Many defense lawyers write their first charge page the way they would write a brief. It opens with the statute, quotes the elements and works through defenses in careful order. The legal content is often excellent. Then the page sits on page four of Google for a year, because a few basic choices about how it was built made it hard for search engines and readers to understand.
This guide is for lawyers who are new to marketing and want to understand those choices before writing or approving a charge page. None of it requires technical skill. It is mostly about deciding what the page is for and saying so clearly in the places search engines look.
The first decision is scope. A page titled "Criminal Defense" that covers DUI, theft, assault and drug charges in a few paragraphs each will struggle against pages that cover one charge in depth. Search engines try to match a query to the page that best answers it, and a page about everything rarely answers anything well.
Give each charge you want to be found for its own page. If you practice in one main county, name it. A page about DUI defense in a specific county answers a narrower question than a page about DUI defense in general, and narrower questions are easier to win.
Every page has a title tag, which is the text that usually appears as the clickable headline in search results and in the browser tab. It is set in your website platform, often in an SEO or page settings panel. Google may rewrite titles it finds unhelpful, but a clear title is still the best way to influence what appears.
A good charge page title names the charge and the place, and it fits in about 60 characters so it is less likely to be cut off. For example: "Domestic Violence Defense Lawyer in Sacramento County."
The main heading on the page itself, usually called the H1, should say much the same thing in natural words. Then use smaller headings for each section, such as penalties, the court process and common defenses. Headings help readers scan on a phone and help search engines see how the page is organized.
Keep the web address short and readable, with words separated by hyphens. A path like /domestic-violence-defense/ is easy to understand and easy to share.
The meta description is a short summary that may appear under the title in search results. Google often writes its own snippet from the page text, so this is not something to agonize over. Still, a one or two sentence description of what the page covers and who it helps gives Google a sensible option and gives readers a reason to click.
Search engines have become good at recognizing pages that answer the questions people actually ask. The people searching for a charge page want to know a handful of things: how serious the charge is, what happens next, what the possible penalties are and whether a lawyer can help.
A useful charge page usually covers:
Accuracy comes before everything. Confirm penalty ranges against the current statute, date the page and review it when the law changes. Bar rules on misleading communications apply to every word on the page, so avoid promises about results and check your state bar's advertising rules.
A new charge page should not stand alone. Link to it from your practice areas page and from any related pages, such as a page about the court process or a blog post that answers a question about that charge. Link out from it to related pages too. These internal links help search engines find the page and show which pages belong together.
Once the page is live, check that it can be found. Google Search Console is free, and its URL Inspection tool lets you see whether Google has indexed a page and request indexing if it has not. If you have never used it, this walk-through of Google Search Console for defense lawyers in the first week explains what to look at.
Give a new page time. Rankings for competitive charges can take months to settle, and they depend on much more than one page. After a few weeks, Search Console will show which searches the page appears for, which tells you whether readers see it the way you intended.
Beginner-friendly SEO guides for lawyers are collected in the SEO basics library for attorneys new to marketing.
Long enough to answer the questions above clearly. For most charges that means several hundred words or more, but padding a page to reach a number helps nobody.
Cite it and summarize it in plain language. A short quotation of the key language can help, but a reader at midnight needs your explanation more than the full text.
Copying a page and changing only the county name creates near-duplicate pages that rarely do well. If the courts and procedures differ, write about those differences.
SBD Marketing works only with criminal defense firms, one firm per city. It builds websites for defense practices, handles SEO for the charges a firm defends, works on visibility in AI search tools and runs SEO audits.