Best Free Lawyer & Law Firm Directories for Attorneys to Obtain Profiles

Profiles in lawyer and law firm directories are important (and often free!) pieces of a robust, well-rounded legal marketing strategy. Check out this post for a list of legal directories to help you reach more clients.

People consult online directories when searching for lawyers because they are packed with relevant information and frequently allow tailored searches on important fields, such as location and practice area, that make it easier to find and compare attorneys. Thus, lawyer directories receive significant qualified traffic, making them important platforms for effective legal marketing.

However, the benefits for your practice go well beyond the people searching directly within directories for a lawyer. Having a presence in high-quality legal directories often enhances the lawyer and law firm’s digital reputation and increases general perceptions of a lawyer as a well-qualified practitioner. Lawyer and law firm directory profiles, when fully completed, often rank well in Google and other search engine results.

Additionally, these directories may help you with your law firm website’s SEO. Legal directories that offer free links to the lawyer’s website or blog may help improve Google, Bing, and other search engine rankings.

In addition to the SEO benefits free links may provide, having the NAP (name, address, and phone number) on these directory profiles matched with your Google My Business (GMB) listing information can also help in your GMB and Google Maps rankings.

Below is a list of lawyer and law firm directories, as well as information on their traffic, SEO attributes, and website linking policy.

List of Directories for Lawyers and Law Firms

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* While free profiles seem to be generally unavailable in the Nolo directory, some Avvo customers will find that their information transfers to the Nolo site.
** Free link is to a blog that has an RSS feed. No link is provided to a website for free.

Want to add a directory or make a correction? Contact us.

Lawyer directories, such as our Justia Lawyer Directory, Avvo, FindLaw, and SuperLawyers, often rank well in search engine results. The content on these sites is highly relevant to the website visitors and, in most cases, time spent on page is high, which in turn increases the odds that the visitor will ultimately convert (in this case, contact a lawyer from the directory). However, all of the above directories are worth signing up for a free profile.

Watch this clip to learn more about lawyer directories.

Do Not Buy Links

Please note that you should not pay for “follow” links to influence Google’s search results. Paying for these “follow” links violates Google’s webmaster guidelines and can be detrimental to your search visibility.

Link attributes: Websites can make use of Google’s recommended link attributes to identify the nature of particular links. Links can have more than one attribute.

• nofollow: Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
• sponsored: Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships, or other compensation agreements.
• ugc: UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.

Links without attributes: Links without any of these attributes are often called “follow” links, and are considered by Google and Bing algorithms as indicating editorial support from the linking website to the linked website. 

Any such “follow” link should not be the result of a compensation agreement, including the purchase of a directory profile or placement. You can purchase a profile or placement with a “nofollow” or “sponsored” attribute and not face any potential penalty.

Final Thoughts: Why Do You Care?

To succeed in reaching your law firm’s goals in the digital age, online directories need to be an integral part of your law firm’s digital marketing strategy. Appearing in a selection of the most authoritative legal directories can help your law firm build a more comprehensive presence online and in search results since many of these top directories already independently rank on the first page of Google and other search engines, like Bing.

When approaching your directory profile strategy, quality is key. You may not need a profile in every single directory, but you do want to create a robust presence in multiple directories. You can start by getting listed in our Justia Lawyer Directory, the most visited legal website in the United States. Then, continue to expand your presence from there by claiming your free listings in other reputable online directories and considering paid profiles where appropriate for your firm.

Lee este artículo en Español en Justia Avanza.