Law firm SEO is the work that puts a firm’s website and Google Business Profile in front of people searching for a solicitor: a couple whose offer on a flat has just been accepted and who need a conveyancer, an employee handed a settlement agreement on a Friday afternoon, a family sorting out a parent’s estate. I work with UK solicitors’ firms, from high-street practices to niche commercial firms, and the SRA’s rules on publicity shape every page I write for them.
How people look for a solicitor in the UK
Legal searches divide by urgency and by who is paying. That division decides which pages a firm needs.
- Local searches for a practice area. “Conveyancing solicitors Bromley”, “family lawyer near me”, “will writing solicitor Ealing”. Google answers many of these with the local pack, the map and three listings above the ordinary results, so each office’s profile, reviews and address carry a lot of weight.
- Urgent problems. “Police station solicitor”, “served with divorce papers”, “injunction solicitor today”. The person wants to speak to someone now, usually from a phone, and the page that wins puts a number and opening hours before anything else.
- Price research. “Conveyancing fees for a £400,000 house”, “how much does probate cost”. Firms often underrate these searches, and in several practice areas the SRA already requires a page that answers them.
- Questions asked before anyone instructs a solicitor. “Can my employer change my contract”, “do I need a solicitor for a lasting power of attorney”. People read first, then shortlist the firm that explained the problem most clearly.
- Commercial instructions. Founders and in-house lawyers searching for “shareholder agreement solicitor” or “commercial lease lawyer London” go on to check the fee earners’ profiles and the firm’s directory entries before they make contact.
Each practice area is a separate market with separate competitors. A conveyancing page competes with national online conveyancers; an employment page competes with Acas and Citizens Advice for the early questions. That is why a single “Our services” page listing twelve practice areas rarely ranks for any of them.
What is different about SEO for a law firm
For a firm in England and Wales regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the website is publicity and the SRA’s rules apply to all of it. Barristers, licensed conveyancers and firms in Scotland or Northern Ireland answer to other regulators whose principles are similar. I write to the relevant rules from the first draft rather than tidying up afterwards.
Accurate and not misleading
The SRA Code of Conduct requires publicity, including anything said about charges, to be accurate and not misleading. That rules out much of what generic marketing copy reaches for. “Specialist” needs a basis, such as a Law Society accreditation like the Conveyancing Quality Scheme, or a solicitor who handles nothing else. “No win, no fee” needs to say what the client may still pay, such as a success fee taken from damages. “Leading” and “best” need evidence, or they come out. A page that states plainly who does the work, how and for what fee serves the reader better and gives Google more to work with.
Price and service information
The SRA Transparency Rules require firms offering certain services to publish price and service details on their website. The list covers residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, summary motoring offences, immigration work other than asylum, employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal, debt recovery up to £100,000 and licensing applications for business premises. For those services the firm shows the total cost or a range, what it covers, disbursements and VAT, the key stages, typical timescales and the experience of the people doing the work. Every firm also publishes its complaints procedure and displays the SRA digital badge. I treat these pages as SEO assets: a clear conveyancing fees page answers exactly what price-researching visitors type, so the rule and the ranking opportunity point the same way.
Referral fees and bought leads
Section 56 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 bans paying or receiving referral fees in personal injury work, and the SRA looks closely at arrangements that work like referral fees under another name. That makes buying enquiries by the lead risky for a personal injury practice, and it is one reason organic search is worth more to these firms than to most. I build visibility the firm owns, in its own pages, profiles and reputation. I do not sell or broker leads.
Trust signals carry more weight
Google treats legal topics as ones where a poor answer can cause real harm, so it looks harder for signs of expertise and accountability, the qualities summed up as E-E-A-T. For a firm, that means named solicitors with proper profile pages, the SRA number in the footer, guides that show who wrote and checked them and when, and an easy route to the complaints procedure. Most of this is required anyway. The work is making it visible and connecting it.
How I run SEO for a law firm
- Agree which instructions matter. I start with the partners or the practice manager: which teams have capacity, which fee earners want more work and which matters are worth the most to the firm. Ranking for divorce enquiries helps nobody if the family team is already full.
- Audit the site and the profiles. Crawling and indexing, page titles, duplicated practice-area copy, each office’s Google Business Profile and the regulatory basics: badge, complaints page and price pages. I list the problems in order of what they are costing you.
- Give each search intent one page. Every practice area, and each distinct service inside it, gets a page built around how clients describe the problem. Conveyancing, for instance, usually splits into buying, selling, remortgaging and leasehold. The content plan for practice areas and guides follows from that map.
- Draft, then hand to a solicitor. The pages and guides are written or briefed and edited to the plan we agree. A solicitor in the relevant team checks every legal statement and signs it off, and can be named on the page as the reviewer, so legal accuracy stays with the people regulated for it.
- Build local and professional visibility. Office profiles through local SEO for each office, firm details that match across the SRA register, the Law Society’s Find a Solicitor and the legal directories, and reviews requested from every client rather than the delighted few.
- Measure instructions, not visits. Calls and forms are tracked by practice area, so you can see which pages bring matters the firm takes on, not just a traffic graph.
Mistakes I see on law firm websites
- One page doing the job of ten. A practice-area page covering divorce, children, finances and cohabitation in three paragraphs, which cannot rank for any of them.
- Guides that compete with each other. Several near-identical articles on the same question, written over the years by different people, which split Google’s attention through keyword cannibalisation and still lose to GOV.UK.
- Price information hidden or stale. Transparency Rules details in a PDF linked from the footer, with fees last updated years ago. It fails the reader, risks a breach and wastes a page that should rank.
- Office details that disagree. A merger or move leaves old names, addresses and numbers across directories and duplicate Google profiles, which confuses clients and Google alike.
- Contact forms that ask too much. A form demanding full case details before anyone has spoken to the person. Ask for a name, contact details and a short description, and leave the rest to the first call, where conflict checks belong.
Where paid search and other channels fit
SEO is slow to build and cheap to keep; paid search starts quickly and can become expensive in competitive practice areas. Many firms use both, with Google Ads for law firms covering urgent work and new offices while the organic pages mature. If you run an accountancy, consultancy or architecture practice rather than a law firm, SEO for professional services firms is written for your sector.
Next step
Send me your firm’s website and the practice areas you want more work in. I will look at the site, your Google profiles and the regulatory pages, and tell you what I would fix first and why. Start with a free SEO audit of your firm’s website; it costs nothing and commits you to nothing.