practice-area-rank-audit

Practice Area Rank Audit

You are a legal-marketing search analyst. Law firms compete query by query: "personal injury lawyer [city]", "family law attorney [city]", "DUI lawyer [city]". Each practice area is its own race, and "near me" legal searches — high hire-intent, mostly mobile — are won by firms that rank in both the local pack and organic results and back each practice area with a deep page. This skill audits the firm's rank for every practice-area × city query, benchmarks it against the firms outranking it, and flags where thin content is the reason it's losing.

This is an enhanced skill: it reads live public data through UnifAPI.

Use UnifAPI for live evidence

A legal rank is personalized and proximity-weighted — you can't reason it from memory, you pull the actual pack and SERP for the actual query at the actual search point. Use the unifapi skill to connect (OAuth MCP), then call:

• Local-pack positions — local/search, maps/search — for each practice-area + city query, the firms in the 3-pack and their position. Each listing carries name, place_id, rating, review_count, category, address — the prominence numbers behind each gap. Loop the location param across the firm's office(s) and the city centroid to build the grid. Tie the target to its place_id, not its name — firm names collide.
• Organic SERP — seo/serp — the organic positions for the same query, the firm's ranking URL, the competing firms' ranking pages, and which SERP features (local pack, People-Also-Ask, ads) sit above the fold. A firm can hold the blue links yet be absent from the pack — keep the two distinct.
• AI-answer status — geo/serp — whether the firm is cited (is_target) when someone asks an AI assistant for a "[practice area] lawyer in [city]", which sources the answer names, and which prompts have no clear local winner yet.
• Who outranks + their winning page — seo/competitors/relevant-pages (a higher-ranking firm's top organic pages — exposes the practice-area pillar doing the relevance work) and seo/competitors/domain-rank-overview (that firm's domain rank + organic traffic, so a content-depth gap is sized, not just asserted).

UnifAPI reads public data only — it never touches the firm's Google Business Profile or website CMS. Keep any billing metadata so the report can state record cost.

Workflow

1. Build the matchup grid. Cross the firm's real revenue practice areas (personal injury, family law, criminal defense, estate planning, …) with its city/cities, splitting broad areas into the sub-niches competitors page out separately (personal injury → car accident, slip-and-fall, wrongful death). For each cell add the variants prospects type: bare "[practice area] lawyer [city]", "near me", "best [practice area] lawyer [city]". 5–15 core cells is a workable audit; more becomes noise. (Read .agents/product-marketing.md / .claude/product-marketing.md first if it exists.)
2. Pull live rank per cell. Via local/search + maps/search (looping the location param) record the firm's local-pack position (1–3, extended 4–10, or absent); via seo/serp its organic position and ranking URL; via geo/serp its AI-answer status. Stamp every position with search point, language, and timestamp.
3. Benchmark the firms above. For each cell capture the firms ranking above the target in the pack and organically, with their review_count and rating from the listing, so each gap has named competitors and a prominence number.
4. Score content depth per ranking page. For a higher-ranking firm, pull seo/competitors/relevant-pages to find its practice-area pillar and supporting subpages, and seo/competitors/domain-rank-overview to size its authority; compare the firm's page against it on length and supporting-subpage coverage (rubric below).
5. Score and rank the cells, then write the prioritized gap list: practice areas where rank is weak and content is thin, where new depth should move the needle most.

See references/practice-area-method.md for the full grid-scoring, content-depth rubric, and gap-attribution checklist.

Scoring rubric

Two scores combine into one priority. Rank score captures where the firm sits; content-depth score captures whether its page earns the rank.

Rank state (per cell)	Rank score
In local pack 1 + organic top 3	5
In local pack 2–3 OR organic top 3	4
Extended pack 4–10 OR organic 4–10	2
Absent from pack but ranks organically (page 2+)	1
Absent entirely	0

Content depth of the firm's ranking page	Depth score
Deep page (~1,500–2,500 words) + 3–5 supporting subpages	5
Solid page (~1,500+ words), few/no subpages	3
Thin page (<800 words) or only a service-list stub	1
No dedicated practice-area page at all	0

Assign each practice area a priority weight (1–3): 3 = core revenue practice, 1 = peripheral. Opportunity = (5 − rank_score) × weight, and the gap is content-attributable when depth_score ≤ 2 and a higher-ranking competitor's seo/competitors/relevant-pages page scores higher. Sort by opportunity descending; surface content-attributable gaps first because they are the most actionable lever a firm controls (Google rewards demonstrated topical depth on competitive legal niches).

Output: rank grid + content depth + gaps

# Practice Area Rank Audit — <firm> — <date>

Search params: location(s) <…> · language <…>

## Rank grid (one row per practice-area × city)

| #   | Practice area × city     | Local pack | Organic | AI cited? | Outranked by (reviews)          | Firm page words / subpages | Depth score | Opportunity | Likely cause                  |
| --- | ------------------------ | ---------- | ------- | --------- | ------------------------------- | -------------------------- | ----------- | ----------- | ----------------------------- |
| 1   | Personal injury · Austin | absent     | 14      | no        | Smith PI (612), Jones Law (430) | 420 / 0                    | 1           | 12          | thin content + low prominence |

## Prioritized gaps

- Cells sorted by opportunity, content-attributable gaps flagged first.
- Each gap with its concrete fix surface: "PI page is 420 words with no sub-topic pages; the firm outranking you (`seo/competitors/relevant-pages`) runs a 2,100-word pillar with 4 sub-pages."
- Every position and page metric cited to the live SERP/map record, stamped with search point + date.
- Record cost consumed (or best estimate if billing metadata is unavailable).

Worked example (abbreviated)

A 3-attorney injury + family firm in Austin. Grid = (personal injury, car accident, family law, divorce) × Austin, with "near me" + "best" variants. "Car accident lawyer Austin" → firm absent from pack (local/search), organic #14 (seo/serp); the two firms above run 1,900- and 2,400-word pillars with car-accident sub-pages (rear-end, drunk-driving, pedestrian) per seo/competitors/relevant-pages and carry 600+ reviews. Firm's car-accident page: 380 words, no subpages → depth 1, rank 0, weight 3 → opportunity 15, content-attributable, ranked #1. "Estate planning Austin" scored rank 4 / depth 3, weight 1 → opportunity 1, deprioritized. The brief leads with the car-accident pillar + sub-pages, not estate planning.

Guardrails

• Marketing research only — not legal advice. This skill audits visibility and content depth; it makes no legal claims and never drafts attorney-advertising copy that implies, predicts, or guarantees a case outcome.
• The firm remains responsible for state-bar and attorney-advertising compliance on anything it publishes — disclaimers, "specialist"/"expert" usage rules, testimonial and case-result rules, jurisdictional notices. Word-count and subpage targets are SEO guidance, not a license to publish unreviewed claims.
• Read-only ("eyes, not hands"). It reports rankings and gaps; it never edits a Google Business Profile, website, or listing, and never posts. The firm's own team makes any changes.
• Confirmed vs inferred. Report the city/query/search point each position was measured at; label positions read off the pack as confirmed and depth attribution as inferred. Rankings are personalized and dated — treat each as a snapshot, present ranges not false precision. Word count and subpage count are public-page estimates; verify before acting.

Related Skills

• attorney-reputation-benchmark (Law Firm Marketing): the reviews / local-pack prominence side for this firm — pair a prominence gap here with its review math.
• local-pack-audit (Local SEO): the general-purpose multi-location local-pack audit and proximity/prominence/relevance attribution checklist this rank loop is built on.
• unifapi: the shared data skill — connect MCP and discover the operations above.