Law firm SEO
Law firm SEO, where the named solicitor is the ranking signal.
Legal search is expensive because a client is worth a great deal, and it is scrutinised because the advice matters. Both point the same way: the firms that win are the ones whose real, qualified people are visible on the page and legible to a machine. Most legal sites publish genuine expertise anonymously and wonder why a content farm outranks them.
Straight answer
You are competing on trust, and giving away the advantage.
A regulated firm with named, admitted solicitors holds something a content site cannot fake. Most legal websites then publish under "the team", which throws that advantage away at exactly the point Google is looking for it.
What holds legal sites back
- Articles bylined to the firm rather than a solicitor
- Profiles with a photograph and two sentences
- A location page for every town within fifty miles
- Practice area pages that describe the firm, not the problem
- Guides quoting limits and thresholds from a previous year
- Chasing head terms the incumbents have owned for a decade
What the YMYL standard rewards
- Named solicitors with admission dates and SRA registration
- Profiles connected in schema to the content they wrote
- Location pages only where an office genuinely exists
- Pages answering the question the client actually typed
- Review dates on anything the law changes
- Specific, winnable terms before contested head terms
On location pages, said plainly
A page per surrounding town, each one the same text with the place name swapped, is a doorway page. Google treats it as a site wide quality signal rather than a per page one, so it puts the whole domain at risk to chase searches you would probably not have won anyway. Where a firm has genuine offices we will build proper location pages. Where it does not, we will tell you no, and that is worth knowing before you brief someone who says yes.
Scope
What law firm SEO covers here.
Roughly in the order it pays back for a practice.
Solicitor entities
Your people as real entities with qualifications, admission dates and regulatory registration that resolve, connected to the content they are responsible for. The highest return work on most legal sites.
Practice area architecture
Which areas deserve a page, which are one intent split across four, and what each has to answer. Clients search their problem, not your department names.
Winnable terms first
The specific queries a firm can realistically take now, ahead of the head terms that need years of authority. Usually closer to instruction anyway.
Genuine local presence
Google Business Profile and local signals for offices that exist, done properly, rather than a page per postcode that puts the domain at risk.
Legal content freshness
Anything citing limits, thresholds or procedure decays on a known schedule. A review cycle built into the site so a stale figure is caught by process, not by a client.
Enquiry flow privacy
Case detail leaks into analytics and third party scripts more often than anyone intends, and in legal that is a confidentiality problem as much as a technical one.
Cost
What it costs.
Billed at £90 to £110 an hour, or the £95 blended rate where it crosses into development. Minimum engagement is 4 hours.
Legal and technical audit
From £900
Authorship signals, practice area overlap, local setup and the technical layer assessed together, ranked by what is costing you instructions.
Solicitor entity build
Scoped
Profiles rebuilt with real substance and connected in schema to the content each person stands behind, so the firm's authority is machine readable.
Growth, 8 hours a month
£760/month
The common shape for a firm working through a roadmap: practice area pages, authority signals and the technical work underneath.
Time is logged as it is spent and the ledger is open to you, including work that gets reverted.
FAQ
Questions clients actually ask
Why is legal SEO so expensive to compete in?
Because a single client is worth a great deal, so the paid cost per click runs into double figures and every firm in the city is buying the same terms. That pushes organic competition up with it, and it means the incumbents on page one have usually been investing for years rather than months.
The practical consequence is that "personal injury solicitor" is not a realistic first target for most firms. The winnable ground is narrower and more specific, and it is usually where the client actually is anyway.
Does legal content count as YMYL?
Yes. Legal advice can materially affect somebody's life, so Google applies its higher standard for expertise and trust. An article about a claims process published anonymously competes badly against the same article signed by a named solicitor with a firm and a regulator behind them.
In practice that means named authors with verifiable credentials, SRA registration stated and marked up, and review dates on anything where the law or the limits change.
Should each solicitor have their own page?
Usually yes, and not for vanity. A solicitor profile is what connects a real, qualified person to the content they wrote, which is the signal that separates your firm from a content farm covering the same topic. It also ranks for name searches, which matter more than most firms expect after a referral.
What makes them work is substance: qualifications, admission dates, the kind of matters actually handled, and links to the articles that person is responsible for. A photograph and two sentences does none of that.
Do we need pages for every practice area and every office?
You need pages for the practice areas you genuinely want work in, and location pages only where there is a real office with real people. Publishing a page for every town within fifty miles is the doorway page pattern, and it is a risk to the whole domain rather than to that page alone.
Where a firm has several genuine offices, they need to differ by more than a postcode: the people, the matters, the local courts. Otherwise they compete with each other and none of them wins.
How long does law firm SEO take to work?
Longer than most sectors, and the honest range is six to eighteen months for competitive practice areas. YMYL scrutiny is higher, the incumbents are established, and legal queries are exactly the sort Google is conservative about.
What can move faster is everything below the surface: indexation problems, three pages competing for one query, solicitor profiles that carry no signal. Fixing those can produce measurable change in weeks, which is usually where we start.
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