Websites, rankings, and clients for criminal defense firms
Criminal defense web design and SEO, built for the 2am call.
Criminal defense is almost never bought by the defendant - it is bought by a terrified family member with a first appearance in the morning and no idea what anything costs. We build for that person at that hour, rank you for the charge they actually type into their phone, and make sure someone picks up when they call.
Flat price. No contracts. You own everything.
One engagement covering the three things a defense firm needs: the website written for a family in crisis, charge-level search rankings, and the after-hours intake and campaigns that turn calls into retained clients.
Defense firms who want retained clients rather than calls from people who cannot afford private counsel.
The buyer is usually a family member in crisis, at night, paying a retainer up front. This practice area is decided at 2am, which makes intake coverage the campaign rather than an operational detail.
Sites that never mention cost, invisibility for the charges you most want to defend, and calls that ring into an empty office at the hours arrests actually happen.
Your website is written for a lawyer, the reader is a panicking parent, and the phone rings in an empty office.
She does not know what an arraignment is, what bond means, or whether she can afford you. Legal language at that moment reads as a closed door - and arrests do not happen during business hours, so neither do the calls that follow them.
Nothing about money
Unlike injury work, defense is paid up front, and the family has no idea whether that is two thousand dollars or twenty. Total silence about retainers makes them assume it is out of reach and keep dialing.
Charges lumped onto one page
DUI, drug trafficking, domestic violence, and federal charges are four different markets with four different competitor sets. A list of twelve practice areas with two sentences each ranks for none of them.
The overnight call goes unanswered
A family calls at 1am after an arrest. Voicemail. They call the next firm on the list. You paid to generate that call and lost it at the last possible step.
What each piece actually does for a defense firm.
These are not three products to shop separately. They are three parts of the same machine, and the order you fix them in decides how fast it pays back.
Gets the call at the worst hour of their life
Written for a frightened family member who has never needed a lawyer, not to impress other attorneys.
- ✓Charge-specific pages, because that is how people search
- ✓Honest retainer ranges and how payment actually works
- ✓Prominent phone with after-hours routing, plus discreet text options
- ✓The process explained plainly - first appearance, bond, what comes next
Ranks for the charge, not the job title
A family member searching at 2am types the specific thing that happened - the charge, the county, sometimes the jail. Firms with one practice-areas page get nothing.
- ✓A real page per charge you seriously defend
- ✓County and courthouse-level content, since defense follows the courts
- ✓Process content families search at 2am - almost entirely unclaimed
- ✓Full Spanish charge pages, barely contested in this market
Answers the phone, then measures retentions
After-hours coverage first, Google Screened above the ad auction, and separate budgets per charge so DUI clicks never eat the federal budget.
- ✓Overnight and weekend routing that reaches a real person
- ✓Google Screened verification handled, placed above standard ads
- ✓Independent budgets and bids per charge category
- ✓Every inquiry tracked through consultation to retainer
One build, one team, one number to call.
Not three vendors blaming each other. The people who build the site are the people who rank it and the people who spend the ad budget.
Charge-specific pages
DUI, possession, trafficking, domestic violence, assault, theft, gun charges, and federal matters - each a real page, because that is how people search.
Retainer transparency
Honest ranges and how payment works. You do not need a price list, but silence costs you clients who assumed they could not afford counsel.
Immediate, discreet contact
Prominent phone with after-hours routing, plus text and form options for people who cannot safely make a call.
The process explained
What happens at first appearance, how bond works, what to expect over the next weeks. This content converts because nobody else writes it plainly.
Compliant credibility
Experience, trial record, and credentials presented within Florida Bar advertising rules, with disclaimers handled properly.
Jurisdiction pages
County and courthouse-level content, because criminal defense search follows the court system rather than city boundaries.
Spanish throughout
Full Spanish site, charge pages, and ad copy - properly written and tagged. In Miami-Dade a very large share of these calls come in Spanish.
Map pack and attorney authority
Google Business Profile built out for "criminal lawyer near me" searches, plus individual attorney pages that rank for their own names.
After-hours intake
Routing, answering service integration, and instant acknowledgment so an overnight inquiry reaches someone who can actually help.
Google Screened
Verified legal services placement above standard ads, with license and background verification handled for you.
Charge-level campaigns
Separate budgets per charge type, so DUI clicks never consume the budget meant for federal or trafficking matters.
Retention attribution
Every inquiry tracked through consultation to retainer, by channel and charge type.
