Your Google Business Profile is probably the most valuable thing your firm owns online and has not looked at in years, and you can see why in about thirty seconds. Search family lawyer plus your suburb right now and look at what appears above everything else on the page. Before any website, before a single article, there is a map with three firms sitting beside it, showing names and star ratings and photographs and opening hours, and for a very large share of local searches that box decides the whole thing while plenty of people never scroll past it at all.
That box is called the map pack, and your position inside it is shaped heavily by a single asset that most firms claimed in about 2019 and have not opened since, which is the Google Business Profile.
The Google Business Profile nobody opens
It helps to think of your Google Business Profile as a shopfront on the busiest street in your suburb, because functionally that is exactly what it is, and then to walk past most firms’ shopfronts and look honestly at what is in the window. Photographs from years ago or none at all. Opening hours that have been wrong since the office moved. Questions from the public sitting there unanswered in front of everyone. Reviews, sometimes lovely ones, without a single reply from the firm.
Nobody inside the firm ever sees any of this, because nobody inside the firm has cause to look at their own profile, and why would you when you already know where your office is and what time you open. But every searcher sees it, positioned directly beside two competitors, which quietly turns every piece of neglect into a live comparison where one profile looks tended and one looks abandoned. The searcher knows nothing else about either firm, so the tending does the deciding.
What actually moves your Google Business Profile up the
map pack
Google’s own guidance is unusually plain about it, since complete, accurate and active profiles perform better in local results, and there is no great mystery beyond that. In practice it comes down to completing every field so Google is not left guessing at what you do, keeping your hours and details correct, adding real photographs of the actual office and the actual people rather than stock, replying to every review because a reply signals a tended profile and doubles the visible text underneath it, answering the questions the public leaves, and posting updates so the profile reads as a firm that exists this week rather than one that existed in 2019.
None of that is technical and all of it is visible to Google and to the searcher at the same time, which is why the work pays twice over.
How the box chooses its three
It stops feeling like a lottery once you understand that Google weighs three things when it decides who appears. Relevance is how well your Google Business Profile matches what was searched, which is exactly why completing every field matters, since you are telling Google what you do rather than leaving it to infer. Distance is how close you sit to the person searching, and you cannot move your office, though you can be the most complete and most active profile inside your genuine catchment. Prominence is how established and well known your firm appears, and that is the one you can influence most, through reviews and activity and your presence across the wider web.
Which means the firm publishing steadily is not only winning the searches about the problem, it is quietly strengthening the signal that helps it win the map pack too, and the two pieces of work turn out to be feeding each other.
The ten minutes a week
Here is the maintenance reality, which is that a Google Business Profile needs roughly ten minutes a week once the initial tidy is done. One update posted, any new reviews replied to, any questions answered, and that is the entire regime. I run exactly this for my own studio, with one update on a Monday for the week’s article and another on a Thursday for the podcast, and replies going out as reviews arrive.
Ten minutes a week, spent on the one asset that appears above your website in the searches most likely to produce an actual phone call. It is the fastest and cheapest improvement available in any law firm’s visibility, and almost nobody bothers to make it, which for the first firm in each suburb that does bother is precisely the opportunity.
Your Google Business Profile is one of the first things I look at in the Law Firm Visibility Audit, alongside where you rank, what your competitors are doing, and what a searching client actually finds.
$1000 + GST, conducted personally, and credited against a monthly plan if you move to one within sixty days. Details at
ngcreative.au/law-firm-visibility-audit, or start with the free webinar at ngcreative.au/webinar.
