Law firm SEO that reaches page one and stays there
We run SEO for solicitors and law firms across England and Wales: the practice-area pages, the local listings, the authority and the technical work that put a firm in front of people at the moment they look for a lawyer. One client has held over a million organic clicks a year for four years running.
Stephensons Solicitors LLP: 409% more ranking keywords, 193% more organic traffic, and page one for competitive terms across several practice areas.
Trusted by firms including
Organic search is the channel these numbers come from. Read the case study.
What page one looks like for a legal search
A search like “divorce solicitor manchester” returns five different kinds of result, and a firm can appear in four of them. Law firm SEO is the work of earning each one, because the person searching rarely scrolls past them.
| Where a firm can appear | What decides it | What we do about it |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overview or AI Mode answer | Shown mainly for questions (“how long does a divorce take”). Google cites pages that answer plainly, name their author and carry specific, checkable detail. | Guides written and signed by your solicitors, structured so the answer is in the first paragraph and the detail is in tables Google can lift. |
| The local pack | Three Google Business Profiles chosen on proximity, relevance and reviews. For most matter-plus-town searches this is the first thing a client sees. | A profile per office, categories and services set correctly, a review flow that keeps new reviews arriving, and office pages on the site that match. |
| Organic results | Pages that match the matter and the place, on a site Google trusts. Directories and national firms hold most of these slots by default. | A page for every matter and location you want, built on a site with the authority and technical health to rank it. |
| Directories and review sites | ReviewSolicitors, the Law Society’s Find a Solicitor, Legal 500 and Chambers rank for almost every legal search in the UK. | Complete, consistent listings with reviews, so the firm wins the click even when a directory holds the position. |
| People also ask | Questions drawn from the searches around yours, answered from pages with a clear question-and-answer structure. | FAQ sections on matter pages that answer the questions people actually type, visibly, in plain English. |
Law firm SEO is not a list of keywords. It is the firm’s expertise written down where Google and clients can find it, on a site that is fast enough and trusted enough to be shown first.
The five things that decide where a law firm ranks
Every engagement works on all five. The order below is the order in which they usually need attention, which is also the order in which they pay back.
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Pages that match what people search
People search for matters, not departments: “settlement agreement solicitor”, “contested probate”, “section 8 notice advice”. A firm with one Employment page cannot rank for the forty matters inside it. We map the matters you want more of against what is searched, then build or rewrite a page for each, with the fee, the process, the person who does the work and the questions clients ask before instructing. Firms that want the pages written without the full retainer can use our legal content writing service.
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Local signals
A verified Google Business Profile for every office with the right primary category, services, photographs and opening hours; name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear; and reviews that keep arriving because asking for them is part of closing a file. Multi-office firms get an office page each with real content about that office, never a town template.
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Authority
Links and mentions from places Google already trusts in legal: the Law Society Gazette, Legal Futures, Today’s Conveyancer, local press, chambers of commerce, university careers pages, the charities and sports clubs the firm supports, and comment pieces from your partners on legal changes. Earned, never bought. A firm’s partners usually have more link-worthy opinions than they realise.
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Expertise that is visible
Solicitor profiles with qualifications, cases and publications; bylines on every guide; a reviewed-by line on anything that touches the law; the SRA digital badge; accreditations shown where they can be checked. The content on a law firm site should be clearly written by people who do the work, and the site should make that obvious.
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A technical foundation that does not get in the way
Page speed in the green on Google’s own measures, a site structure two levels deep, every page indexable and canonical, structured data for the organisation, the solicitors and the services, and no thin archives or duplicate pages competing with the ones that matter. We fix this in the first month so nothing later is wasted.
What the first twelve months look like
Organic search compounds. The work front-loads in the first quarter and the results arrive from the second, which is why we ask for a twelve-month commitment and show the plan for it before you sign anything.
Full technical audit and fixes, keyword and matter mapping across every practice area, Google Business Profiles set up or corrected, tracking in place so every organic enquiry has a source page.
The ten to twenty matter pages with the most demand and the best economics are written or rewritten first, with your solicitors reviewing every one. Review requests start going out.
The remaining matter pages, the first guides, solicitor profiles brought up to standard, and the first earned links and mentions. Local pack positions usually move first.
Content is refreshed on what the data shows, new guides target the questions behind your most valuable matters, and authority work continues. Organic enquiries by now should be a line on the board report.
Reported in the numbers a partner can act on
Most SEO reports are a list of keyword positions that nobody reads. Ours starts with organic enquiries and the pages that produced them, because that is what the retainer is for. Rankings are in there too, grouped by matter and location so you can see where you win, where you are close, and where a competitor is pulling away.
You get the report monthly with a short written note on what moved and why, a call to go through it, and a plan for the next month that you can push back on. Nothing is hidden behind a dashboard login.
