Technical SEO · Criminal defense websites
Technical SEO for Law Firms: Guides by SBD Marketing
A defense firm’s website can look fine and still be hard for Google to crawl, read or rank. These guides explain the technical side of SEO in plain language, so firm owners know what to ask their developer and what to check themselves.
Start here: seven coding mistakes that hurt defense firm SEO
Technical SEO Guides
7 Website Coding Mistakes That Hurt Criminal Defense SEO
Our main guide covers leftover noindex tags and robots.txt rules, menus that only work with JavaScript, slow pages that fail Core Web Vitals, mobile layouts that hide content, missing redirects after a redesign, duplicate location pages and canonical tags, and outdated structured data.
At a glance
- Who it’s for: Defense firm owners and the developers who build their sites
- Covers: Indexing, links, speed, mobile, redirects, canonicals, schema
- Time to read: About 8 minutes
- Updated: October 2026
For criminal defense firms
How SBD Marketing handles the technical side
SBD Marketing works only with criminal defense law firms, and only with one firm per city. Technical SEO is part of every website and SEO project we take on.
- SEO audits that find hidden problems
A full crawl and review of your site in Google Search Console to catch indexing blocks, broken redirects, canonical errors and slow templates. - Fast, clean defense firm websites
Sites built with lean code, proper HTML links, real mobile content and tap-to-call buttons, designed to pass Core Web Vitals. - Structured data that matches your profile
LegalService markup and consistent firm details that agree with your Google Business Profile, which also helps AI tools describe your firm correctly.
Talk to SBD Marketing about a technical SEO audit
Run a criminal defense practice and suspect your website is holding you back? Here’s how to reach the team.
BUSINESS
SBD Marketing
info@sbdmarketing.agency
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sbdmarketing.agency/scheduling
SERVING
Criminal defense firms, USA
WEB
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Five technical checks you can run today
All five use free tools. None of them require you to touch your site’s code.
Open your robots.txt file
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / under User-agent: * blocks the whole site from crawling.
Read the Pages report
In Google Search Console, look at why pages are not indexed. Noindex, robots.txt and 404 errors are the ones to fix first.
Run PageSpeed Insights
Test your home page and top charge page. Check the field data for LCP, INP and CLS before the lab scores.
Compare mobile and desktop
Open a charge page on your phone and on a computer. Every heading and link on desktop should also be on mobile.
Inspect a canonical tag
Use URL Inspection on a charge page and confirm the canonical Google selected is the page itself.
Guides in this series
We’re adding technical SEO guides one topic at a time.
How to plan redirects before a law firm website redesign
Coming soon
Passing Core Web Vitals on a WordPress law firm site
Coming soon
LegalService schema for criminal defense firms
Coming soon
How we put these guides together
Each guide draws on Google Search Central documentation, Chrome’s Core Web Vitals guidance, schema.org definitions and what SBD Marketing finds in technical audits of defense firm websites. Google changes its tools and guidance often, so every guide notes when it was last updated. Technical SEO for Law Firms is researched and published by SBD Marketing.
Explore the SBD Marketing network
Technical SEO for Law Firms is one of 28 guides published by SBD Marketing. Each one looks at a different side of marketing a criminal defense law firm.
Criminal Defense Visual Branding · Criminal Defense Firm Growth · DUI Attorney Marketing · Legal Marketing Analytics · Law Firm Website Design · How Families Find Defense Lawyers · Attorney Image and Personal Branding · Law Firm Marketing Budgets · Local SEO Lessons from Fitness Businesses · Local SEO Lessons from Restaurants · Game Design and Law Firm UX · Healthcare Fraud Defense Content · Local SEO Lessons from Home Services · Criminal Defense SEO · Courtroom Storytelling and Legal Branding · Music Industry Branding Lessons for Law Firms · Legal SEO News · Photography for Law Firm Websites · Legal Copywriting and Storytelling · Criminal Justice Policy and Search Trends · Criminal Defense SEO 101 · Law Firm Conversion Science · Defense Marketing for Athlete Cases · AI and Legal Marketing Technology · Out-of-State DUI and Location Search · Video Marketing for Defense Attorneys · Environmental Crime Defense Content
