Choosing your primary Google Business Profile category for a Canadian law firm is one of the highest-leverage decisions you'll make. The primary category controls what Local Pack queries you're eligible to appear for. Most Canadian firms default to 'Law firm' as their primary, which is almost always wrong — it forces you to compete against every legal practice in your city for generic 'lawyer near me' queries while missing the higher-intent practice-area-specific queries. The correct approach: pick the single practice area that drives the most revenue or that you most want to grow. If 70% of your matters are personal injury, your primary should be 'Personal injury attorney'. If you're a family law boutique, 'Family law attorney'. The Local Pack will then surface you for 'family lawyer Ottawa', 'family law firm near me', and similar high-intent queries — much more valuable than generic 'lawyer' rankings. Use secondary categories for everything else you genuinely practice: 'Civil law attorney', 'Real estate attorney', 'Estate planning attorney', 'Tax attorney', etc. You can have up to 9 secondary categories. Do not stuff secondary categories with practices you don't actually offer — Google may suppress your listing for inaccuracy, and clients who book based on misleading categorization complain or leave bad reviews. For multi-location Canadian firms (e.g., a Toronto firm with offices in Ottawa and Vancouver), each location needs its own GBP listing with its own primary category. The locations can have different primary categories if they have genuinely different practice mixes. We've seen national firms gain 30–60% local-pack visibility just from correctly differentiating primary categories by location.