Google and prospective clients want the same things from a law firm website: a clear answer to their problem, evidence the firm can be trusted and an easy way to get in touch. The steps below are in the order we would tackle them.

Start with how clients search

Clients rarely search using practice area names. They search for their situation: "contesting a will", "how much does conveyancing cost", "solicitor for a settlement agreement". Group these searches by type of matter and by how close the person is to instructing someone.

Questions such as "what is a settlement agreement" show early research. Searches that include a fee, a town or the word "solicitor" show someone ready to choose. Both matter, but the second group should shape your service pages.

Build one page per matter type

A single services page cannot rank for divorce, lasting powers of attorney and lease extensions at the same time. Give each practice area its own page, and split it further where clients search differently. Family law, for example, often works better as separate pages for divorce, child arrangements and financial settlements.

Each page should say who it is for, how the firm helps, the key stages, how fees work and who does the work. Add a short FAQ drawn from the questions your team hears on the phone.

Worked example. Picture a firm with offices in two market towns, offering residential conveyancing, probate, family law and employment advice for individuals. A sensible structure looks like this.

Three of those five pages cover services named in the SRA Transparency Rules. That is useful for search as well as compliance, as the next section explains.

Treat your price pages as search assets

Under the SRA Transparency Rules, a firm that advertises certain services must publish cost and service information for them on its website. For individuals, the list covers residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, immigration applications and appeals (excluding asylum), summary-only motoring offences dealt with at a single hearing and employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal. For businesses, it covers defending those dismissal claims, debt recovery up to £100,000 and licensing applications for business premises (publicly funded work is excluded).

The SRA's guidance on price and service transparency says this information must be prominent, clearly signposted and easy to find. Searches such as "probate fees" and "conveyancing quote" are exactly what these pages answer. Write them in plain English, link them from the matching service page and they can rank in their own right.

Set up Google Business Profile properly

For most firms, the map results are the biggest local opportunity. Google says local ranking rests on relevance, distance and prominence, and that complete, accurate profiles are more likely to show. Choose the most specific primary category that describes the firm, add hours and services, and keep the name, address and phone number identical to your website.

Lawyers count as individual practitioners in Google's guidelines for representing your business. A public-facing solicitor who can be contacted at the office may have their own profile, separate from the firm's profile for that location, but not several profiles for different specialisms. Keep the business name to the firm's real name, and give each staffed office its own profile and its own page on your site.

Earn reviews the right way

Reviews feed into prominence, and Google notes that more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking. Ask every client at the end of a matter with a short, direct link. Reply to reviews politely, without confirming any details about the client or their matter.

Two rules catch firms out. Google's Maps content policy does not allow businesses to offer incentives for reviews or to ask only the clients they expect to be happy. Paragraph 8.8 of the SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors also requires all publicity, including what you say about reviews and ratings, to be accurate and not misleading.

Show who is behind the advice

Legal problems affect people's money and wellbeing, which Google calls "Your Money or Your Life" topics. Its guidance on helpful, reliable content says its systems give extra weight to strong experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust on these topics. It also encourages accurate bylines where readers would expect them.

In practice, put a named author on every guide and link it to a full profile. Profiles should cover qualifications, years of experience and the matters each person handles. For the listed services, the Transparency Rules already ask for the experience and qualifications of the people doing the work and their supervisors, so one set of profiles can serve both purposes.

Publish guides that answer pre-instruction questions

Short, accurate guides on the questions clients ask before they call bring in earlier searches and build trust. Good examples are "what happens at a first divorce meeting", "do I need a solicitor to sell a house" and "how long does probate take".

Each guide should be checked by a qualified member of the team and link to the matching service page. A few excellent guides beat dozens of thin ones, which is why our advice on avoiding thin location content applies here too.

Fix the basics, then measure enquiries

Pages should load quickly, work well on a phone and have a title and main heading that match the search. Link from guides to service pages, and from service pages to the people who do the work.

If you are moving to a new site, map every old URL to its new home and set up redirects before launch. Our on-page SEO checklist covers the page-level details.

Then track calls, form submissions and booked consultations by practice area and by page. A ranking only matters if it brings the kind of matter you want. Review the numbers monthly and give the work time, as we explain in how long SEO takes to work.

How The Think helps law firms

We are a small branding and web design studio that builds in Framer and offers SEO and local SEO. For a law firm, that means planning the page structure, writing plain-English service and price pages, and setting up the technical and local search foundations.

We are used to large, structured sites, such as the nearly 200-page Mould Matters build with 130+ location pages and 75 redirects. See our SEO for law firms service for how we work and what it includes.