Solicitor is the word
Search volume in the UK sits on "solicitor" and "solicitors", with "lawyer" a smaller second. Pages, the Business Profile category and the schema use the word clients type, and the firm’s own name pages catch the rest.
United Kingdom
SEO for law firms in the UK
A client in the UK does not search for a lawyer. They search for a solicitor, and they search the problem first: a redundancy, a house purchase falling through, a will being contested. The firm whose page answers that problem, in that word, gets the call before the firm with the best-known name.
The competition on a firm’s own name and practice areas is mostly directories and review sites: the Law Society’s Find a Solicitor, Legal 500, Chambers, ReviewSolicitors and Trustpilot hold the head terms in most towns. They cannot enter the map pack and they cannot write about your firm the way you can, which is where the work goes.
Everything below sits inside the SRA’s transparency and publicity rules for England and Wales, and the Law Society of Scotland’s equivalent north of the border. Nothing here requires claiming a result.
The searches in the UK
The shapes law firms are found by in the UK. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there: the town, the suburb, the matter, the treatment.
- solicitors near me
- conveyancing solicitor [town]
- employment solicitor unfair dismissal
- no win no fee solicitors [city]
What is different in the UK
Costs transparency is a rule
The SRA requires published costs information for certain services, conveyancing and probate among them. Those pages are built to satisfy the rule and to answer the search, since how much conveyancing costs is one of the largest legal searches in the country.
Reviews on named platforms
Clients read ReviewSolicitors and Trustpilot alongside Google, and firms are judged on all three. Replies never confirm a client relationship or discuss a matter, which is the line most firms cross without noticing.
What a month of work covers for law firms in the UK
- A page for each practice area you genuinely want more of
- Problem-first pages answering what a client actually searches before they know the legal term
- An attorney page each, with admissions, practice areas and a direct line
- How fees work, explained by structure rather than by number
- Google Business Profile: practice areas as services, hours, reviews replied to within the bar rules
- Monthly Search Console report by practice area
The industry page, SEO for law firms and attorneys, has the problems and the questions in full; the country page, SEO services in the UK, has the search landscape in the UK for every trade.
The search landscape in the UK
Directories hold the first page
For many trade and service terms the top results are aggregators. Two routes past them: the map pack, and pages specific enough that a directory listing cannot answer the question.
Town and postcode, not region
Buyers search by town. A page covering a whole county competes with pages written about each town in it, and loses to all of them.
British English, properly
Spelling, the word for the trade and the way an address is written all signal whether a page was written for this market or translated into it.
Cities in the UK with their own page
Each is written for the way that city searches and for the trades that search there most.
Working with us from United Kingdom
SEO happens in your accounts and on your website, so nobody needs to visit. We scope the work on a video call in your hours, send a written quote, and then work month by month with a call whenever you want one. The result is judged on the enquiries in your own records, never on a ranking report.
If you would rather do the first part yourself, the Local SEO for law firms guide is the list we start from.
Results from real clients
Every number below is from the client’s own Google Search Console, for the period shown. Impressions are how often the site appeared; clicks are people who arrived. What each visit is worth is your sales process, not ours, so these are the visits we can prove rather than a conversion figure we cannot.
- 52,993clicksUp and Running Physical TherapyPhysical therapy · 1 Mar 2023 to 14 Mar 2024
- Impressions
- 2,238,155
- CTR
- 2.4%
- Avg. position
- 13.49
+139,355% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
- 12,285clicksBackcountry Physical TherapyPhysical therapy · 6 Jul 2023 to 31 May 2024
- Impressions
- 601,822
- CTR
- 2.0%
- Avg. position
- 19.3
+2,059% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
Questions law firms in the UK ask us
Do you understand the SRA publicity rules?
Every page goes to you before it is published and nothing claims a result, a specialism you cannot evidence, or an accreditation you do not hold. Where the SRA requires costs information for a service, the page carries it in the form the rule asks for.
Can you get us above the Law Society and Legal 500 on our own name?
Usually, yes, because a firm’s own site can say more about the firm than a directory entry can, and the map pack is closed to directories altogether. It takes a proper page for each solicitor and a Business Profile with the right category.
We are in Scotland. Does any of this change?
The regulator and some of the terminology change, and a few of the searches do: sheriff court, conveyancing under Scots law, and so on. The method is the same, and the pages are written for the jurisdiction you practise in.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.