The person hiring you is rarely the person in custody.
This is the thing most defense firm websites get structurally wrong. The defendant is usually in jail with no phone. The person on your site at 2am is a mother, a spouse, or a sibling - frightened, ashamed, unsure whether they are even allowed to help, and completely unfamiliar with how any of this works. They are not evaluating your trial record; they are looking for someone who will explain what happens next and tell them it can be handled. Content written for that reader - plain, calm, procedural - converts dramatically better than content written to impress other attorneys.
- ✓Plain-language explanations of arrest, bond, and first appearance
- ✓Guidance on what the family can actually do right now
- ✓A calm, human tone rather than adversarial marketing language
- ✓Experience and trial record presented within Bar advertising rules
Silence about retainers costs you clients who could have paid.
Defense is bought differently than injury work - there is no contingency, and the family has to produce real money quickly, often while also posting bond. Because almost no firm publishes anything about cost, families assume the worst and call around until somebody gives them a number. Publishing honest ranges by charge type, explaining what a retainer covers, and mentioning payment arrangements where you offer them converts the people who were about to give up and request a public defender by default. It also saves your staff hours of calls that were never going to result in a retention. Discretion matters just as much: many of these visitors browse privately and cannot risk an obvious confirmation email on a shared device.
- ✓Honest retainer ranges by charge severity
- ✓Clear explanation of what a retainer does and does not cover
- ✓Text and form contact given equal weight with calling
- ✓Careful handling of confirmation messages and email subject lines
People search what they are afraid of, not what you call your practice.
The searches that produce defense clients are startlingly specific and frequently phrased as questions. What happens after a DUI arrest. Can you go to jail for a first offense. How much is bond for possession. My son was arrested last night. These do not look like commercial keywords, which is exactly why almost no firm builds for them - and why they are winnable. The person typing them is hours away from hiring somebody, and the firm that answered their question honestly at 2am is usually the one they call when the sun comes up.
- ✓Content built around real questions, not practice area labels
- ✓Penalties, process, and consequences explained without jargon
- ✓A real page per charge - DUI, possession, trafficking, DV, weapons, federal
- ✓Reaching the family during the panic window, before they call anyone
Defense geography is the county, and the Spanish search is wide open.
Where a case is heard determines which attorney makes sense to hire, and people intuitively search that way - by county, by courthouse, sometimes by the jail where the person is being held. A firm optimizing purely for a city name misses a large share of that volume. Separately, a very large portion of criminal defense inquiries in Miami-Dade come in Spanish, frequently from a family member more comfortable in it than the defendant, and the number of firms with genuinely built Spanish charge pages is small. Most have nothing at all. Both of these are structural openings most competitors have simply never taken.
- ✓County and courthouse-level content for the jurisdictions you work
- ✓Local procedure detail that demonstrates genuine familiarity
- ✓Charge and process pages genuinely written in Spanish, correctly tagged
- ✓Map pack and individual attorney pages most defense firms neglect
In this practice area, answering the phone is the competitive advantage.
Almost nothing else in defense marketing matters as much. Arrests cluster overnight and on weekends, the family starts calling immediately, and the firm that gets a human on the line first usually gets retained - not because they were the best lawyer available, but because they were the one who answered when everything felt out of control. Larger firms are often worse at this than solos, because their calls route into systems designed for business hours. Before touching a campaign, we make sure a 2am call reaches somebody, because otherwise every dollar spent upstream is wasted.
- ✓Overnight and weekend routing that reaches a real person
- ✓Answering service integration and instant acknowledgment
- ✓Missed-call text-back, since panicked families rarely leave voicemail
- ✓Intake able to take the call in the language it arrives in
A DUI budget and a federal defense budget should never be the same pot.
Charge types differ enormously in both volume and retainer value. DUI searches carry far more traffic than federal or trafficking matters, so a single combined campaign will spend almost everything on DUI clicks while the higher-value work never gets shown. Splitting budgets by charge type fixes it immediately and lets you bid sensibly. The same logic applies to qualification: a significant share of inquiries come from people who will end up with the public defender, and the answer is not screening harshly on the phone - it is setting retainer expectations on the site before the call, so everyone is treated respectfully and your staff is not drowning.
- ✓Independent budgets and bids per charge category
- ✓High-value matters protected from high-volume search terms
- ✓Retainer expectations set on the site, before the phone rings
- ✓A referral path for callers you genuinely cannot help
Ads stop. Rankings and reputation do not.
