Most law firm websites are built to look reputable, and most of them do. What they rarely do is turn up when someone in the next town searches for a conveyancing solicitor at ten at night, or explain clearly enough what happens next that the person fills in the form instead of pressing back.
SEO for solicitors is not a separate trick bolted onto the website. It is mostly the same work as making the site useful: say plainly what you do, where, for how much, and how to start. Google has spent years getting better at rewarding exactly that. This guide is the order I would work in for a UK firm, from the changes that usually matter most to the ones that can wait.
Why legal search is different
Legal topics sit in what Google calls “Your Money or Your Life”: subjects where a bad answer can cost someone their home, their job or their liberty. Google holds those pages to a higher standard of experience, expertise and trust than, say, a recipe. In practice that means named, qualified authors, accurate and current content, and a firm that is easy to verify.
The other difference is intent. Someone searching “divorce solicitor Leeds” is not researching; they want a firm, usually soon, usually nearby. That is why the map results matter more for most firms than any blog post.
1. The map results: your Google Business Profile
For local, high-intent searches, Google shows a map with three firms before the ordinary results. Those places come mostly from Google Business Profile, and for many high-street firms they bring in more enquiries than the website itself.
Get the basics exactly right. The firm name as it appears on your letterhead, not stuffed with keywords. A real address that is staffed during the opening hours you list: virtual offices and mail-forwarding addresses are not eligible, and adding them is a quick way to get a profile suspended. The primary category that matches your main work, with secondary categories for the rest. Opening hours that are true, including bank holidays.
Then fill in what most firms skip: a short description of each service, real photographs of the office and the team, and the questions people actually ask, answered by you rather than left to strangers. Every office is its own profile; a firm with three offices needs three, each with its own phone number and page on the website.
2. One page per practice area, written for the client
A single “Our services” page listing family, conveyancing, wills and employment cannot rank for any of them. Each area of work needs its own page, and the strongest pages answer the questions a client has before they call.
For conveyancing that is: what you charge and what is included, how long a typical purchase takes and what slows it down, what the client needs to provide, who will handle the file, and what happens after they instruct you. For family work it is the first steps, the realistic options, and how the first conversation works. Write in the client's words. People search for “solicitor for divorce”, not “matrimonial proceedings”.
If the firm genuinely serves several towns, a page per location can help, but only when it says something true about that place: the office there, the people in it, the local courts or the local property market. Fifty near-identical town pages with the name swapped are the kind of thing Google's spam policies were written for.
3. The SRA rules your website must meet anyway
The SRA Transparency Rules already require a firm to publish price and service information on its website for a set of common services: residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, summary motoring offences, employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal, debt recovery up to £100,000, immigration work other than asylum, and business premises licensing. The same rules require the firm's complaints procedure to be published, and since November 2019 every regulated firm's website must display the SRA clickable logo.
This is good SEO as well as compliance. A clear page that says what a freehold purchase costs and what is included is exactly what a searcher wants, and it is the page a competitor without prices cannot match. Treat the pricing pages as some of the most important on the site, not as a regulatory afterthought tucked in the footer.
Before any SEO work, check that every service on the SRA list has a price page, the complaints procedure is one click from every page, and the SRA logo is in the footer. It costs an afternoon and closes a compliance gap at the same time.
4. Show who you are
Because legal content is held to a higher standard, the people behind it matter. Give every fee earner a profile page: their qualification and admission year, what they specialise in, and a real photograph. Put the author's name on every article, link it to that profile, and say when the article was last reviewed. Law changes; an article about the old leasehold rules with no date on it does the firm no favours.
Add the firm's details in a consistent form everywhere they appear: the website footer, the Google profile, the Law Society's Find a Solicitor listing and any directories you use. Mismatched addresses and phone numbers make the firm harder for Google to trust, and harder for a client to reach.
5. Reviews: ask everyone, buy nothing
Reviews feed directly into the map results and into whether someone calls. The way to get more is unglamorous: ask every client at the end of a matter, with a direct link to your Google profile, as part of the closing letter or email.
Ask everyone, not only the happy ones. Sending only satisfied clients to Google, known as review gating, is against Google's policy. Paying for reviews or offering anything in return for one is also against it, and since April 2025 fake or incentivised reviews have been banned outright under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. Reply to reviews, including the critical ones, briefly and without discussing the matter, which client confidentiality rules out anyway.
6. Speed and the technical basics
A slow site loses people who are deciding quickly and often on a phone. Google measures this with Core Web Vitals: the main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and nothing should jump around as it loads. Search Console reports all three for your own visitors.
The usual culprits on law firm sites are oversized photographs, a page builder loading scripts for features nobody uses, and a cookie banner, chat widget and review widget all competing to load first. The fixes are rarely glamorous and usually quick. While you are there, check the plumbing: every page has a unique title and description, the site works over HTTPS without warnings, old pages redirect to their replacements rather than returning errors, and there is a sitemap Search Console can read.
Structured data helps Google understand the firm. Mark up each office as a LegalService with its address, phone number and opening hours, and articles with their author and date. It does not jump a site up the rankings, but it removes guesswork.
7. Content that earns its place
Blogging for its own sake rarely helps a firm. A guide that answers a real question better than anything else on the first page of Google does: what happens at a first family law appointment, how long probate takes in practice, what a leasehold extension costs. Write each one for a specific search, from a named solicitor's experience, and link it to the practice area page where the reader can act.
Two or three guides like that a quarter will do more than a weekly news post nobody searches for.
8. Measure enquiries, not visits
The question is never how much traffic the site had. It is how many people asked for help, through which route, and which of them became instructions. Set the enquiry form and click-to-call buttons up as key events in Google Analytics 4, connect Search Console, and agree with whoever answers the phone how a new enquiry is recorded.
Then look monthly at three things: the searches people found you through in Search Console, the enquiries by page and by source, and the profile's calls and direction requests in Google Business Profile. If an area of work brings visits but no enquiries, the page is the problem, not the ranking.
What can wait
Link-building campaigns, programmatic pages for every town in the county, and paying for a monthly “SEO package” before the basics above are done. Most firms get further by fixing their Google profile, writing proper practice area and price pages, and asking every client for a review than by anything sold as advanced.
If you would rather someone did this with you, it is the work I do with firms: one person across the website, search and paid ads, reporting in plain English on enquiries rather than rankings. A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether I can help.
Further reading on this site
What a law firm actually needs from its website, and AI intake for solicitors: a working pattern, both on this blog.
