The Core30 SEO Frameworkfor Law Firms
Core30 is the 30-page law-firm SEO methodology Rubiks runs on its own site. Silos, on-page, technical, audit, reporting, ABA, CRO. Open framework.
Core30 is the 30-page law-firm SEO methodology Rubiks runs on its own site. Silos, on-page, technical, audit, reporting, ABA, CRO. Open framework.
Core30 is a thirty-page, three-silo framework for law-firm search visibility. Two commercial silos capture transactional and local intent across every major practice area. One methodology silo proves the framework as a content asset and feeds authority into both commercial silos. The output is a site that is search-visible across the full law-firm intent spectrum, structurally coherent in the eyes of Google's ranking systems, and defensible against the most common patterns of generalist-agency ranking decay.
It is a methodology, not a checklist. A checklist tells you what to do. A methodology tells you why one structural decision causes the next, and what happens when you skip the dependency.
Core30 is the methodology Rubiks Technology built on its own domain.
The site you are reading is the build. The thirty pages exist because we wanted the proposal you read to be the proposal you are already standing inside.
Captures transactional intent across every major U.S. practice area. The pillar at /law-firm-seo-agency/ targets the broad agency-level term. The nine children target practice-area-specific queries — personal injury, criminal defense, family, estate planning, immigration, workers comp, employment, mass tort, multi-practice. Together they signal that this entity does law-firm SEO across the full transactional intent map.
Captures local intent — the map pack, GBP, reviews, geo pages, citations, NAP, multi-location. The pillar at /local-seo-for-law-firms/ targets the broad local-agency term. The nine children target the disciplines within local SEO. The local silo is engineered to convert: map-pack ranking is the highest-converting placement in legal search, and the silo is built so that placement is engineered, not hoped for.
The pillar you are reading. Nine children cover the structural disciplines that make the other two silos rank. Silo architecture, content inventory, on-page, technical, audit, reporting, ABA-compliance, CRO, link building. Methodology is the most-linked-to silo on the site. Both commercial silos reference its pages whenever the underlying discipline is relevant. The methodology pages link out to commercial silos with concrete examples — "here's how silo architecture works for a personal injury firm" — so the abstract grounds in the specific.
The structure that holds everything else up. Pillar pages, child pages, link rules, anchor-text rules, no-orphan rules, cross-silo cross-link rules. Most law-firm sites have flat or shallow architectures because nobody mapped the link graph before content was written. Silo architecture fixes that by deciding the graph first.
Before any new page ships, an inventory of what already exists is built. Every page on the firm's current site is logged with its URL, primary keyword, target intent, current rank, and link role. Topic mapping then identifies the gaps. This is the unglamorous work that prevents the most expensive SEO mistake — publishing into a hole that was never measured.
Title tags, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, internal-link anchors, schema, image alt, URL conventions, the soft-CTA H2 trap. Law-firm on-page is unusual because legal content is dense — H2 patterns that work for an e-commerce site break for a 3,000-word practice-area page. The on-page page covers the patterns that work.
Site speed, Core Web Vitals, mobile UX, schema (Attorney, LegalService, LocalBusiness, FAQ, BreadcrumbList), canonical handling, hreflang for bilingual immigration practices, internal redirects from old practice pages. Technical SEO for law firms is mostly schema discipline — get that right and the rest is small.
The thirty-point audit Rubiks runs at the start of every engagement. Architecture (5 points), on-page (8), technical (6), local (6), content (3), reporting (2). The audit is the diagnosis the rest of the engagement is built from. The framework is published in full.
The monthly report is the contract. Every engagement gets one chart that matters: cost-per-signed-case by source, against last month and last quarter. Underneath that, supporting layers — map-pack rank, organic rank, GBP-driven call volume, content-engine output. The reporting page covers the dashboard build, the GA4 events, the call tracking, and how to read the numbers.
State bar ethics rules govern how lawyers advertise, how they solicit clients, how they handle reviews, how they describe their specializations, and how they manage trust accounts. Most marketing agencies are unaware of these rules. ABA-compliant marketing is the discipline of doing aggressive SEO inside a compliance perimeter. The page is written for marketers who do not have a JD, by an agency that has had to learn the rules the hard way.
Conversion rate optimization for law-firm sites. Hero clarity, trust elements, intake-form psychology, click-to-call placement, the case-result trust trap (more is not always better), live-chat vs. callback-form decision logic. CRO is where the SEO work either converts to signed cases or gets wasted at the door.
The link sources that move the needle for law-firm rankings — bar associations, law schools, chambers of commerce, legal directories, scholarship-page outreach (and why the scholarship trick still works in 2026), HARO equivalents, original legal-data publications. The page covers source mining, the outreach pattern, and the white-hat anchor distribution that does not trigger penalty risk.
Three reasons.
The agencies that own a category in Google's eyes are the ones whose published frameworks get cited. The ones that hide their playbook get ranked behind the ones that publish it.
If we are the only agency publishing a thirty-page methodology specifically called "Core30 for law firms," then in two years the law-firm-SEO conversation includes the word "Core30" — and we are the named methodology.
Firms that read all thirty pages and decide they would rather hand the methodology to their in-house team are not the firms we are best positioned to help. Firms that read the methodology and decide they want the team that built it are exactly the firms we want.
Read the pillar (this page). Read silo architecture and content inventory before you do anything else. Run the audit on your current site. Map the gap. Build the practice-area silo first; the local silo second. Layer on the methodology silo internally — you don't need to publish a public methodology silo unless category authority is one of your goals.
If you want a guide, the SEO Audit Framework page is the starting point. It tells you exactly what to look at, in what order, and what each finding implies for the build sequence.
Before a dollar is spent, you see exactly where your site leaks equity and which structural fixes compound.
The engagement opens with the audit. We bring it to the first conversation, mapped against your current site. From there: which pieces of Core30 your firm needs first, what the 90-day, 180-day, and 12-month outcomes look like, what the build actually costs. If we agree there's a fit, the next document is the proposal. If we don't, the written audit is yours either way — you've still walked away with a diagnosis you can act on.
See the same 30-point audit we ran on ourselves. Before a dollar is spent, you see exactly where your site leaks equity and which structural fixes compound. No vanity metrics, no obligation.
