Dallas law firm SEO: seven markets in one city

Dallas carries seven of the eight practice areas we measure, and they are 8.4 times apart on price: $116.39 for a personal injury click against $13.85 for an employment one, measured 3 August 2026. One search plan for the whole firm mis-prices most of it.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

How far apart are Dallas practice areas?

Far enough that two departments in one building are in unrelated markets.

Volumes and click prices measured 3 August 2026. The right-hand column is volume multiplied by click price — arithmetic, not a forecast, and not revenue, profit or instructions won. It is what buying every one of those searches for a month would cost at Google's own prices. The dataset treats family and divorce as a single category, so that row covers both.

The two top rows are the ones to sit with. Personal injury and family are almost the same size — 6,600 searches against 6,280 — and the family market costs 32% of the injury one per click, which is division on the two measured prices. A firm running both departments is competing in a $768,174 market and a $236,065 market at the same time, and no single budget line describes both.

Where does Dallas sit against the other cities?

Everywhere, which is the point.

Ranked against the other US cities we hold, on click price, Dallas comes third on immigration, fourth on real estate, fifth on family and divorce, seventh on personal injury, seventh on probate, ninth on employment and fourteenth on business. That ordering is a sort of the rows we already publish, not a new measurement.

Two of those positions are worth naming. Dallas immigration runs at $19.34, third of twenty cities and above both New York at $15.21 and Los Angeles at $14.71, on 4,400 searches a month — one of the larger immigration markets in the dataset as well as one of the dearest. Dallas business runs at $17.52, fourteenth of the nineteen cities carrying that category, on 390 searches. In one city, the same buyer meets a national top-three market and a national bottom-third one.

What follows from that is unglamorous. A plan written for the firm rather than for the practice area will be roughly right for one department and wrong for the rest, usually by over-investing in the cheap markets because they were easier to reach and under-investing in the expensive ones because progress looked slow.

Which Dallas figure is missing, and what do we do about it?

Criminal defense, and the honest answer is that we leave the gap visible.

The dataset carries criminal defense for 17 of the 20 US cities. Dallas is one of the three it does not cover, alongside Austin and Columbus. So a Dallas criminal defense practice reading this page gets no figure from us for its own market, and that is a real limitation rather than a formatting quirk.

We will not substitute Houston's number for it. Houston criminal defense runs at 4,400 searches a month and $59.34, measured 3 August 2026, and quoting that to a Dallas firm as though it described Dallas would be inventing a figure by borrowing one. Across the seven areas both cities carry, Houston's volumes run between 1.2 and 3.4 times Dallas's, which is division on the measured rows — there is no stable ratio to convert by. A firm in that position should treat the click price as unknown and ask any supplier quoting one where it came from.

Does an expensive click mean a page is harder to rank?

We do not know, and the honest position is that the two are not the same measurement.

A click price is what advertisers agreed to pay in an auction. An organic position is decided by different machinery entirely, and we hold no data joining the two. What a high price does tell you is that a number of businesses looked at the same searches and concluded they were worth bidding for, which is information about commercial belief rather than about difficulty.

So the useful reading of the $116.39 row is not "this will be hard". It is "several well-funded firms already decided this traffic was worth $116.39 a visit, and they will not have stopped at the ads." That is inference from the bidding, not a measurement of the results page.

What actually changes between a $116.39 page and a $13.85 page?

Not the writing. The patience, the depth, and the number of people already there.

The writing is the same job in both: the question in the client's words, the answer in the firm's, the named fee earner, and what happens first. What changes is everything around it.

• How long before anything moves. In a market several firms have been writing into for years, a new page joins a longer queue. We cannot put a number on that queue and will not pretend to.
• How narrow the target has to be. The head term in an expensive market is the most contested phrase in the city. The questions underneath it are not, and they are answered by the same fee earner in the same week.
• What a thin page costs you. In a cheap market a mediocre page is invisible. In an expensive one it is invisible and also sits beside firms that treat this as a standing budget line.
• Whether buying is the better answer this quarter. Sometimes it is. We do not manage ad spend, so a Dallas injury firm that needs matters in the next ninety days needs a different supplier, and we would rather say that here than after an invoice.

Which suppliers should a Dallas firm compare?

Four we read in full, and the single field we recorded about each.

Of 40 legal-marketing suppliers read in full on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price at all, 5 showed only a "from" range, 8 claimed a guarantee, and 1 offered work with no minimum term. We recorded whether a figure was visible and nothing more. We will not say what any of them charges — the tooling collected case values and fragments alongside genuine fees, and a wrong number attached to a named business is not worth publishing. Nothing here describes the quality of their work, which we did not examine.

The question worth asking each of them in this city is narrower than usual: which of my practice areas is this quote priced for? An answer that names one is workable. An answer that covers all seven at one number has not looked at the table above.

What does this cost, and why never per inquiry?

$1,450 for the Practice Sprint and $2,900 for the build. Fixed, published, no minimum term.

The same figures apply in Dallas as anywhere, because the work is the same work. We never charge per inquiry, per case or per matter. We charge for the work by scope and time. Lawyer advertising in the United States runs through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted differently by each state, and how it bears on a particular firm is a question for that firm and its own advisers.

We also cannot promise a ranking, a position or a number of clients. Eight of the 40 suppliers we read on 3 August 2026 claimed a guarantee of some kind; nobody controls the auction or the algorithm.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026 — including one named on this page. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat the reading rather than take ours. It also gives you the volume and click price for each of your own practice areas, which is the table this page is built on.

Get the report — five questions, about two minutes →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

For the work itself, step by step, once the practice area is chosen: law firm seo guide.

If the firm is small enough that one person does all of this: small law firm marketing machine.

On what a low quote in an expensive market usually contains: how to find cheap rate law firm marketing los angeles.

For the practice area at the bottom of the Dallas table, where search reaches least: corporate law firm marketing.

On the model this page refuses, and why: legal leads law firm marketing.

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