Paid placement produces calls while you are paying and stops the day you are not. Organic rankings behave differently - charge pages and the process content families search at 2am keep producing inquiries for years at no cost per call. In a practice area where the same firms bid against each other continuously, that difference compounds meaningfully. Paid coverage is worth running, particularly to cover the hours and charges where you need volume now, but the firms with stable case flow built something underneath it. And we always fix intake coverage first, because a campaign feeding an unanswered phone is money set on fire.
- ✓Calls that do not convert? It is intake coverage and retainer clarity.
- ✓No calls at all? Start with charge pages and the process content.
- ✓Busy but unprofitable? The charge budgets are not separated.
Cover the hours, then build and buy.
Free assessment
Where you rank by charge and jurisdiction and what is winnable, plus call volume by hour, answer rate, retention rate, and spend. Yours to keep either way.
Content and review
We draft charge and process pages in plain language a frightened family can follow; your firm reviews for accuracy and Bar compliance.
Fix intake, then build and rank
After-hours routing and instant acknowledgment live before any campaign spend, then the site, the charge pages, jurisdiction content, and Spanish versions.
Launch and reallocate monthly
Campaigns split by charge in English and Spanish, every login yours, budget moved each month toward what produced retained clients.
What our clients say about us
Amazing services, been working with Miami Web Lab for over 8 years and they have given me nothing but the best service, highly recommend working with them.
Miami Web Lab absolutely crushed it! If you need a website and don’t want to worry about the process, go to Miami Web Lab. They’re the real MVPs of the internet world.
MWL provided us with the technical expertise to quickly design and deploy our website. The personal touch his team provided is a breath of fresh air. Highly recommended.
Criminal Defense Web Design & SEO FAQs
How much does this cost?
The website is quoted flat after one call - solo firm sites start lower, builds with extensive charge libraries and full Spanish versions cost more. Search and campaign management are flat monthly, never a percentage of ad spend.
How long does this take?
Intake coverage fixes pay off immediately. Four to eight months for competitive charge terms in a market like Miami. Process and question-based content often ranks faster because almost no firm has written any. We are straight about timelines rather than promising quick wins.
Do we really need after-hours call handling?
In this practice area it is the highest-return thing you can fix. Arrests happen overnight and families call immediately. A firm that reaches voicemail at 1am is losing clients it already paid to generate.
Should we publish retainer ranges?
We recommend it, and most firms resist at first. Families cannot pay what they cannot estimate, and the ones who assume you are unaffordable simply never call. Ranges by charge type filter appropriately without committing you to a fixed price.
Which charges should we target first?
The ones you genuinely want and defend well. A firm that owns DUI and drug charges in its county will out-earn one ranking thinly across fifteen practice areas it is indifferent about.
Is it worth writing about bond and first appearance?
It is some of the highest-return content in this practice area. Families search it constantly at the worst moment of their lives, virtually no firm has written it plainly, and the firm that helped them understand it is the one they call.
How do we stop wasting time on callers who cannot pay?
Publish honest retainer ranges on the site so expectations are set before the call, and structure intake to establish the essentials early. Both are respectful and both protect your staff's capacity.
Is Google Screened worth it for defense firms?
Usually. It places you above the standard ad auction with a verification badge, which carries weight with a family who has never hired an attorney and is worried about being taken advantage of. We handle the verification.
How do you handle Florida Bar advertising rules?
We build with them in mind - disclaimer requirements, careful handling of past results, testimonial treatment, and ad copy written within the regulations. Your firm reviews and approves all content, but you will not be starting from a site that ignores the rules.
How do reviews work for a defense firm?
Delicately. Clients are often reluctant to be publicly associated with a criminal matter, and Bar rules constrain solicitation and outcome claims. We build a request process that respects both, frequently focused on the family member who hired you rather than the defendant.
Do we need Spanish?
In Miami-Dade, absolutely. A very large share of these calls come in Spanish and frequently from a family member who is more comfortable in it than the defendant would be.
Do we own the site, the ad accounts, and the call recordings?
Yes - domain, hosting, code, ad accounts, tracking, recordings, and attribution history all in your name. No contract.
Ready for a firm setup that answers at 2am?
Tell us which charges you want more of, where you practice, and what your answer rate looks like. We will show you which terms are winnable and where clients are being lost, then send back a plan, a flat price, and a launch date.