Somebody got walked out of the building this afternoon with a cardboard box and a severance agreement that expires in 21 days. Tonight they’ll google “is my severance agreement fair” or “fired after complaining to HR,” and whichever employment lawyer shows up first has a real shot at the case. That’s the whole game in employment law marketing. The window is short, the searcher is rattled, and most firms aren’t showing up in it at all.
Key Takeaways
- Most employment cases start with a search made within days of a termination, often from a phone, often at night.
- Severance review is the best front door for an employment practice: it’s specific, urgent, and easy for a worker to act on.
- Plaintiff-side firms should build pages around the event (fired, demoted, retaliated against) rather than the statute.
- Intake screening matters more here than in almost any other practice area, because volume is high and case value varies wildly.
- Content that explains what a worker should do in the next 48 hours tends to outrank and outconvert generic “know your rights” pages.
Why employment law is a different marketing problem
Personal injury firms fight over a handful of expensive keywords. Employment lawyers have it stranger. The demand is spread across dozens of situations (wrongful termination, unpaid overtime, pregnancy discrimination, retaliation, FMLA interference, non-competes) and a worker rarely knows which legal category they’re in. They know what happened to them. They don’t know it’s called retaliation.
That gap is where most firm websites fall apart. A practice area page titled “Title VII Discrimination Claims” is accurate, and nobody searching at 11 p.m. after being fired will ever type it.
There’s also the case-value problem. An unpaid overtime claim for one hourly worker might be worth a few thousand dollars, while a senior executive’s discrimination claim could settle in the high six figures. Same website, same phone line, very different economics. Your marketing has to attract the calls you want and your intake has to sort the rest quickly and kindly.
Build pages around what happened, not the statute
Start with a list of the events that push people to call you. Pull it from your own intake notes if you can. It’ll probably look something like this:
- Fired shortly after reporting harassment or a safety issue
- Offered a severance package and told to sign quickly
- Demoted or had hours cut after returning from medical or parental leave
- Not paid for overtime, or classified as a contractor when they’re really an employee
- Asked to sign a non-compete on the way out
Each of those deserves its own page, written in the language a worker uses. “Fired after reporting to HR” beats “Retaliation Claims” as an H1. Inside the page you can explain the legal framework, cite the relevant federal and state law, and describe what a claim looks like. But the page has to meet the reader where they are first.
The severance review page
If you only build one page this quarter, build this one. Severance review is the cleanest entry point in employment law. The worker has a document in hand, a deadline, and a specific question: should I sign this? It’s easy to offer a flat-fee or free review, it’s easy for the searcher to say yes, and a meaningful share of those reviews surface claims the worker didn’t know they had.
Put the deadline math right on the page. Many releases for workers 40 and older give 21 days to consider (45 in group layoffs) plus a 7-day revocation window under the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act. People search those numbers. Answering them plainly makes you the obvious call.
Local SEO still carries most of the weight
Employment searches are local even when they don’t look like it. Someone searching “wrongful termination lawyer” gets a map pack, and those three listings take a large share of the calls. Your Google Business Profile should list employment law as the primary category, carry reviews that mention specific situations (with client permission and within your bar’s rules), and link to a landing page for the city, not your homepage.
State law matters here too. California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Washington all have employee protections that go well past federal law, and searchers in those states often include the state name. A page about California’s wage and hour rules or New York’s non-compete landscape can pull steady organic traffic for years.
Paid search: narrow beats broad
“Employment lawyer” is expensive and mixed-intent. Plenty of those clicks are employers looking for defense counsel, HR staff doing research, or people who want free advice with no case attached. Tighter phrases tend to perform better: “severance agreement review,” “fired after medical leave,” “unpaid overtime lawyer [city].” Run them to matching landing pages and add negatives aggressively (employer, template, jobs, salary, free form).
If budget is tight, consider running paid search only during evenings and weekends. That’s when workers search and when your competitors’ intake teams are asleep. It sounds backwards. For a lot of plaintiff-side firms, it’s where the cheapest good cases come from.
Content that earns trust in a bad week
The strongest employment law content we’ve seen is practical and a little blunt. A post called “What to Do in the 48 Hours After You’re Fired” will outperform “Understanding At-Will Employment” almost every time, because it answers the question people actually have. Tell them to save their texts and emails before their accounts get shut off. Tell them to write down a timeline while it’s fresh. Tell them not to sign anything tonight.
That kind of piece also builds the case file you’ll need later, which is a nice side effect. The client arrives organized.
A few other formats that work well:
- Plain-language explainers on state-specific topics, like final paycheck deadlines or whether a non-compete is enforceable where they live
- Short videos of an attorney answering one question in under 90 seconds
- Case result summaries (anonymized and compliant) grouped by situation rather than by dollar amount
Intake is where employment firms win or lose
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Good employment marketing will send you more calls than you can take, and a lot of them won’t be viable. Some will be wage claims too small to pursue, some will be sympathetic situations with no legal violation, some will be outside your state.
That’s fine, as long as intake handles it well. A written screening script, a clear referral list for cases you don’t take, and a fast callback on the ones you do. Speed matters because workers often call three or four firms in one evening. The first attorney to call back with a real answer tends to get the retainer.
Track which pages and campaigns produce signed cases, not just calls. Once you’ve got a few months of data, you’ll probably find that one or two situations (often severance review and retaliation) drive most of your fee revenue, and you can shift budget accordingly.
Staying inside the ethics rules
Everything above has to fit within your state’s advertising rules. Avoid guarantees, label past results carefully, keep testimonials compliant, and be thoughtful about language like “specialist” if your state restricts it. None of that limits the strategy much. It just means reviewing copy before it goes live, which is a good habit anyway.
If you want help building pages around the situations that bring you your best cases, talk to our team. We’ll look at your current site and intake data and show you where the gaps are.
