Is Google Actually Showing Your Law Firm's Pages? How to Check

You've invested time and money into a professional law firm website. You've got beautifully written practice area pages, helpful blog posts, and an "About" page that tells your firm's story. But here's a question that might keep you up at night: is Google actually showing any of it to potential clients? Surprisingly, many law firm websites have pages that Google doesn't even know exist. If Google hasn't indexed a page, it might as well not be there.

What indexing actually means

Think of Google as the world's largest library. Before a book can be checked out, a librarian has to catalog it -- record the title, author, subject, and shelf location. Only then can someone search the catalog and find it. Google works the same way. Before your web page can appear in search results, Google has to crawl it (visit and read it) and then index it (add it to its catalog).

There's an important distinction here:

• Crawling is when Google's automated bots visit your page and read its content. Think of this as the librarian picking up the book and flipping through it.
• Indexing is when Google decides the page is valuable enough to add to its catalog. Just because Google visits a page doesn't mean it will include it in search results.

A page that has been crawled but not indexed is like a book the librarian read but decided not to put on the shelf. Nobody searching the catalog will ever find it.

Why this matters for your law firm

If your practice area pages aren't indexed, nobody searching for "divorce attorney in [your city]" will find you through Google -- no matter how well-written those pages are. Here are common reasons law firm pages fail to get indexed:

• Accidental "noindex" tags: During website development, developers often add a tag that tells Google, "Don't index this page." Sometimes these tags are left in place when the site goes live. It's more common than you'd think.
• Thin content: If a page has very little text or substance, Google may consider it not worth indexing. A practice area page with just one paragraph and a stock photo might not make the cut.
• Crawl errors: If Google's bots can't access a page -- because of server errors, broken links, or misconfigured settings -- it can't index what it can't read.
• Duplicate content: If Google finds substantially identical content on multiple pages, it may choose to index only one version and ignore the rest.
• Missing internal links: If none of your other pages link to a particular page, Google's bots may never discover it. Orphan pages -- those with no internal links pointing to them -- often go unindexed.

How to check if your site has this

Here are two simple methods anyone can use:

Method 1: The "site:" search operator

1. Open Google and type site:yourfirm.com (replace with your actual domain).
2. Google will show you every page from your website that it has indexed.
3. Count the results. Does the number seem right? If your site has 30 pages but Google only shows 12, that's a big problem.
4. Look for specific pages. Try site:yourfirm.com family law to see if your family law page is indexed. If it doesn't show up, Google hasn't indexed it.

Method 2: Google Search Console

1. Log in to Google Search Console (see our separate guide on setting this up).
2. Click on "Pages" in the left sidebar.
3. You'll see a breakdown of how many pages are indexed and how many are not, along with specific reasons why pages were excluded.
4. Click on any "Not indexed" reason to see exactly which pages are affected.

The Search Console method gives you much more detail and is the most reliable way to understand your indexing status.

What to do next

If you've discovered that important pages are missing from Google's index, here's your action plan:

• Check for "noindex" tags. Ask your web developer to verify that no live pages contain a noindex meta tag or header. This is the most common culprit and the easiest to fix.
• Strengthen thin pages. If any practice area or service pages have fewer than 300 words of unique content, consider expanding them with genuinely helpful information that potential clients would want to read.
• Fix crawl errors. Check Google Search Console for any access problems and resolve them with your developer.
• Build internal links. Make sure every important page on your site is linked from at least one other page. Your main navigation, footer, and related-content sections are natural places for these links.
• Submit a sitemap. An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages you want Google to know about. Submit it through Google Search Console to give Google a complete roadmap of your site.
• Request indexing. In Search Console, you can paste any specific URL into the inspection tool and click "Request Indexing" to ask Google to visit it. This is one of the checks the LexGrow SEO platform handles automatically, monitoring your indexing coverage and alerting you when important pages drop out of Google's catalog.

Your website is only as valuable as the pages Google actually shows to potential clients. Take twenty minutes today to run the site: search and see what comes up. You might be surprised -- and now you'll know exactly what to do about it.