boring work that determines whether anything else can rank.
Step 3: Own your local presence
Google Business Profile rebuilt around probate. Categories and services corrected. Photos added. Citations audited and cleaned so your name, address, and phone match everywhere. Duplicate listings removed.
Step 4: Build the probate practice page properly
One strong page that explains what you handle, which courts you appear in, how the process works in your state, what it typically costs, and what happens on the first call. This page becomes the hub that every other probate page links to.
Step 5: Publish geography
A page for each county probate court and each city that files there. Real local detail: court name, filing specifics, driving context, the towns included. Never a template with the city name swapped.
Step 6: Answer the question set
Cost, timeline, executor duties, small estates, intestate estates, real property in probate, out of state assets, creditor claims, contested wills, removing a personal representative. One page per question, each linked to the practice page and the relevant county pages.
Step 7: Make your attorneys the authority
Search engines and AI systems both weigh who is answering. We build attorney bios with credentials, bar admissions, speaking, publications, and case types handled, then attribute your content to the attorney who reviewed it. This is the single most underused ranking asset at law firms.
Step 8: Earn links and mentions
Local bar associations, chambers, community organizations, professional partners like CPAs and financial advisors, guest content, and legitimate legal directories. Slow, real, and durable. No purchased link schemes.
Step 9: Optimize for AI answers
Clear question and answer structure, schema markup, consistent entity data, and content thorough enough to be quoted safely. We build the conditions for citation. Nobody can promise inclusion in an AI answer, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Step 10: Review and compound
Monthly reporting on rankings by cluster and city, traffic to probate pages, calls and forms, and what shipped. Then we double down on what moved and cut what did not.
What this looks like on a timeline
Months 1 to 3
Foundation, profile, practice page, first geography pages, early local movement.
Months 4 to 6
Question content, internal linking, authority work, organic terms begin to climb.
Months 7 to 12
Broader coverage, links and mentions, AI visibility, compounding results.
What we need from you
Attorney review of content, access to your website and Google accounts, and patience through the ramp. That is genuinely it.
Related pages
- Probate SEO, the technical and keyword detail
- Marketing for probate attorneys, by firm stage
- Probate marketing, the full program
- Probate online marketing, your presence off site