In the eight years or so since I decided to create a website for my law firm, it has become apparent to me that if you don’t understand what Google is looking for in your website, you are going to be at an extreme disadvantage for being found on the internet by potential clients. And now there are other search engines besides Google, but the idea of Googling something has been synonymous with searching on the website. And so even though you could think about other browsers, and certainly we’re getting into an AI LLM stage where people are going to Grock and ChatGPT and Gemini, and of course Gemini being a Google product, it is still important in 2026 that you do what Google wants in order that it will serve up your website. And one of the things that is most important to Google, if you want your website to be served up in its search results, is for you to claim a Google business profile.

And this is something that used to be called Google My Business. They’ve rebranded. As of today, the official name is Google Business Profile. Basically, if you search for a lawyer or a website of a lawyer on Google, you might see in the right-hand side of the search results, a bunch of different squares pop up where you might see a picture of the lawyer, and it’s a place where you can put down reviews of the lawyer and that sort of thing. When you set up your new website, at least in the last eight years since I’ve been playing this game and certainly still in 2026, you have to create a Google business profile for your law firm. You have to associate it with the physical address. You have to point it at your website. When you set up the Google Business Profile, they mail you a postcard, you’ve got to mail it back.

This is part of the way that you’re able to show Google that this is not a fake website that’s created by a bot somewhere and that there’s a real human being there. And then you have to learn how to play the Google Business Profile game. And one of the things that I find to be, frankly, most distasteful about this game is getting Google business reviews. And in my world, because I’m a business to business lawyer, my clients tend to be CEOs of big companies. It’s extremely hard for me to say, “Hey, Mr. CEO, can you go online and find my Google business profile? Can you give me a five-star review? And can you say something nice about me and make sure to use the words design and construction so that people know what we’re talking about? ” I’m never going to go to my clients and ask them to do that because I just don’t have the sort of clients that would think that that’s normal.

My competition doesn’t do this because my competition isn’t playing the organic SEO game. They don’t understand how important this is, but I don’t want to be the only lawyer out there that’s imposing on my clients to go and give me these reviews. And so because I have to get them and I have now gotten up to around a hundred reviews, I look for every opportunity to get them in other places. When I speak and somebody says they like what I talked about, if I write, if I mentor somebody, if I do a little pro bono, I’m saying, “Could you please go onto Google and give me a review in my Google business profile?” It’s a little bit distasteful, but if you don’t play the review game, Google might not serve up your website in search results, even if it otherwise looks like a decent match for the search query.

So you got to set up your Google Business Profile, you got to link it to your website, you got to link it to the right kind of physical address. You have to play the review game and you also have to play the game of setting up the content on the Google Business Profile. And I have people that go to my Google Business profile and I have multiple because I have multiple offices and they upload new content and they upload photos. And playing this game is unfortunately part of what we have to do now in 2026 and for the foreseeable future in order to make your website performance. So if you are like me, a former big firm lawyer or a big firm lawyer thinking about setting up your website, you got to play the whole backend game. You’re going to have to have technical support there to make sure that Google knows you’re out there, but you got to set up your Google business profile and you got to do it in the right way if you want to increase the odds that your website is going to be served up to potential clients who might be interested in hiring you.