If a number goes the wrong way we say so, with the reason and the fix. A Google update, a competitor’s new site or a change to your own site can all move rankings; the job is to know which it was within a week, not to wait for the quarter.
- Enquiries
- Organic enquiries by page and matter type, with calls and forms separated
- Rankings
- Positions grouped by matter and location, with movement against last month
- Local pack
- Pack positions for each office on the searches that matter to it
- Content
- Pages published or updated, and what each one is meant to rank for
- Authority
- Links and mentions earned, and from where
- Technical
- Speed, indexing and any errors Google reported, with what was fixed
- Next month
- The plan, in priority order, for you to agree or change
Four things we will not do, and why
Law firm SEO has a long history of shortcuts that worked for a year and then cost a firm its rankings. These are the ones we are asked about most.
Buy links
Paid links, link networks and guest-post schemes are named in Google’s spam policies and are the usual cause of a manual penalty. A firm’s authority is built from legal press, local institutions and its own partners’ opinions, which takes longer and cannot be taken away.
Google Search spam policies, link spamPublish content at scale
Hundreds of near-identical articles, however they are produced, are treated as scaled content abuse and drag down the pages that matter. We publish fewer pages, each written to be the best answer to its question and reviewed by one of your solicitors.
Google Search spam policies, scaled content abuseBuild town pages for places you are not in
Pages that swap a town name into a template are doorway pages. They rank briefly where nobody else competes and are removed when Google catches up. Location pages exist only for offices with a real presence and real content.
Google Search spam policies, doorway abuseGuarantee a ranking
Nobody controls Google’s results, and a firm’s publicity must be accurate and not misleading. We will show you what we expect to happen and when, based on the search data and the work planned, and we will report against it every month.
SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors, paragraph 8.8Four years of organic growth with Stephensons Solicitors LLP
A full-service firm competing with national brands and claims management companies across personal injury, family, employment and consumer law. We have run the firm’s organic search since the start of the engagement: matter pages across every department, local profiles for each office, earned authority, and a steady programme of guides signed by the firm’s solicitors.
The channel now brings in more than a million organic clicks a year, with page one positions for competitive terms across several practice areas. Read the full case study.
Who does the work
This is what separates a law firm SEO agency from a general one: search is run by the people named here, not handed to a junior once the contract is signed.
Runs organic search for every client, including the Stephensons account from its first month, and writes or edits most of what gets published.
Sets the strategy with you, agrees the plan against the firm’s own targets, and owns the monthly report.
Content is written by the search team and reviewed by your solicitors before it goes live, so the expertise on the page is the firm’s own. Meet the team.
Questions firms ask about law firm SEO
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How long does SEO take for a law firm?
Local pack positions and long-tail matter pages usually move within three months. Competitive head terms in large cities take six to twelve, sometimes longer where national firms and directories hold the page. We show the expected timeline for your matters and locations in the audit before you commit.
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How much does law firm SEO cost?
It depends on the number of practice areas and offices and on how competitive your locations are. We agree a fixed monthly fee after the audit, with the first three months of work set out page by page. There is no percentage of anything and no charge per ranking.
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Do we need a page for every town we serve?
No, and it will hurt you if you build them. You need a page for each office with real content about it, and matter pages that mention the places you genuinely act in. Google removes templated town pages and the sites that carry them lose trust across the board.
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What is the difference between local SEO and SEO for a law firm?
Local SEO is the work that puts the firm in the map pack and the matter-plus-town results: Google Business Profiles, reviews, office pages and consistent listings. It is part of law firm SEO, not a separate service, and for a high-street practice it is usually the part that produces enquiries first.
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Can you guarantee a page one ranking?
No, and any agency that does is either guessing or planning something that will get you penalised. We show you what we expect, based on the search data and the work planned, and report against it every month.
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Should the firm keep blogging?
Only if each piece answers a question that someone about to instruct a solicitor actually asks, and a solicitor has reviewed it. Twenty strong guides outperform four hundred thin posts, and the thin posts can hold the whole site back. We would rather publish two pages a month that rank than twenty that do not.
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Do you work with firms in one practice area?
Yes. Single-discipline firms, personal injury and conveyancing especially, are often easier to rank because the whole site can be about one thing. The plan is smaller and the fee reflects it.
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What happens to our site if we stop?
You keep everything: the pages, the profiles, the links, the data. Rankings built this way do not vanish when the retainer ends, which is the main argument for building them rather than renting ads.
Start with a search audit
We will show you where the firm ranks today for the matters you want more of, who holds the positions you need, and what it would take to move. It is the same audit we use to plan the first three months.
- A 30-minute call about your practice areas, offices and the matters you want more of.
- A written audit within a week: current rankings, local pack positions, technical issues, and the gap to page one.
- A twelve-month plan with a fixed monthly fee and the first quarter set out page by page.