Sokada

SEO for Solicitors.

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A probate enquiry and a conveyancing enquiry are two different searches.

They come from two different people, in two different situations, typing different words at different moments in their lives. Most firm websites answer both with the same page. That is the biggest single reason a firm with a real reputation stays invisible for the work it actually wants more of.

SEO for solicitors isn’t really about traffic. It’s about being one of the two or three firms a careful reader finds, and then being the one that reads as steady. We’re a family-run agency in Heathfield, we’ve been building websites since 1997, and we’ve grown a real firm’s site in this market. Hart Reade Solicitors, over in Hailsham and Polegate, saw enquiries rise 62% year to date against the same period the year before.

One page per practice area, not one page for the firm.

A page headed ‘Our Services’ listing conveyancing, probate, family and employment can’t rank properly for any of them, because it isn’t really about any of them. Google matches a page to a question, and ‘how much does conveyancing cost’ and ‘contesting a will’ aren’t the same question.

Every practice area needs its own page, written for the person in that specific situation, with its own title and its own place in your navigation. That’s more work than a services list. It’s also the difference between showing up and not.

The searches your clients actually type.

Not ‘legal services Sussex’. Real searches look like ‘conveyancing solicitor Eastbourne’, ‘probate solicitor near me’, ‘how long does probate take UK’, ‘divorce solicitor Hailsham’, ‘do I need a solicitor to sell a house’. They’re specific, so a general page loses to a specific one. And a lot of them are questions rather than services, which is where most firms have nothing at all to offer.

Your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your homepage.

For most searches with a town attached, Google puts three local businesses in a map pack above the organic results. On a phone that is most of the first screen. If you’re not in that pack, being eighth organically is worth considerably less than it sounds.

So the profile itself matters: the right primary category, your office hours, consistent name and address everywhere, and reviews arriving steadily rather than in a burst. We’ll be blunt about the last one, because UK law is stricter here than most people realise. Since April 2025 it’s been unlawful to publish fake reviews, or incentivised reviews that aren’t clearly labelled. Google has given the Competition and Markets Authority binding undertakings to place a visible warning notice on UK profiles that break the rules. For a regulated profession, that isn’t a risk worth taking for a handful of stars.

E-E-A-T is not mysterious when you are already regulated.

Google wants evidence of experience, expertise, authority and trust. Most industries have to manufacture it. You already have it and usually hide it. Named solicitors with their actual qualifications and years in practice. Your SRA number. Lexcel or the Conveyancing Quality Scheme if you hold them. Real offices with real photographs. Case outcomes where you’re permitted to describe them.

The firms that rank aren’t the ones with the cleverest copy. They’re the ones where a reader can see who would actually be handling their matter.

Copy that will not put you in front of the SRA.

This is where a generalist agency can cause you a real problem. The SRA Code and the CAP Code both bite on comparative and superlative claims, and an SEO copywriter chasing ‘best solicitor in Sussex’ will happily write something you can’t substantiate and shouldn’t publish. We won’t write claims you’d have to defend, and we’d rather lose a keyword than hand you a compliance problem.

Three things we will not sell you.

An llms.txt file. Google has said in its own documentation that these neither help nor harm, and a study across 300,000 domains found no measurable effect either way.

Schema markup sold as the route into AI answers. A controlled test on 1,885 pages, each matched against three comparable pages that changed nothing, found no uplift on any platform.

Content chopped into fragments for robots to digest. Google’s guidance says plainly that there’s no requirement to break content into small pieces, and no ideal page length.

These get sold hard to professional firms, usually with an invented statistic attached. Google published guidance in June 2026 warning that no third-party tool has access to its ranking systems. Knowing what doesn’t work is part of what you’re paying for.

What we would do first.

Look at what you already rank for and where the enquiries actually come from, before touching anything. It is the same starting point as any of our SEO work. Then practice-area pages in the order of what you want more of, the profile tidied properly, and the questions your clients ask answered on your own site rather than left to somebody else’s blog. We’re near enough to do that in person rather than over email.

Not getting enough enquiries?

Book a free audit and we’ll spend 30 minutes going through your website, telling you exactly what’s holding it back and what we’d do to fix it.

Book your free audit

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does SEO take for a law firm?

Local map pack changes can show within days. Organic movement on practice-area pages is realistically three to six months, and Google says site-level reassessment takes several months. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either lucky or guessing.

Is SEO worth it for a small firm competing with national brands?

For local searches, yes, because proximity and your profile matter and the nationals can’t fake being in Hailsham. For broad terms like probate solicitor with no place attached, that’s a much harder fight, and usually not where your instructions come from anyway.

Can you guarantee first position?

No, and neither can anyone else. We can tell you what we’d change, what we’d measure, and what we’d expect to move first.

Will you write content that breaches the SRA Code?

No. We keep comparative and superlative claims out of the copy, and if a claim needs evidence we’ll ask you for it before it goes live rather than after a complaint.

30 years
Building websites that actually get results
3x More Enquiries
Average increase for clients in their first six months

Not getting enough enquiries?

We'll spend 30 minutes going through your website, telling you exactly what's holding it back and what we'd do to fix it.

Book your free audit
97%
Of our clients see improved search visibility within 90 days
1-in-3
New clients come to us through referrals from existing clients

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