If you’re planning to grow your law firm by opening multiple offices, one of the most critical—yet often overlooked—factors is how your website should be structured to support this expansion.
I recently sat down with Tony Karls, my partner and co-founder of Sterling Lawyers (now President of RocketClicks.com), to discuss the website strategies that have helped us expand to 26 locations across Wisconsin and Illinois.
Single Location vs. Multi-Location Sites
When you’re running a single-location law firm, the website structure is relatively straightforward.
You’ll want your map embed, name, address, and phone number in the footer, with the same information on your contact page.
However, if you’re planning to expand in the future, this approach can create significant challenges.
Tony: “When we started SterlingLawyers.com, we did not start it like a single location site. That made it more difficult for us at the beginning, but it saved us a ton of time in re-indexing when we went multi-location.”
The challenge when you start with a multi-location structure is that your location page needs to outrank everybody else’s homepage—a much harder task initially.
But this approach becomes significantly easier as you expand because of all the different backlinks and citations you can generate through multiple locations.
The Multi-Location Website Playbook
For a multi-location site, you need:
- A location hub page. This is simply a page titled “Locations” that links to all your individual office pages. At Sterling, we have all 20 of our Wisconsin locations and 6 Illinois locations listed on this hub.
- Individual location pages. Every single location needs its own dedicated page. This should be the only place where your map shows up, along with your name, address, and phone number for that specific location. It should also be the only place where the Google Business Profile map embed appears for that location.
Tony: “When you’re multi-location, you want Google to clearly identify this page as your Milwaukee page, this page as your Madison page, and this page as your Appleton page.”
What Happens When You Get It Wrong
When we first expanded Sterling Lawyers, we experienced frustrating traffic fluctuations because our site wasn’t properly structured.
Tony: “One week our Menomonee Falls office would be busy, but our Madison office wouldn’t have anything to do. And then it flipped, and it flipped, and it flipped.”
This inconsistency was caused by two main issues:
- Poor site structure. When you have maps and location information scattered throughout your site, Google gets confused about which page corresponds to which location.
- Over-optimized backlinks. We were using exact match anchor text in our backlinks (like “Milwaukee divorce lawyer”), which inadvertently made Milwaukee relevant for every divorce lawyer query—even when someone was searching in Madison.
These problems created operational headaches as our team experienced wild swings in workload, making it impossible to scale efficiently.
The Solution: Clean Structure and Proper Linking
To resolve these issues and smooth out our traffic flow, we implemented two critical changes:
- Proper site hierarchy. Each location received its own dedicated page with location-specific information.
- “Naked URL” backlinks. Instead of using descriptive anchor text like “Milwaukee divorce lawyer,” we simply used the URL itself (https://www.sterlinglawyers.com/wisconsin/locations/milwaukee/) for backlinks.
Additionally, we optimized our Google Business Profile integration by using the specific CID URL for each location.
This provides a powerful backlink that gives your site more link equity than using the generic embed code.
Multi-State Considerations
If you plan to expand into another state, it’s wise to structure your site accordingly from the beginning.
At Sterling, we set up our root URL with minimal content, then created state-specific sections (/wisconsin and /illinois) where most of our content lives.
This approach allows us to create state-specific content that addresses the different legal terminology and practices across states.
For example, “custody” in Wisconsin is called “allocation of parental responsibilities” in Illinois.
Tony: “The further you can think ahead and plan, the fewer problems you’ll have when you get to your continued expansion points. If you need to restructure your site URLs later, your best-case scenario is that your rankings stay even—and that’s pretty rare. Most of the time, you’ll see at least a temporary drop.”
Small Touches That Make a Big Difference
Interestingly, we’ve found that appearing too large can actually hurt conversion rates.
Clients tend to prefer working with firms that feel local and accessible rather than impersonal corporate entities.
One surprising example of this is our decision not to use an automated phone system (IVR).
Despite the operational efficiencies an IVR would provide, we answer all calls with a live person because every time we tested an automated system, our drop calls increased significantly—regardless of whose voice we used.
Tony: “We saw like a 7-10% drop in call volume with an IVR. Most people hear an automated system and immediately think, ‘I hate talking to this stupid automated voice thing that never understands me,’ and they’re already irritated with your brand before speaking to anyone.”
These strategies have been instrumental in our growth from zero to $15 million, allowing us to efficiently manage 26 locations across two states while maintaining consistent client acquisition across all our offices.
If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your firm’s website for multi-location growth, reach out to Tony – akarls@RocketClicks.com.
