A page that Google has not indexed cannot rank, no matter how well it is written. Defense firms pay for content about DUI, domestic violence and drug charges, and some of those pages never make it into Google's index at all. Often the firm has no idea, because nobody checked.
Google Search Console shows which of your pages are indexed and which are not, along with a reason for each excluded page. Reading that report once a month is one of the most useful technical habits a firm can build, and most of the fixes do not require a developer.
Open Search Console for your site and go to the Pages report under Indexing. Google splits your URLs into pages that are indexed and pages that are not, with a list of reasons for the second group. Click any reason to see example URLs.
You can also paste a single URL into the URL Inspection tool at the top of Search Console. It shows whether that page is on Google, when it was last crawled, and which version Google picked as the canonical.
"Crawled - currently not indexed" means Google visited the page and decided not to add it for now. This often happens with thin or near-duplicate pages, such as city pages that differ only in the city name.
"Discovered - currently not indexed" means Google knows the URL exists but has not crawled it yet. On a small law firm site, this can point to weak internal linking. The page exists, but few other pages link to it.
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical" and "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" both relate to duplicate versions of the same content. On law firm sites the usual causes are the same page loading at both http and https, with and without a trailing slash, or with tracking parameters attached.
"Excluded by 'noindex' tag" means the page itself tells Google to leave it out. Sometimes that is intentional, such as a thank-you page after a form submission. Sometimes a developer left the tag in place after building the site on a staging server.
If ten of your city pages sit under "Crawled - currently not indexed," the cause is rarely technical. Google looked and did not find enough reason to index them. Rewrite each one with something specific, such as the courthouse that handles cases from that city or a local diversion program. Merge the pages you cannot make distinct, and redirect the old URLs to the page that remains.
A practice area page that can only be reached through a dropdown menu three levels deep may get crawled less often. Link to your most important pages from your home page and from related pages. A DUI page can link to your license hearing page and your page on refusals. A blog post about a new law can link to the practice page it relates to.
Check your XML sitemap too. It should list the pages you want indexed and leave out the ones you do not, such as tag archives, thank-you pages and duplicate URLs. Submit it in Search Console under Sitemaps.
Search Console also has a Core Web Vitals report. Since March 2024, the responsiveness metric in Core Web Vitals has been Interaction to Next Paint, which replaced First Input Delay. Slow, heavy pages frustrate a person on a phone who is trying to find a lawyer quickly. Large uncompressed images, chat widgets and video backgrounds are common causes on law firm sites.